Municipal Water Leader November December 2019

Volume 6 Issue 10

November/December 2019

Chris Kahn of American Water: Asset Management With Drones

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Municipal Water Leader is published 10 times a year with combined issues for May/June and November/December by

An American company established in 2009

6

Asset Management With Drones: American Water’s UAV Program

Contents

November/December 2019 Volume 6, Issue 10 5 T he Importance of Asset Management

By Kris Polly 6 A sset Management With Drones: American Water’s UAV Program

25 R educing Maintenance Risk and Expenses Through SUEZ’s Asset Management Program 30 M anaging Natural Assets Alongside Engineered Ones

12 H DR’s Data-Driven Utility Management Services

33 I rrigation Innovation on Southern Utah University’s Campus 16 B lack & Veatch: Management

By Beth Fillerup for All Stages of the Asset Life Cycle THE INNOVATORS 34 H ow Assura’s Configurable 22 The Town of Cary’s Buried Asset-Management Platform Infrastructure Asset Can Help Water Utilities Management Plan WATER LAW 36 P reserving Federalism

in Water Law

STAFF: Kris Polly, Editor-in-Chief Joshua Dill, Managing Editor Tyler Young, Writer Stephanie Biddle, Graphic Designer Eliza Moreno, Web Designer SUBMISSIONS: Municipal Water Leader welcomes manuscript, photography, and art submissions. However, 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 one-quarter, half-page, and full-page ads. For more information on rates and placement, please contact Kris Polly at (703) 517-3962 or municipal.water.leader@waterstrategies.com.

CIRCULATION: Municipal Water Leader is distributed to irrigation district managers and boards of directors in the 17 western states, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials, members of Congress and committee staff, and advertising sponsors.

For address corrections or additions, please contact our managing editor, Joshua Dill, at joshua.dill@waterstrategies.com.

Copyright © 2019 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.

Coming soon in Municipal Water Leader: January: Energy Recovery and Renewables 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

MuniWaterLeader

COVER PHOTO:

Chris Kahn, Senior GIS Manager, American Water.

Photo courtesy of American Water.

PHOTO COURTESY OF AMERICAN WATER.

MunicipalWaterLeader.com

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The Importance of Asset Management

H

ow does your water utility manage its assets?

With aging infrastructure and limited funds for rehabilitation and replacement, the question is more important every day. In this month’s issue of Municipal Water Leader, we profile some of the water utilities and service providers that are forging new paths in asset management.

In our cover interview, Chris Kahn of American Water introduces us to the high-tech world of asset management using unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. American Water’s drones give it eyes in the sky that it can use to examine elevated and difficult-to-reach assets, but they can also be equipped with thermal and multispectral sensors and even ground-penetrating radar, providing an invaluable addition to the utility’s asset management arsenal.

We also speak with three large asset management service providers, each of which brings a distinct focus to its work.

Allan Scott and Trent Stober tell us about HDR’s utility management services and its data-driven water main renewal and replacement analysis. Will Williams of Black & Veatch, meanwhile, tells us about how his company carries out gap analyses and assessments to help agencies measure risk; collect and use data; and boost their efficiency, flexibility, and resilience.

And Jonathan Cato of SUEZ traces the roots of his company’s subscription-based asset management services back to its tank maintenance work and explains how they can reduce an agency’s risk and uncertainty.

The Town of Cary, North Carolina, recently developed a buried asset management plan. Dave Hallgren, the town’s

By Kris Polly

utility manager, explains the motivations behind the exercise and what the town will do as a result.

Everyone knows a pressurized pipe is an asset—but what about a stream? To answer that intriguing question, we speak with Roy Brooke of the Municipal Natural Assets Initiative, a nonprofit that is encouraging municipalities to recognize and value the services provided by natural assets like wetlands and streams.

We also check in with a few companies that are making the life easier for water providers. Watson Engineering helped Southern Utah University install a new filter system that dramatically reduces maintenance needs. And Hamish Howard tells us about how Assura Software’s workflow program can be configured to handle a municipal water district’s asset management needs.

Finally, we hear from Robert Lynch about what a potential ruling on the definition of the Waters of the United States will mean on the state level.

Asset management is a topic every water agency and utility needs to carefully consider. I hope that the articles in this issue of Municipal Water Leader provide a good overview of the possible solutions every municipal water district can choose from. M Kris Polly is editor-in-chief of Municipal Water Leader magazine and president 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 may be contacted at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

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Asset Management With Drones: American Water’s UAV Program

One of American Water’s drones, with a safety helmet included for scale.

