Municipal Water Leader January 2022

Volume 9 Issue 1

January 2022

Joe Mouawad of Eastern Municipal Water District: Diversifying Supply for Efficiency-Minded Customers

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Joe Mouawad of Eastern Municipal Water District: Diversifying Supply for EfficiencyMinded Customers

Municipal Water Leader is published 10 times a year with combined issues for July/August and November/December by an American company established in 2009.

Jeff Kightlinger Contributing Editor

Contents

January 2022 Volume 9, Issue 1 5 A New Leader at Eastern

By Kris Polly 6 Joe Mouawad of Eastern Municipal Water District: Diversifying Supply for Efficiency-Minded Customers

18 T he Oklahoma City Water Utilities Trust: Providing Reliable, AwardWinning Water Service to Central Oklahoma

24 H ow the DuPage County Stormwater Management Department Harnessed 14 Y our Water Is Our Promise: a Former Quarry to How Coachella Valley Water Control Flooding District Launched Its New Public Relations Campaign 32 N ew Zealand Considering Largest Three Waters Reforms in Decades 38 JOB LISTINGS Do you have a story idea for an upcoming issue? Contact our editor-in-chief, Kris Polly, at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

4 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2022

SUBMISSIONS: Municipal Water Leader welcomes manuscript, photography, and art submissions; the right to edit or deny publishing submissions is reserved. Submissions are returned only upon request. For more information, please contact our office at (202) 698-0690 or municipal.water.leader@waterstrategies.com.

ADVERTISING: Municipal Water Leader accepts half-page and full-page ads. For more information on rates and placement, please contact Kris Polly at (703) 517-3962 or kris.polly@waterstrategies.com or Tom Wacker at tom.wacker@waterstrategies.com.

CIRCULATION:

Municipal Water Leader is distributed to all drinking water and wastewater entities with annual budgets or sales of $10 million per year or greater as well as to members of Congress and committee staff and advertising sponsors.

For address corrections or additions, or if you would prefer to receive Municipal Water Leader in electronic form, please contact us at admin@waterstrategies.com. @MuniWaterLeader

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COVER PHOTO:

Joe Mouawad, General Manager, Eastern Municipal Water District. Photo courtesy of Eastern Municipal Water District.

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF EMWD.

Copyright © 2021 Water Strategies LLC. Municipal Water Leader relies on the excellent contributions of a variety of natural resources professionals who provide content for the magazine. However, the views and opinions expressed by these contributors are solely those of the original contributor and do not necessarily represent or reflect the policies or positions of Municipal Water Leader magazine, its editors, or Water Strategies LLC. The acceptance and use of advertisements in Municipal Water Leader do not constitute a representation or warranty

by Water Strategies LLC or Municipal Water Leader magazine regarding the products, services, claims, or companies advertised.

STAFF: Kris Polly, Editor-in-Chief Joshua Dill, Managing Editor Jeff Kightlinger, Contributing Editor Elaine Robbins, Copyeditor Tyler Young, Writer Stephanie Biddle, Graphic Designer Eliza Moreno, Web Designer Caroline Polly, Production Assistant and Social Media Coordinator Tom Wacker, Advertising Coordinator Cassandra Leonard, Staff Assistant Milo Schmitt, Media Intern

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A New Leader at Eastern

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ongtime Eastern Municipal Water District (EMWD) leader Joe Mouawad took over the agency’s top job as general manager in May 2021. In this month’s cover story, we speak with him about EMWD’s careful and long-term planning to decrease its dependence on imported water by investing in recycled water and desalination and increasing water use efficiency.

Looking to another Southern California utility, we speak with Katie Evans, the director of communications and conservation at Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD).

Based on data it collected about its customers’ needs and opinions, CVWD has launched a major public relations campaign, Your Water Is Our Promise, highlighting CVWD’s employees and their ties to the local community.

We also speak with Oklahoma City Utilities Director Chris Browning about how the Oklahoma City Water Utilities Trust has reached over a remarkably large area of the state to secure reliable and sufficient water supplies for its large central Oklahoma customer base, netting a Platinum Award for Utility Excellence from the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies in the process.

When Chicagoland-area DuPage County needed a new flood control facility, it turned to an existing structure: a former quarry.

By Kris Polly

We speak with DuPage County Stormwater Management Department Director Sarah Hunn and Deputy Director Chris Vonnahme about the construction and performance of the 2.7 billion gallon Elmhurst Quarry flood control facility.

Finally, we receive an update on regulatory reform on the far side of the world. Elizabeth Soal writes about the sometimes-contentious progress of New Zealand’s major three waters reform, which would affect the way drinking water, wastewater, and storm water services are managed and delivered across the country.

Finally, we are pleased to announce that Mr. Jeff Kightlinger, the longtime head of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, is joining Municipal Water Leader as our new contributing editor. Mr. Kightlinger knows the municipal water world inside and out, and his contributions to our magazine will be of great interest to our readers. M Kris Polly is the editor-in-chief of Municipal Water Leader magazine and the president and CEO of Water Strategies LLC, a government relations firm he began in February 2009 for the purpose of representing and guiding water, power, and agricultural entities in their dealings with Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other federal government agencies. He can be contacted at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

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January 2022 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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Joe Mouawad of Eastern Municipal Water District: Diversifying Supply for EfficiencyMinded Customers

EMWD's desalination complex.

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ow has California’s Eastern Municipal Water District (EMWD) decreased its dependence on imported water during a period when the local population nearly doubled? By taking water use efficiency seriously and making smart investments in local resources, including recycled water and desalination plants. In this interview, new General Manager Joe Mouawad talks about how his forward-thinking agency is planning for a drier future.

Municipal Water Leader: Please discuss your background and how you came to be in your current position.

6 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2022

Municipal Water Leader: How have your past positions at the district prepared you for the role of general manager?

Joe Mouawad: Since starting at EMWD, I have been actively involved in many of the efforts that have propelled the district to become nationally recognized as a progressive agency. This included being responsible for overseeing the district’s capital improvement program, which typically invests $100 million a year in infrastructure to expand our water, wastewater, and recycled water systems. EMWD’s board of directors has long made it a strategic priority to become a national leader in water reuse, to expand our investments in local groundwater supplies, and to secure record-setting grant funding to reduce municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF EMWD.

Joe Mouawad: For the past 30 years, I have been a part of the water industry, and in 2006, I joined EMWD as its director of engineering. Since then, I’ve had the privilege to take on additional responsibilities at the district, including serving in various leadership roles. Most recently, I served as assistant

general manager, overseeing the planning, engineering, and construction branch. In May 2021, I was fortunate enough to be selected as EMWD’s general manager.