A

Kris Polly: Please tell us about your background and how you ended up in your current position.

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Chris Kahn: I have an undergraduate degree in geography from Rutgers. I was an intern and then an employee with the Middlesex County, New Jersey, engineering department as a GIS analyst during college. After graduation, I worked for a couple of years for a car navigation company now named TomTom. This was before Google Maps—turnby-turn navigation was not yet common and the data were often flawed. I got to travel around a lot, making the maps better and seeing the country. Eventually, I earned a master’s degree in GIS, which is like the information technology branch of geography. GIS is what makes spatial analysis and location analytics possible. For about 4 years, I consulted for a company that built GIS databases for the City of Philadelphia. In January 2008, I started with New Jersey American Water, which had just begun its GIS program.

My roles have changed over the years. As far as titles, I started as a senior technician and then became a project manager, a senior project manager, and a manager, and I am now a senior manager leading a new department named Geospatial Operational Services. Ultimately, I moved from New

PHOTO COURTESY OF AMERICAN WATER.

sset management requires precise information about the location and condition of an organization’s assets, as well as the ability to regularly inspect them and update that information. American Water is one company that has started to use drones to do this. American Water’s drones are not only used as eyes in the sky to inspect specific problems in hard-to-reach locations like elevated water storage tanks, but the information they collect is integrated into the company’s internal mapping and geographic information systems (GIS) software. Further, with specialized thermal imaging and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) sensors, American Water’s drones can locate buried assets and rapidly identify damaged solar panels, among other tasks.

In this interview, Chris Kahn, American Water’s senior GIS manager, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Editor-inChief Kris Polly about the advantages of the company’s drone system and his advice for other agencies interested in establishing a similar program.

ADVERTISEMENT Jersey American Water to American Water Service Company, which serves all the company’s regulated state subsidiaries.

Part of my current role includes generating value from cutting-edge geospatial technologies. We figure out how they fit into the business. UAS (unmanned aerial systems) affect many departments, including supply chain, legal, risk management (insurance), physical security, cybersecurity, production, operations, engineering, and communications.

The drone industry is maturing rapidly and is heading toward more automation and integration into the national airspace. From a regulations standpoint, UAS will soon operate similarly to traditional aviation. With this in mind, my most recent professional development is working through the Mercer County College aviation and technology program in New Jersey, where I am learning to fly manned aircraft and earning my commercial pilot’s license. I am also learning a great deal about how the commercial aviation world developed and how it operates today, which is helping me build a better drone program with the various stakeholders at American Water.

Kris Polly: Please tell us about American Water.

Chris Kahn: With headquarters in Camden, New Jersey, American Water is the largest and most geographically diverse publicly traded U.S. water and wastewater utility company. The company employs more than 7,100 dedicated professionals who provide regulated and market-based drinking water, wastewater, and other related services to more than 14 million people in 46 states. The company has 15 regulated state subsidiaries, including New Jersey American Water, which is the largest publicly traded water and wastewater services provider in New Jersey, serving 2.7 million people in 192 communities.

Kris Polly: Please tell us about your unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system.

Chris Kahn: We started thinking about it at New Jersey American Water in 2015. One of our longtime vendors, who works with high-end, high-accuracy GPS equipment, introduced me to UAVs’ potential for mapping—not simply mapping imagery, but also topography and contour lines for making design products. The vendor showed me some examples and told me how inexpensive the drone was.

I brought it to my supervisors’ attention and told them that this was one of the geospatial technologies that would be big in 3–5 years. They gave me the go-ahead to start researching the system. In 2016, we learned that Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Regulation part 107 was coming. This would remove the requirement of a private pilot’s license to fly UAVs commercially. Prior to that, to fly a drone you either needed to be a private pilot with a part 333 exemption or to have a certificate of authorization as a public university.

Before the release of part 107 in August 2016, we started our

proof of concept by working with our vendor, who had a part 333 exception, and with a public university in New Jersey. We invited a lot of companies to an event at which they could demonstrate sensors and airframes. My job was to evaluate them and decide what technologies could be scaled and which could deliver high value with lower risk and cost.

Early on, we identified two things as lower risk and high value. One was mapping updates. We’re installing main extensions and new developments all the time, but they wouldn’t show up on our distribution map, which is like what you see on Google Maps but is private to the company and our contractors. Frontline workers didn’t have a point of reference in their maps for years. One of the decisions we made was to immediately update the imagery on all our projects via drone. When someone turns on the imagery map, it includes all the most recent updates. They’ll see the new properties, the new configurations, and where the curb lines are. That allows them to do their measurements effectively.

The second initiative was supporting the inspection process with drones. In New Jersey alone, we have almost 200 elevated potable water tanks. To do a visual assessment of the condition of the coating requires an employee or contractor to climb the tank, which is slow, can cost a lot of money, and is a potential safety hazard. With drones, we can easily do a visual inspection of every single tank on an annual basis and store that imagery where those who need it can access it.

Kris Polly: In addition to conventional cameras, do the drones use other kinds of sensors?

Chris Kahn: We have some cameras with 30x optical zoom.

This provides the ability to capture shots from a safe distance of several hundred feet. This comes in handy when things like power lines, branches, or trees make flying closer unsafe. We own several thermal sensors. We also have several multispectral sensors used for algae measurement and a GPR. We have several types of drone airframes. Some can lift and carry sensors that weigh up to 35 pounds. Others can fly in the rain or look upwards at the underside of bridges. As you go through them, our drones get more complex to operate, more expensive, and have fewer use cases, but each use case delivers a higher value. Our workhorses are fairly inexpensive and are equipped with red-green-blue (RGB) cameras that can take images and video. The drones at the next stage up have sensor configurations that we can mount in any direction and can mount many different sensor types. Looking upward is important for things like critical crossings and bridges. If a main is bolted to the underside of a bridge, we may need to get underneath it to look up and make sure that the bolts that are holding it up are not corroding.

Thermal and multispectral sensors are harder to use, but they give you insights that you can’t get with RGB. Security is currently the highest-value use for thermal sensors. We have a daylight waiver that allows us to fly at night within our visual line of sight, and soon we will apply to the FAA to go beyond MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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New Jersey American Water’s drones are piloted from a Mobile Operations Center trailer.

Kris Polly: How many drones do you have?

Chris Kahn: At American Water, I believe we have 19 total, and as of September 2019, we have about 40 pilots. In the past year or so, we

Drones at the ready in New Jersey American Water’s Mobile Operations Center.

8 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

PHOTOS COURTESY OF AMERICAN WATER.

the line of sight. We want the ability to fly a couple miles beyond our line of sight at night to patrol our reservoirs via thermal imaging. An application we have scaled is looking at solar panel fields. In New Jersey, we have seven large solar fields. We’re able to fly over them and combine the imagery with the as-built design drawings of the solar field. We can tell down to the diode when they go bad. Then we can send a detailed report to the maintenance person that identifies each diode that’s out and how much power is being lost.

GPR is a technology that can see underground and locate infrastructure.

It’s kind of an add-on for GPS. Normally, we can only use GPS on physical assets that come up to the surface. We regularly use a GPR based on a cart to map subsurface utilities. Using GPR on a drone is something we have only tested to see if it works—and it does! It does not speed the process up, nor do we fly very high. The idea is to get over terrain that a traditional cart-mounted GPR cannot.

Think of thick, 6-foot-high weeds that go for miles down an easement. We can fly just above them carrying a 35-pound radar at walking speed and capture the same data.

have completed over 700 flights. We also have several pilots who are now qualified instructor pilots.

We spent 2016–2018 dealing with the business case; finding out what technology works; figuring out how to scale it; approaching risk, legal, and all the departments I mentioned before; creating a companywide policy; creating a practice and a governance policy; and engaging aviation experts to help us write a safety management system, which we launched in 2017. Scaling the technology to enterprise scale is a long road, but we’re right on the cusp of completion. Illinois American Water, for example, went from having zero pilots at the start of the year to having 12 pilots by the spring. They were all trained at once on the safety management system, how to fly at night, and air incident response operations— how do you respond if there is a crash, and how do you document it? We have procedures for pretty much everything.

They were able to do what New Jersey American Water did over several years right out of the gate. We’ve set up these on-ramps for all the regulated states.

Each state needs to have an executive sponsor in order to start the program

internally and a program manager who is responsible for day-to-day operations in addition to the pilots. There’s also a safety officer, who might be the same person as the program manager depending on the size of the UAV program.

Every 90 days, every pilot has to be in what’s called currency. They’re certified for certain drones and certain mission types. The restrictions are strict: You’re only allowed to fly a specific drone with specific sensors for a specific reason. We certify our pilots for each drone. All that is tracked in an online logbook system. The logbook tracks everything, down to every battery cycle that we go through.

Kris Polly: How has the UAV program changed the way American Water does asset management?