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EMWD's Perris Valley regional water reclamation facility.

the financial burden on our customers. My experience in helping implement those strategic priorities provided the foundation for me to serve as general manager.

Municipal Water Leader: Please discuss EMWD’s history and current services.

Joe Mouawad: EMWD was established in 1950, organized under the Municipal Water District Act for the purposes of importing Colorado River water to our service area to augment local water supplies. We just celebrated our 71st anniversary. Today, we receive approximately half our water supply from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), water ultimately sourced from the Colorado River Aqueduct and the State Water Project.

EMWD has been fortunate in having a series of forwardthinking board members and managers. This has resulted in investments in a diverse water supply portfolio that includes local groundwater supplies, recycled water, and desalination efforts. EMWD is currently the sixth-largest public water utility in the state of California. We serve more than 156,000 water connections, approximately 246,000 sewer connections, and more than 600 recycled water connections.

EMWD is committed to delivering value to our diverse customers and to the communities we serve by providing safe, reliable, economical, and environmentally sustainable water, wastewater, and recycled water services.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you talk about your service area in terms of its population, land use, and growth? municipalwaterleader.com

Joe Mouawad: We serve the western Riverside County area, which spans 558 square miles and represents more than a million residents. While most of our customers are residential, we also serve commercial and agricultural customers and provide wholesale service to the area’s water purveyors.

Our board of directors has always had a strategic vision. EMWD staff are implementing that vision through planning efforts not only to build the necessary infrastructure for the future, but to look for innovative ways to be more efficient with the resources we have.

For example, in 2009, we adopted a water budget– based tiered rate system, which led EMWD customers to embrace a culture of efficient water use habits and reduced per capita use by approximately 41 percent over the past two decades. Those numbers have continued to get even better as we face another historic drought. Over the last 20 years, the population in our service area has increased 93 percent, but our overall reliance on imported supplies has decreased by 3 percent as our use of recycled water has dramatically increased. We’ve made significant investments in local resources to ensure that we’re not increasingly reliant on imported supplies to meet the demands of our communities.

EMWD staff conduct extensive planning work not only to anticipate overall growth, but also to know where growth is going to occur within our service area. We work in collaboration with the development community and land use agencies to ensure that our infrastructure can accommodate the additional demands from increases in population.

January 2022 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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EMWD provides recycled water for agriculture as well as urban irrigation.

EMWD's Hemet water filtration plant.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you discuss the makeup of your water supply and how vulnerable each source is to drought?

the size of a customer’s irrigated landscape and the specific weather conditions. Tiered rates are proportioned based on cost of supply and applied as water is used by the customer.

For example, our tier 1 rate aligns with the lowest-cost supply, which is local groundwater, and every customer’s budget is allocated 20 percent to this lowest rate. The second tier equates to the remaining budgeted supply. If customers use more water than is allocated for their water budget, they pay a higher rate, and if they use more than 50 percent more than their water budget, they are charged the highest rate.

It’s important to note that over the past 3 years, an average of 80 percent of our customers have stayed within their budget.

We’re proud of the fact that our customers have reacted to our call to be water efficient and use water wisely. That track record speaks volumes about the responsiveness and the attitudes of our customers.

Joe Mouawad: Due to the investments EMWD has made over the last 20 years, 50 percent of our water comes from the Colorado River Aqueduct and the State Water Project, and the remaining 50 percent comes from local resources, such as groundwater. EMWD started with the primary purpose of importing water to augment local supplies for our growing region. Our forward-thinking board and leadership understood early on that the best way to provide reliable supplies to a growing service area was through diversification. This is why we continue to invest in maximizing local groundwater supplies through desalination; recycled water projects; and robust water use efficiency programs, including our water budget–based tiered rates. While imported supplies can be the most vulnerable to drought and other factors, such as regulatory restrictions, all water supplies are vulnerable and need to be managed well.

Recycled water is a key component of our local resources, and we have consistently used more than 95 percent of the recycled water we produce. It is used primarily to meet the demands of agriculture in our service area as well as the irrigation demands of parks, schools, and environmental habitat. We also have desalination facilities, where we treat brackish local groundwater to make potable water for the communities we serve. These sources, in addition to EMWD’s local groundwater wells, are all integral parts of EMWD’s diverse water supply portfolio.

Municipal Water Leader: Does the district expect to be affected by the tier 1 shortage on the Colorado River?

Joe Mouawad: EMWD provides a unique water budget for every customer, based on individual needs and circumstances.

One portion of the total water budget is based on the number of occupants in the house, and the other portion is based on

Municipal Water Leader: Beside diversifying water supply and encouraging conservation among your users, in what other ways is the district addressing ongoing and cyclical drought conditions?

8 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2022

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF EMWD.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you explain your water budget–based tiered rates?

Joe Mouawad: EMWD is a member of MWD. We anticipate that by the end of next year, if conditions do not improve, MWD and the State of California will have to contribute water as part of the Drought Contingency Plan for the Colorado River. We are already planning for that possibility. For that reason, we have continued to ask our customers to voluntarily consider reducing their outdoor water use by as much as 25 percent through a messaging campaign for all our customers. We are also looking at the potential challenges ahead of us with the State Water Project. However, EMWD’s significant investments in local resources reduces its vulnerability during drought cycles.

ADVERTISEMENT Joe Mouawad: Every 5 years, we complete an urban water management plan to align our efforts with those of the cities and unincorporated areas, to meet the needs of the community, and to plan infrastructure for the growing population in our service area. We calibrate our capital improvement plan annually to make certain our future infrastructure needs for water, wastewater, and recycled water services are designed and constructed to complement growth in the service area.

Whether it’s an expansion of a treatment plant, addition of a desalination facility, or additional pipelines in the ground to connect customers to our services, EMWD has always tried to be prepared. For example, we are currently building our third desalination plant.

That facility, which is scheduled to come online in the first quarter of 2022, will add another 5.4 million gallons per day of potable supply. Also, we are currently under construction on our North Perris groundwater program, through which we’re going to be able to extract local groundwater and treat contaminants that have historically existed in that aquifer, ultimately producing about 5,000 acre-feet of potable water per year to serve the local community. We continue to make investments in local resources, knowing that our imported supply may be restricted going forward due to drought conditions.

Municipal Water Leader: Has the district continued to expand its renewable energy portfolio?

Joe Mouawad: EMWD has always focused on using all our available resources to generate clean energy. Right now, we are on our third phase of solar power generation expansion.

We previously installed 5.5 megawatts of solar facilities at our headquarters and at our treatment facilities. The third phase is coming online soon and will bring an additional 16 megawatts of solar generation. At that point, we will be producing approximately 50 percent of the energy used for EMWD’s treatment facilities, pump stations, and the total energy needs of the district.