Chris Kahn: The biggest change so far for folks who are in engineering, operations, and production is the ability to have eyes in the sky. They are responsible for elevated assets that are often in remote areas. We’re able to observe them inexpensively, because our pilots can fly 10 tanks in 1 day and provide imagery in near-real time. We can even provide real-time video feeds. They can spot an open hatch, a damaged solar panel, or a broken fence at a remote site.

Engineering operators can request a look at a particular nut or bolt or meter-reading antenna. In one case, it took 5 minutes to fly to the top of a tank and verify that an advanced metering infrastructure antenna was damaged.

That saves an immense amount of time and money when the alternative is a harnessed climber.

From a mapping perspective, the change has been enormous. It is just expected now that when a new project goes in the ground, all the assets have been entered in GIS with centimeter accuracy from a global navigation satellite system, and the updated imagery is in the map. I don’t think that the majority of the end users know the magic of how it happens, but they expect it to be there. The measurements we’re talking about go down to a centimeter or two. Each pixel on the screen of a drone image is about 2 centimeters across, whereas in Google Maps it’s 1 foot across. That provides extreme precision. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you have a few hundred thousand work orders a year, and you can save 5–10 minutes on each one, the efficiency adds up.

Kris Polly: What advice do you have for other municipal water providers that are thinking about establishing a UAV program?

Chris Kahn: Lead with safety. It’s too easy, in my opinion, to get a drone from a box store or the Internet. The biggest hurdle is that they’re viewed as toys, not as tools. I tell people to think about them the same way they would think about a new chop saw: a potentially dangerous tool that has high value for your business if used properly. How would you go about

getting a new tool like that? Would you seek out legal advice and talk with management? Would you adjust safety practices?

Would you educate your workforce and your contractors? The FAA is not an enforcement agency, so there are now tons of drone hobbyists out there who often have no idea what they’re doing. There are also about 100,000 licensed commercial operators in the United States. Believe it or not, current regulation makes it very simple to become commercially licensed to fly a drone even if you do not know how to turn a drone on, to say nothing of flying a particular model safely.

If your business relies on outside vendors for drone work, it is still difficult to sort out who is safe and who isn’t. A good start before hiring any drone vendor would be to ask to see their UAS Safety Management System documentation. If you get a blank look, keep shopping!

When I’m speaking at conferences, I always ask how many people have had their smartphone die on them when it was reporting 10 percent battery life. About 30 percent of people usually raise their hands. I tell them that drones are basically flying smartphones. You have to assume that at some point, something’s going to go wrong, especially as you scale. It is important to decide on the level of risk you’re willing to accept, and more importantly, what you can do to mitigate it. What risk matrix is in place to evaluate site risk? What checklists are in place to prevent common human and electronic error? What happens if, despite risk mitigation, the drone still causes an accident?

Are the pilots trained to deal with that properly? What’s the chain of command? Do your employees know what sorts of accidents need to be reported to the FAA? It’s not incredibly onerous; it can definitely be navigated. But a lot of people don’t pay attention to it. They just get the drone and start using it, and when the drone lands in someone’s pool or causes a car accident, they may have no plan or insurance.

That’s when an organization can get itself into trouble.

Think through how to involve the communications, risk management, and cybersecurity people in your organization.

Despite all this, it’s still worthwhile. It takes resources, but the value is so high that we work through it. Drone use is going to become a standard practice for utilities, so we still needed to make the rules around it. Municipalities may have contractors that are using drones without their knowledge. It is better to have policies in place so as to make sure that they are operating those drones with a license and in a safe and legal manner. M

Chris Kahn is senior GIS manager at American Water. He can be reached at christopher.kahn@amwater.com.

MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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HDR’s Data-Driven Utility Management Services

H

DR is a major architectural, engineering, and consulting firm that has worked on infrastructure projects around the world, including bridges, highways, parks, hospitals, arenas, and treatment facilities. Perhaps lesser known are its utility management services, which help water and wastewater utilities plan, manage, operate, and fund infrastructure. One of HDR’s key utility management services focuses on performing expert analyses of water and wastewater utilities’ buried pipelines and assets and providing utility-specific, datadriven pipeline renewal and replacement planning. This helps utilities know when to replace and rehabilitate their infrastructure to reduce water main breaks and service disruptions and, ultimately, to save money.

In this interview, Allan Scott, HDR’s lead for utility management services in Northern California, and Trent Stober, HDR’s national director for utility management services, speak with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about how HDR performs its data-driven analyses and how its client utilities use them to inform their operations.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your backgrounds and how you came to be in your current positions.