EMWD has been able to expand its solar generation facilities through grant funding and power purchase agreements. We’ve been proactive when it comes to securing state and local funding to advance solar and other clean energy initiatives. We also use our digester gas reclamation facilities to capture a byproduct of the treatment system to generate energy through fuel cells and other technologies, including microturbines.

Municipal Water Leader: Who are the district’s main partners and stakeholders?

Joe Mouawad: We have strong partnerships and collaborations within our community; throughout the water, wastewater, and recycled water industry; and with our local, state, and federal legislators. Our board of directors has municipalwaterleader.com

made it a priority to foster partnerships with stakeholders and other agencies whenever possible to benefit the communities we serve. One example of this collaboration is the Santa Ana River Conservation and Conjunctive Use Program. It is a first-of-its-kind regional groundwater banking program. It involves EMWD, the Inland Empire Utilities Agency, the Municipal Water District of Orange County, the Orange County Water District, the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District, the Western Municipal Water District, and MWD. The program allows us to work collectively to import additional water into the region and store that water in various spaces throughout the Inland Empire. We’re proud of those types of local and regional collaborations and partnerships, as we believe they will form the path forward by which we can provide a more secure water future for our communities.

Municipal Water Leader: How do you intend to continue to position EMWD as an industry leader?

Joe Mouawad: We intend to remain an industry leader by continuing the strategic direction set by the EMWD board of directors to find innovative and collaborative solutions to maximize our resources and provide the most efficient and economical services possible to our customers. We are currently updating our triennial strategic plan, which anticipates changes and challenges to develop initiatives and programs to address an ever-evolving industry. Our approach is to be consistently proactive rather than reactive on industry issues.

Municipal Water Leader: What is your vision for the future of the district?

Joe Mouawad: EMWD is a standards-driven organization that continues to develop and implement multifaceted approaches to ensure superior service through advances in technology and through solid financial planning to provide our customers with exceptional value. In addition, our planning and continuous improvement practices are part of EMWD’s long-term plan to meet the needs of a growing and evolving customer base. My vision is to continue those practices while also sharing EMWD’s expertise and knowledge with other industry leaders and representatives to work together to better serve all our communities. M

Joe Mouawad is the general manager of the Eastern Municipal Water District.

For more information, please visit www.emwd.org or contact EMWD’s public and governmental affairs department at publicandgovtaffairs@emwd.org or (951) 928‑3777, ext. 4340.

January 2022 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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Your Water Is Our Promise: How Coachella Valley Water District Launched Its New Public Relations Campaign

The CVWD employees depicted on this billboard working on a late night emergency pipeline repair are all local Coachella Valley residents.

C

data for policy decisions. The committee was formed by a group of water agencies to try to better understand data.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell our readers about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

Katie Evans: CVWD was founded in 1918, and until 2018, most of our outreach focused on water conservation. In 2018, we pulled back the conservation outreach and launched a 100th anniversary campaign. After that, in 2019, we saw an opportunity to refocus our efforts and use research to make our communication strategy more intentional, strategic, and effective. We hired a public opinion polling firm and did extensive customer opinion research to find out more about our customers’ attitudes, their perceptions of CVWD, which communications methods were most effective, and the strategies we might employ for improving our messaging. Our research included two focus groups, a survey in both English and Spanish, and follow-up communications.

We found out that a lot of people knew what CVWD was.

About 63 percent approved of the job CVWD was doing, 7.4 percent thought we were doing a bad job, and 29.6 percent didn’t know. We were focused on the 29.6 percent who weren’t

oachella Valley Water District (CVWD) provides domestic water, sanitation, recycled water, agricultural water, storm water protection, groundwater replenishment, and water quality conservation services to 300,000 people across a 1,000‑square-mile service area in Southern California. Several years ago, CVWD decided to revamp its communications strategy, which had previously focused primarily on water conservation, to try to meaningfully improve public perceptions of the agency and to emphasize its close connections with the local community. In this interview, CVWD Director of Communications and Conservation Katie Evans tells us about the ideas behind the strategy, how it has been implemented, and its results.

14 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2022

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF CVWD.

Katie Evans: I have worked in the water industry since 2008, primarily in communications. I took over as CVWD’s director of communications near the end of 2017, as we were moving toward our 100th anniversary. I’m also the steering committee chair for the California Data Collaborative, which is focused not on communications, but on using water

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about how CVWD developed its Your Water Is Our Promise campaign.

ADVERTISEMENT sure whether or not CVWD was doing a good job. We also learned that respondents were interested in learning more about infrastructure, particularly if we tied infrastructure to public health, general quality of life, and fire protection. A lot of customers were interested in knowing more about water quality and making sure CVWD was ensuring that their water was safe. People wanted to know more about the fact that CVWD is a nonprofit government agency, unlike some electric companies, which are for-profit companies with shareholders.

We decided that what we needed was a campaign to humanize CVWD, shifting its image away from red tape and bureaucracy and emphasizing that CVWD is part of the community. We wanted a new look, and we wanted to educate customers on all the services we provide the community. We wanted to inspire trust and confidence in our customers, and we wanted to give the district a face and a voice. We set some goals for growing our social media presence and increasing the number of people using our app, but our real goal was creating follow-up surveys and ensuring that our efforts were working.

We went through a lot of brainstorming and revisions to come up with the Your Water Is Our Promise campaign.

Our first hurdle was presenting it to our board. There was some concern about the fact that this campaign did not focus on water conservation. However, we had focused on water conservation before, and we happened to be in a good place on that topic because we were part of a regional group that was doing regional water conservation outreach through something called the CV Water Counts Program. We could continue our water conservation messaging through that group and move our own messaging to Your Water Is Our Promise.

Municipal Water Leader: What do you mean by humanizing the image of the agency?

Katie Evans: We want to humanize the district by including our employees in our ads—not stock images or general photos of pipelines. In this campaign, we feature our employees; explain their roles at CVWD; and show that they are people who live, work, and play in the Coachella Valley. They may even be familiar faces. We want our customers to see the people who are doing the work to bring them water services. My hope is that somebody will be driving down the street, see one of our billboards, and recognize the employee featured on it. That helps customers understand that the CVWD employees who provide them these services are also members of their community.

Municipal Water Leader: What are the different elements of the campaign?

Katie Evans: We are doing less traditional print advertising, because our polling showed it was not particularly effective, although we are still placing print ads on specific services in certain publications. We’ve switched over to billboards, municipalwaterleader.com

CVWD’s Your Water Is Our Promise campaign features real CVWD employees and community members.

because the Your Water Is Our Promise campaign doesn’t really need much text. One of our billboards features several guys working on an emergency pipeline repair late at night. All these guys are local Coachella Valley community members. We also did some billboards in Spanish. There are areas where the cities, rather than CVWD, provide the water service, and in those areas, we put up billboards about flood control or sanitation services. We tried to match the billboard with the services that are provided in the area.

We run radio ads based on an ask-the-expert theme. Each ad is a mock interview with an expert who lives within the community. We run television ads, which feature photos of our employees and operations and are narrated by one of our employees. We do a lot of social media. We hope that if we post a picture of an employee on our social media feeds, their families will share it with their friends. One of the best results happened when we featured a meter reader, and his girlfriend loved it and shared it with everybody on every platform. We have also started a blog and created some behind-the-scenes videos.

We’ve also themed our annual water quality report to match our campaign.

Municipal Water Leader: What is the desired end point of your communications strategy?

Katie Evans: The most important data point is public perception, measured via public polling. We did some public polling after the first year of the campaign and found that we had improved people’s attitudes about CVWD. We saw the approval number go up into the 70s. We haven’t done a poll since then, partly because of the COVID‑19 pandemic, but we intend to recommence public opinion polling in the near future. I feel strongly that communication strategy January 2022 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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ADVERTISEMENT should be based on data. If you don’t have data points, then you should be doing research to get them, which is why we went out and did the polling.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your communications department. How many people are working on this campaign, and how much has it cost?

Municipal Water Leader: How might improving the public perception of CVWD end up helping the district in the future?

Katie Evans: My communications department is made up of 11 people. They all have tasks besides this campaign, but one person works on it primarily. During the first year of the campaign, everything we did, including public opinion polling, cost $160,000. That included the development of the campaign, which was expensive because of the cost of graphic arts. With those initial expenses out of the way, our annual budget is closer to $50,000. I should point out that CVWD is a huge district: We serve 300,000 people across 1,000 square miles. The cost would be dramatically reduced for a smaller district that didn’t need to do such extensive polling and didn’t need as huge an outreach program. We have outreach specialists who work on this campaign and outreach specialists who work on earned media, which is when outside news sources cover us. My department also oversees education in schools, tours, workshops, and events for students. My department also does all CVWD’s internal employee communications as well as government affairs.

Katie Evans: We think that if people support the work CVWD is doing, they’ll be more willing to support our needs. When we’re constantly showing people the work we’re doing here at CVWD and how effective it is, it’s an easier sell when we need something like a rate increase. We are conveying that we are responsible, we are doing good work, and we are providing a service to the community. We want the community to understand the work we are doing, to value us, and to trust us. Having a connection with our customers can help CVWD in the future. If we are tearing up a customer’s street to put in a pipeline, their immediate reaction might not be negative; it might be speculation about what we’re doing.

Municipal Water Leader: Did you get any unexpected results from your polling?

Katie Evans: The fact that so many people talked about fire protection threw me off. Fire protection is an important thing that water agencies do, but I was surprised to see it listed as the primary reason people were supporting water agencies.

I think that response was so prominent mainly because California was experiencing major wildfires at the time.

One thing we’ve struggled with in the Coachella Valley is that we have a lot of water agencies—Desert Water Agency, Mission Springs Water District, Indio Water Authority, Coachella Water Authority, Myoma Dunes Water Company, and CVWD—but everybody thinks that CVWD is their water agency. It is important to help people understand who their water agency is.

Another important result was that many people did not know that CVWD provides seven different water-related services. We provide domestic water, sanitation, recycled water, agricultural water, storm water protection, groundwater replenishment, and water quality conservation, but people didn’t know any of that. Because of that, we were careful to ensure that our campaign included not only domestic water but storm water and nonpotable water as well.

Municipal Water Leader: Are you planning to continue this campaign for the foreseeable future?

16 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2022

Katie Evans: I would say start with data. If you don’t have the budget to hire a public opinion polling group like we did, at least do surveys that you e-mail out to customers or put on your social media. Start with data about what your customers think, what they misunderstand, and how they want to be talked to.

Municipal Water Leader: What is your vision for the future of CVWD? Katie Evans: One of the wonderful things about CVWD is that our general manager is always telling us to stop and break the that’s-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it mentality.

He wants to see us innovate, and I agree. My vision for CVWD is for it to take risks, try new things, and see if there’s a better way to do things. There’s a lot of value, especially as the world is changing, in approaching things with fresh eyes and being ready to try things differently. M Katie Evans is the director of communications and conservation at the Coachella Valley Water District. She can be contacted at kevans@cvwd.org or (760) 625‑8925.

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF CVWD.

Katie Evans: We plan to stick with it. We will probably do some polling again when the pandemic settles down. Our entire public outreach department is in limbo because of the pandemic. Before the pandemic, we did a lot of tours, events, workshops, hands-on activities, and booths. We will soon begin deciding what we want to put our resources back into.

Municipal Water Leader: What advice do you have for other agencies that are looking to revamp their communications strategies to make them more strategic and effective?

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The Oklahoma City Water Utilities Trust: Providing Reliable, Award-Winning Water Service to Central Oklahoma

The OCWUT's Atoka spillway project.

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he Oklahoma City Water Utilities Trust (OCWUT) is Oklahoma’s largest provider of drinking water, treating and delivering an average of 100 million gallons a day (MGD) of water to more than 1.4 million residents through retail and wholesale service connections. The trust also provides wastewater and trash collection services to residential, commercial, and industrial customers across central Oklahoma. In this interview, Oklahoma City Utilities Director Chris Browning tells us more about the OCWUT and its mission.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

Chris Browning: More than 40 years ago, I started as a laborer at a wastewater treatment plant. As I observed the multifaceted nature of the sector, it didn’t take long to figure out that there were many career opportunities throughout the industry, so I began advancing through the ranks, working in every business unit that exists in a water utility, mostly in the Atlanta metro area. In 2014, I moved to Texas to take a job as a public works director. In 2016, I moved to Oklahoma City to become the utilities director for Oklahoma City and the general manager of the OCWUT. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the history of the OCWUT.

18 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2022

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE OCWUT.

Chris Browning: Oklahoma City is situated right at the center of the United States. We get about 35 inches of rain per year. Oklahoma City developed as a city in about a day as a result of the 1889 Land Run. It went from just a few people to being a city of 10,000 in a very short period of time.

Therefore, water became critical. The Oklahoma River, also known as the North Canadian River, runs right through town.

However, it dries up in the summertime. Originally, the folks who moved here depended on purchasing water by the bucket from the stationmaster at the Santa Fe depot. Because that was not sustainable, plans were launched to put in 19 wells along the river with the capacity to draw 1 MGD. But when the river dried up in the summer, so did the wells. Thus, in 1917, the city decided to build a surface water treatment plant and a large lake that would act as a water reservoir. The project had a price tag of a million dollars, which was pretty substantial, but it was a good investment, and the system and Lake Overholser are still operational today. However, as the population continued to grow, it became clear that Lake Overholser alone could not keep up with the escalating demand of the growing city, and in 1950, the city built Lake Hefner to serve as an additional water collection reservoir.

Despite these efforts, the maximum capacity of the North Canadian River and recurring droughts still limited growth in central Oklahoma. To overcome that, in the 1960s, city leaders decided they needed to look beyond our immediate region for additional sources of water. They eventually settled on an area in southeastern Oklahoma that averages 50 inches of rainfall per year. We built a plant and Lake Stanley Draper in southeastern Oklahoma City and another lake in Atoka, Oklahoma. We pump the water from Atoka 100 miles through a 60‑inch pipeline to Lake Stanley Draper.

Continued growth eventually led the city to purchase water storage and water rights in a number of federal reservoirs as well. Our footprint is large. We bought the storage rights and water rights from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers–owned Canton Lake to provide water from the west. We also bought the storage and water rights tied to two more lakes in McGee Creek and Sardis in southeastern Oklahoma. The result is that today, the OCWUT relies on a water supply system that stretches 250 miles across

ADVERTISEMENT the state: 75 miles to the northwest and 130 miles to the southeast. That broad footprint makes our water supply reliable, since it’s highly unlikely that the entire state would be in a drought situation at the same time. Through these combined resources, we have access to enough water to provide all of central Oklahoma with water through 2060.

Today, we provide water to 1.4 million people in central Oklahoma. Oklahoma City accounts for about 700,000 of those people. We also provide water to a number of other cities in the region as a wholesaler. Oklahoma City is unusually large in a geographic sense. At 621 square miles, it is one of the largest cities by area in the United States.

Municipal Water Leader: Why is your agency called a trust, and what is its relation to the municipality of Oklahoma City?

Chris Browning: In Oklahoma, a number of entities that are revenue based rather than tax based are set up as trusts.

The OCWUT manages the operation of the city’s water, wastewater, and trash collection services. The trust is made up of the mayor, the city manager, a council member, and two independent members.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us about your infrastructure and services?

Chris Browning: We have about 7,000 miles of water and sewer pipeline. We have two large water treatment plants capable of treating up to 250 MGD and four wastewater plants that can treat about 110 MGD. We are committed to providing water, wastewater, and trash collection services throughout central Oklahoma to safeguard public health and the environment, to support public safety, and to enable economic development. In total, we have 10 divisions: administration, customer service, engineering, line maintenance, water quality, wastewater quality, solid waste management, fleet services, southeastern Oklahoma water supply, and Tinker Airforce Base operations and maintenance.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE GREATER OKLAHOMA CITY CHAMBER.

Municipal Water Leader: How many employees do you have, and where are they situated?

Chris Browning: We have about 800 employees and two large service contracts. The first is a contract to provide operations, maintenance, and repair services at all our wastewater plants. Second, we have a trash collection service that serves about two-thirds of the city. When you add all this, our combined workforce is about 1,100 employees.

A small group of our core direct employees are located in Atoka, 100 miles to the southeast; they manage the pumping of water to Oklahoma City. Everyone else is based at our headquarters and local facilities.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us about the services you provide to Tinker Air Force Base? municipalwaterleader.com

Oklahoma City.

Chris Browning: We were recently awarded a 50‑year contract, worth about $600 million, to operate the water and sewer system on Tinker Air Force Base. We are responsible for operating, maintaining, repairing, and rebuilding the entire water system on the base. The base actually sold us the existing system when we got the operational contract in late 2020. We effectively took over the operation of the system on November 1, 2021. It’s a large base with about 35,000 people living and working there, so the water system is fairly large.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us about why your agency recently received the Platinum Award for Utility Excellence from the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA)?

Chris Browning: The AMWA is an association made up of the largest publicly owned water utilities in the United States—those serving populations of at least 100,000.

The award process is not a competition but is rather a comprehensive peer review. It’s a method of recognizing utility management excellence by industry peers. The categories that are evaluated include fiscal responsibility, service reliability, regulatory compliance, sustainability, workforce management, and customer service. The peer reviewers look at all the major elements that are part of water utility operations. They review how well the utility is doing from the perspective of the utility itself and from the perspectives of customers, officials with oversight responsibilities, and the reviewers themselves. One initiative our utility undertakes that I like to point out to people is the citizen survey we conduct each year through an independent company. Through the years, we have consistently ranked about 10 percent above the national average in all categories.

We push hard for quality of service. With this in mind, we put together an application for review by this peer panel of AMWA members, and ultimately, we were fortunate enough to be awarded the Platinum Award for Utility Excellence.

January 2022 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

| 19

ADVERTISEMENT Municipal Water Leader: How is your agency upgrading its infrastructure while encouraging a reduction in water consumption, all while maintaining affordable rates?

Chris Browning: People may think of the OCWUT as a department of government, but we’re not. We’re a large business, and thus we have to respond and act accordingly. Our annual budget is over $700 million. Our capital program for the next 10 years is $3.3 billion. A number of years ago, we developed core business initiatives to focus on water supply, system reliability and resiliency, regulatory compliance, safety, and financial management. With regard to financial management, we are rated AAA by Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s. There are only a handful of large utilities in the United States that are AAA rated, and we pride ourselves on our financial management. That goes to the heart of affordability.

management potential, that’s what the bonding agencies are looking at today. I mentioned earlier that we have a water footprint spanning 250 miles. We are effectively building a resilient system that is responsive to such weather events.

We’re deploying generators and now have them at nearly all our treatment facilities. We’re constantly upgrading our aging infrastructure to minimize the likelihood of failure.

Currently, we’re building a large redundant pipeline so that if one plant becomes inoperable, the other plant can serve the entire city. Similarly, we’re in the process of building a second pipeline from Atoka to Oklahoma City so that we can bring our entire water allocation from southeastern Oklahoma to the central Oklahoma and Oklahoma City region. That project alone has an $800 million cost. We are also currently working to automate our meter reading capabilities though new technology. In addition, we have launched a water conservation program partnership with the Oklahoma State University Extension Services to focus on public outreach and education on efficient water use. Along with this, in 2013 we adopted permanent progressive water conservation measures to manage system-wide demand and ensure water availability through periods of drought, and in 2014, we implemented conservation-oriented inclining-block water rates to provide conservation pricing signals.

Municipal Water Leader: What are your current regulatory challenges?

The Hefner Water Treatment Plant residuals processing facility.

20 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2022

Chris Browning is utilities director for Oklahoma City and the general manager of the Oklahoma City Water Utilities Trust. He can be reached by e-mailing the Oklahoma City Utilities Department public information officer at michelann.ooten@okc.gov. municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE OCWUT.

Today, resiliency and reliability are at the forefront of our concerns, particularly when considered in conjunction with what are referred to as climate shock events. Climate change is a long-term, generational issue, but climate shock is what we are dealing with in the here and now. We’re having more frequent and more intense storms across the United States.

Hurricanes, tornadoes, winter storms, and droughts are all becoming more frequent and more intense. Here in Oklahoma, we are affected by them all. Last year, we had an ice storm that knocked 125,000 tons of trees and tree limbs to the ground; collecting them cost $15 million. Exacerbating the issue was the fact that shortly before the storm, there had been a major hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, so many local resources were tied up down there. Shortly thereafter, we experienced a winter storm of record that sent temperatures below freezing for a couple of weeks and included lows of 15 degrees below zero.

The last time our area had had temperatures that low was over 100 years earlier. We have to anticipate and deal with those kinds of extreme, unpredictable storm events.

To maintain our AAA rating, we need to build a reliable and resilient water system, because along with financial

Chris Browning: We work closely with our regulators here and communicate with them constantly. It is a team effort. We need to know what they’re thinking, and they need to know what steps we are taking to manage our highly regulated industry. We let them know about our challenges so that they are aware that we are working on them and can help guide us as we respond to them. One current example is lead service lines. Fortunately, we don’t have a lot of lead service lines, but we are engaged in a comprehensive study to find and eliminate those we do have. As our system has grown and evolved, we have replaced a lot of the older pipelines, which included replacing most of older lead service lines. We have dedicated a team to evaluate this and responding accordingly.

A more recent concern is the evolving focus on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, including perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA. It’s still not clear what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will ultimately do, but we’ve already been testing down to parts per trillion and have found no traces in our systems so far. M

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How the DuPage County Stormwater Management Department Harnessed a Former Quarry to Control Flooding

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he Chicagoland-area DuPage County Stormwater Management Department has an unusual flood-control tool in its arsenal: a converted quarry. The Elmhurst Quarry flood control facility was completed in 1996 and has a total capacity of 2.7 billion gallons. In this interview, Director Sarah Hunn and Deputy Director Chris Vonnahme speak with Municipal Water Leader about how the facility works and about the challenges of controlling storm water.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell our readers about your backgrounds and how you came to be in your current positions.

An aerial image of the quarry, looking east, during a large rain event in May 2020.

Sarah Hunn: I graduated from Michigan Technological University with a civil engineering degree. Upon graduation, I started working for the Illinois Department of Transportation in the water resources group. I then moved on to the DuPage County Stormwater Management Department, where I started as a senior civil engineer and worked my way up to my current position as director.

Chris Vonnahme: I am the deputy director of the department. I earned a degree in agricultural engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As part of that program, I specialized in soil and water. After graduation, I was hired as a civil engineer with the DuPage County Stormwater Management Department. I have worked with the county for over 31 years and am currently the deputy director for the department.

A view of the Elmhurst Quarry facility while empty.

24 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2022

Chris Vonnahme: Our department was formed following a major flood event in August 1987. The State of Illinois passed legislation shortly after that event to allow the five collar counties surrounding Chicago to start their own storm water management programs.

Our storm water management committee was tasked with addressing the severe flooding, specifically in the more urbanized Salt Creek watershed. We developed an ordinance that set minimum countywide standards for storm water management to ensure that new development would not adversely affect floodplains, floodways, or wetlands within the county. Our engineers and wetland specialists also began developing watershed plans to address the severe flooding and water quality impairments within the county.

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF DUPAGE COUNTY STORMWATER MANAGEMENT.

Floodwater is diverted from Salt Creek through a moveable sluice gate to be funneled into the quarry.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us about the department’s history and mission?

ADVERTISEMENT Sarah Hunn: We have 17 flood control and flood storage facilities. Most of those are offline, or adjacent to the riverine systems. We do have one major facility that is online, meaning that it actually uses the riverine system as part of the flood storage. In total, we can divert around 6 billion gallons of water during a major flood event.

there wouldn’t be too much infiltration into the existing underground mine beneath the quarry, which we did not need for flood control. We ensured that all the big concrete plugs in the entrances of the mine were safe and structurally sound and would keep the floodwater in the surface quarry, preventing it from leaking into the mine.

Municipal Water Leader: Is your area particularly vulnerable to floods?

Chris Vonnahme: Another design challenge was that before the quarry was purchased by the county, its west lobe was being used as a construction debris landfill. The landfill had to be capped and the side slopes stabilized to ensure that the landfill’s contents would not leach out into the surrounding soils and into local groundwater. We obtained a permit from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to perform this work. The facility was completed in 1996.

Sarah Hunn: Yes, we are particularly vulnerable to flooding in our area. The main reason is that we’re in a very flat area where there is not a lot of storage potential in the rivers and streams.

We have broad floodplains rather than fast-moving floodplains.

Chris Vonnahme: Our county is also heavily developed. There are many storm sewer systems that drain storm water quickly into our stream systems. Since our streams are flat, water doesn’t flow downstream fast enough, resulting in water rising over the stream banks and causing overland flooding.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us about the Elmhurst Quarry flood control facility?

Chris Vonnahme: Our engineers developed the Lower Salt Creek Watershed Plan, which identified capital improvement projects to reduce the severe flooding on Salt Creek. We realized that conveyance improvements weren’t going to solve the flooding. We had to incorporate many large storage projects to help reduce the flooding in the area.

Elmhurst Quarry was the cornerstone of that plan. Today, it provides 8,300‑acre-feet of storage for the watershed.

Municipal Water Leader: What were some of the benefits and challenges of converting an existing quarry into a floodwater storage facility?

Chris Vonnahme: One of the big benefits of using the quarry was that the storage space had already been created by over 100 years of blasting at the site. It was an expensive project to convert the quarry into a flood control facility. However, when you break down the cost per acre-foot of storage provided, it’s actually the cheapest flood control facility in DuPage County.

One of the major design challenges involved the physical location of the quarry in relation to Salt Creek. Route 83, a major roadway in the Chicagoland area, is located between Salt Creek and the quarry. Getting the water from Salt Creek into the quarry without disrupting the traffic on Route 83 was a challenge. That was accomplished through a vortex drop shaft and tunnel system. Another challenge was getting the water back to Salt Creek after water elevations in the stream subsided.

We achieved that through multiple pumping stations.

Sarah Hunn: We also needed to make sure that the quarry itself wasn’t going to be susceptible to floods and that municipalwaterleader.com

Municipal Water Leader: How does the facility operate during a storm event?

Sarah Hunn: We have a SCADA system that oversees everything within our storm water network. We watch the upstream and downstream elevations in the stream. About a mile downstream of the quarry, we have a stream gauge that tells us when we’re going to start seeing flooding. When it hits what we call a trigger elevation, we initiate the operation of the quarry. First, we open a 7‑foot-by-7‑foot gate, which can handle some of the lower-flow events. The water enters over a fixed weir, goes through a couple of tunnels underneath Route 83, and then drops into the quarry. We are actually adding a second gate to allow more water to come in at lower events, so we’ll have two entrance points instead of one. Our total operating intake capacity is 2.7 billion gallons.

Municipal Water Leader: After the storm or flood event is over, what do you do with the water?

Sarah Hunn: We allow Salt Creek to recede to a safe level and then pump the water back into the creek. If the water has sat in the quarry for weeks or even months, we find that it has sometimes lost dissolved oxygen, so we have an aeration facility that puts oxygen back into the water before it is returned to Salt Creek. We also test the water as it is going back into Salt Creek to make sure that there are no toxins or anything outside EPA parameters.

Chris Vonnahme: We believe the quarry also provides a water quality benefit for the watershed. When storm water flows into the quarry, it contains sediment and other suspended solids. While the storm water is stored in the quarry, a lot of that sediment and organic matter settles out. Because of that, we feel that the water is cleaner when we pump it back into Salt Creek.

Municipal Water Leader: How much water does a standard storm event deposit in that facility?

January 2022 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

| 25

ADVERTISEMENT Sarah Hunn: We have only filled the quarry once, during a storm event in 2008. In general, the quarry goes into operation four to five times a year. Our typical operation has us taking in less than 1 million gallons. In more frequent, less severe rain events, the elevation of Salt Creek does not get high enough to overtop the fixed weir. In these situations, our 7x7 gate allows us to control the levels in Salt Creek. In these more frequent events, the approximate intake into the quarry is likely closer to 1 million gallons.

We are adding a second 7x7 gate to help us further reduce flood elevations in Salt Creek during those frequent events.

With the addition of a second gate and the effects of climate change, we will likely see our annual diversion amounts increasing twofold or more.

needed to use the quarry as a flood control facility, we would be able to drop all the water down into the mine so that we would have the full capacity of the quarry for flood storage.

Municipal Water Leader: Has the county measurably reduced flood damage since it opened the Elmhurst Quarry flood control facility?

Sarah Hunn: Yes. The difference in damages between the 1987 flood event and the similar event in 2008 was probably about $500 million, so we can definitely say that we’ve seen a significant reduction in flood damage because of the quarry.

Municipal Water Leader: What advice would you have for another agency or municipality that was considering transforming an old quarry or another similar structure into a flood control facility?

Sarah Hunn: Do it! We’ve been fortunate to have this facility, especially in the more urbanized eastern side of the county.

You can’t skimp on maintenance, though. You have to be out there inspecting and checking your pumps. Quarries do a lot of blasting, which loosens the rock structure. You need to make sure that there’s no room for slag in that and that it stays safe. Additionally, the side walls are completely vertical, so extra care and inspection may be needed to ensure that the surface structure does not collapse. Another item to be concerned about is trespassing. We have a 24‑hour patrol to make sure there is no trespassing, as the inside of the quarry can be extremely dangerous

Submerged pumps in the west lobe of the quarry carry floodwater back to Salt Creek once river elevations have reached a safe level.

Municipal Water Leader: In the past, the county has considered creating a pumped storage hydropower facility in the mine that exists under the quarry. How would that work?

26 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2022

Sarah Hunn: We show the quarry facility to the public and do tours. The public can also see all the information about our flood control facility operations online in real time. They can see when we open the quarry, when we’re bringing water in, and so on. It has been a great educational tool for us. We want everybody the community to know what’s going on so that everybody can have pride in the facility. M Sarah Hunn is the director of the DuPage County Stormwater Management Department. She can be contacted at sarah.hunn@dupageco.org.

Chris Vonnahme is the deputy director of the DuPage County Stormwater Management Department.

He can be contacted at christopher.vonnahme@dupageco.org.

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF DUPAGE COUNTY STORMWATER MANAGEMENT.

Sarah Hunn: It’s been considered quite a few times. Every few years, depending on developments in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s regulations or other federal regulations associated with clean energy, someone reaches out to us about it. Each time we evaluate the idea, the big issue is that if the quarry were used for hydropower, we would need to team up with Commonwealth Edison or another major energy company, and the energy company would actually want the land rights of the facility so that it would own the hydropower.

DuPage County is prohibited from allowing a lease longer than 20 years. Twenty years is not long enough for most energy companies to earn a return on their investment.

As I mentioned earlier, there is a huge underground mine underneath the quarry. The idea for a pumped storage facility is that during the daytime, when power demand and energy costs are higher, we would drop water through a turbine down into the quarry and generate power. At night, we would pump the water back up to the quarry so that it could be reused. If we

Municipal Water Leader: Is there anything you would like to add?

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Tyhee Siphon Rehabilitation

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he Fort Hall Indian Irrigation Project (FHIIP), located in southeast Idaho, is currently dealing with problems common to many irrigation systems across the western United States: The project faces ever growing rehabilitation costs, while operating within an extremely limited budget. The aging infrastructure of the project includes several individual facilities, each of which carries a multimillion dollar price tag for rehabilitation/replacement. One such facility is the Tyhee Siphon.

The Tyhee Siphon was originally constructed in the early 1900s as a 78inch concrete pipe and serves as a primary water conveyance structure of the FHIIP. The siphon is located about two miles south of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Bannock County, Idaho, within the of City of Chubbuck, and delivers 230 cubic feet per second of irrigation water to roughly 11,500 acres of farmland. At some point in time after initial con-

struction, about 900 feet of open canal leading to the siphon was replaced with similar cast-in-place concrete pipe, increasing the total length to roughly 5,400 feet.

The siphon was rehabilitated in the 1940s by installing a steel lining sleeve inside the concrete host pipe to seal the leakage from the concrete pipe. Over time, the steel liner and the concrete pipe have deteriorated to the point that leaks are now common. Given the many challenges associated with traditional “cut and cover” replacement methods, rehabilitation in place is a very desirable alternative. Phase 1 was completed, including rehabilitation of roughly 20 percent of the total siphon length in three slipline segments and two direct replacement segments using 72inch diameter HOBAS pipe.

Although the project is many years from completion and several construction phases are still required, the FHIIP has made significant progress toward the complete rehabilitation of this vital project component.

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New Zealand Considering Largest Three Waters Reforms in Decades

By Elizabeth Soal

Ross Creek Reservoir provides municipal water to Dunedin City in Otago on New Zealand’s South Island.

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32 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2022

Elizabeth Soal is a freshwater policy and governance specialist in New Zealand. She can be contacted at ejcsoal@icloud.com.

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ELIZABETH SOAL AND CASWELL IMAGES.

he New Zealand government is pushing ahead with significant and controversial changes to the way three waters services (drinking water, wastewater, and storm water) are managed and delivered across the country.

Three waters services are currently owned, managed, and delivered by 67 local authorities—either city councils or, in provincial areas, district councils. The proposed reforms would see the services being amalgamated into large service delivery organizations based on population. At this stage, four such organizations are proposed.

Originally, the government had stipulated that the reforms were not compulsory and that councils could opt out of the reforms and retain their three waters functions independent of the new delivery agencies. As a sweetener, however, it offered a significant funding package of NZ$2.5 billion (US$1.76 billion), intended to support councils that decided to go ahead with the reforms. The package is made up of NZ$2 billion (US$1.4 billion) of funding to invest in the future of local government and community well-being (the better-off component) and NZ$500 million (US$350 million) to ensure that no local authority is financially worse off as a direct result of the reform (the no-worse-off component).

Throughout the latter half of 2021, opposition to the reforms grew, with groups of councils writing to the minister for local government, Nanaia Mahuta, requesting a pause in the program, which mayors described as “once in a generation.” The mayors were concerned with the pace of the reform program and worried that communities would

not have enough time to adequately assess the proposals and understand their implications.

For some councils, three waters services make up a significant proportion of their operations and functions, so the idea of shifting their management to large, aggregated entities raises concerns over a loss of local knowledge and skills.

Amid mounting criticism of the proposed reforms from councils and communities around the country, Minister Mahuta announced at the end of October 2021 that councils would no longer be able to opt out of the reforms; the reforms would be compulsory. To address the concerns raised by the councils, a working group has been established to take a fresh look at how the reforms will be implemented.

Concurrently, the government has established a new national water regulator, Taumata Arowai. (The agency’s name is in the Māori language: Taumata invokes a sense of protection, leadership, and wisdom; aro means to give attention to, to focus on, or to be in the presence of; and wai is water.)

The standards and regulations regarding drinking water supplies and suppliers have also been significantly overhauled.

Following an outbreak of campylobacter and E. coli contamination in the town of Havelock North in 2016, when around 5,000 people became sick, an enquiry was undertaken, ultimately leading to the Water Services Bill going before Parliament. The bill progressed through Parliament, and a select committee held hearings on the draft. It received royal assent in early October 2021 and has now been enacted as the Water Services Act 2021. It will require all domestic water suppliers to undertake source water protection planning, water safety planning, multiple barrier treatment, and disinfection and to establish more-stringent testing requirements.

Taumata Arowai will be responsible for the implementation and enforcement of the new regulations. This will affect all suppliers, from large cities to farms that source groundwater for multiple buildings on their properties.

The three waters working group will report back to the government with its findings and recommendations in March 2022. The government will then make final decisions on the form and function of the new water services entities, which it will wish to implement before to the next general elections, which will be held in late 2023. M

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For more information, please email Kris Polly at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

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ESTIMATOR Location: Remote Deadline: Open until filled Salary: TBD based on qualifications RESPONSIBILITIES: +R eviews data to determine material and labor requirements and prepares cost estimates of steel pipe and fittings for competitive bids. +A nalyzes data to determine manufacturing capabilities at individual facilities. +M anages estimates for multiple projects simultaneously. +C omputes cost factors and prepares estimates used for management purposes such as planning, organizing, and scheduling work, preparing bids, selecting vendors or subcontractors, and determining cost effectiveness.

38 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2022

scopes of work for competitive bids. +P rovides information and guidance to Project Managers

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QUALIFICATIONS: +B BA/BA/BS in business, finance, accounting, or engineering or equivalent experience. +E xperience in renewable energy project development, market analysis, transmission interconnection, land acquisition, permitting and system organization & implementation. municipalwaterleader.com

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meet company needs. Issue timely and complete financial statements and coordinate preparation of the corporate annual report. Calculate and issue financial and operating metrics. +M anage production of annual budgets and forecasts then calculate and report variances from the budget. +P rovide financial analyses as needed related to capital investments, pricing decisions and contract negotiations. +C oordinate the provision of information to external auditors as required. +E nsure the company complies with local, state and federal government reporting requirements and tax filings.

QUALIFIATIONS: +B achelor’s degree in business, finance, accounting, or equivalent business experience. +7 + years of progressively responsible corporate B2B accounting experience. +P reference will be given to candidates with Certified Public Accountant or Certified Management Accountant designations. +A bility to travel periodically.

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CONTROLLER Location: Atlanta, GA Deadline: Until Filled Salary: TBD based on qualifications RESPONSIBILITIES: +O versee the operations of the accounting department and manage outsourced functions. +D evelop, maintain and enforce a documented system of accounting policies and procedures. +E nsure accounts payable and payroll are paid timely and accounts receivables are collected promptly. +M aintain the chart of accounts, an orderly accounting filing system, and a system of controls over accounting transactions.

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Upcoming Events January 4–5 National Water Resources Association, Leadership Forum, Phoenix, AZ January 12 Nebraska Water Resources Association, Water Roundtable, Lincoln, NE January 18–20 Ground Water Management Districts Association, Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX January 19–21 U.S. Conference of Mayors, 90th Winter Meeting, Washington, DC January 21–22 Texas Rural Water Association, Rural Water Conference, Round Rock, TX January 26 Nebraska Water Resources Association, Legislative Reception, Lincoln, NE January 26–27 Irrigation Leader Operations & Management Training Workshop, Phoenix, AZ January 26–28 Colorado Water Congress, Annual Convention, Aurora, CO January 28–29 Nebraska Natural Resources Districts, Legislative Conference, Lincoln, NE January 31–February 3 National Association of Clean Water Agencies, Winter Conference, Scottsdale, AZ January 31–February 3 Nevada Water Resources Association, Annual Conference, Las Vegas, NV February 1 North Dakota Rural Water Systems Association, Annual Meeting and Expo, Fargo, ND February 8 North Dakota Rural Water Systems Association, Rural Water Rally, Washington, DC February 9 Nebraska Water Resources Association, Water Roundtable, Lincoln, NE February 17–18 Ditch and Reservoir Company Alliance, Annual Conference, Colorado Springs, CO March 6–9 Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, Water Policy Conference, Washington, DC March 9 Nebraska Water Resources Association, Water Roundtable, Lincoln, NE March 11 Oregon Water Resources Congress, District Managers Workshop, Newport, OR April 7–8 The P3 Water Summit, San Diego, CA April 13 Nebraska Water Resources Association, Water Roundtable, Lincoln, NE April 24–30 National Association of Clean Water Agencies, Water Week, Washington, DC

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