Allan Scott: I am HDR’s lead for utility management services in Northern California. My work focuses on projects concerning asset management, maintenance and operations, and business consulting for water and wastewater utilities. I’ve been working in this area for about 20 years. Before that, I worked on other water resource projects, both in consulting and for a couple of different municipalities.

12 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

across the country. This work has been focused on a variety of issues that utilities face today, including asset management, capital planning, regulatory issues, and financial effects.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about HDR’s utility management services division.

Trent Stober: We have about 150 technical practitioners in utilities management services, located across the United States. The municipal water service lines include utility planning, master planning, asset management, hydraulic modeling, rates and finance, operations consulting, and regulatory support for municipal utilities’ Safe Drinking Water Act and Clean Water Act obligations.

Joshua Dill: What are the main asset management problems that municipal water districts and other water utility managers are facing?

Trent Stober: Our nation’s utilities own and operate a vast amount of infrastructure that is nearing the end of its useful life. The funding needed to manage these assets to meet customer service goals can be daunting. We’re at a point in the industry where we have to apply a decision process for how to maintain, rehabilitate, and replace our buried infrastructure, including facilities like pump stations and treatment plants, in a costeffective, defensible, and data-driven

manner. Our ultimate goal is to use a proactive and repeatable approach to gain the highest value out of our infrastructure investments.

Allan Scott: Water and wastewater utilities have a significant amount of aging infrastructure. The value of their buried infrastructure can range from hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars and may represent the majority of their capital investment. They have to decide how much and where they’re going to spend their capital dollars on replacing or rehabilitating this aging infrastructure. Of course, the overall goal is to keep the system viable and to continue to meet the needs and expectations of their customers and stakeholders. That hasn’t changed over time: They’ve always wanted to put the investments where they’re going to do the most to maintain or improve their services. But how exactly to do that is difficult to figure out, especially for water utilities. Water distribution systems are closed systems, so you can’t run a camera inside them or physically inspect them.

In the past, utilities have relied largely on indirect engineering assessments, intuition, and on the past experience of the operators regarding what needs the most attention. This approach doesn’t always align with the actual highestpriority needs of the system.

One of the things that we’re helping utilities pivot toward is the data-driven assessment of risk and vulnerability. That provides a transparent and consistent

PHOTOS COURTESY OF HDR.

Trent Stober: I’m HDR’s national director for utility management services. I have been in the field for 25 years, working on utility planning for water and wastewater utilities

Material, vintage, and location are all factors that determine a pipe’s longevity.

ADVERTISEMENT approach that helps them decide how much to invest in infrastructure to achieve certain service levels and where to make those investments. For example, how many main breaks are acceptable in a given year, and do we want to maintain the current number or drive it down?

Where will our replacement dollars do the most good this year?

Joshua Dill: One of the ways districts have done this in the past is by relying on industry-established average useful lives.

How are those average lives calculated?

Allan Scott: That information is typically estimated by pipe manufacturers, consultants, and utility managers based on various industry studies or experience. The reality is that the useful life of an asset varies greatly depending on its location, environmental factors, and the characteristics of the system it is part of. Especially in a water distribution system, the same material could be subjected to different pressures and stresses in one system or another.

There is also variation dependent on the design specifications and construction methods applied at the time of installation and seasonal operational variations in pressure and flow. There are also environmental factors, like soil shrink/swell potential and corrosion potential. The average useful life that is provided by the industry or vendor is usually a pretty unrealistic estimate given the actual conditions that the pipes are experiencing. There are plenty of examples of water mains in excess of 100 years old—well beyond anybody’s calculated average useful life—that are still performing well. There are other examples of mains that are failing within just a few years of installation.

We’ve found that if utilities just use the industry-provided average useful life, they usually end up with annual replacement cost calculations that don’t line up with actual replacement needs and are much higher than they can realistically deal with. It is difficult for utility managers to justify these estimates because they are not based on data that reflect the performance of their systems. We’ve done

some comparisons of replacement cost calculations based on average useful life– based estimates versus those based on the data-driven approach. We’re seeing that the average useful life approach many times yields unrealistic overestimates.

Additionally, as time goes on and these estimates are shown to be inaccurate, decisionmakers’ confidence in the analysis goes way down. It has always been a challenge for utilities to justify industryprovided average useful lives to the board, the city council, or whoever else they’re accountable to.

why, because this is the most likely place where future breaks will occur.

The break history can help determine the average time between breaks. You may be able to determine that pipes that have experienced their first break will on average experience the second break within 8 years, but pipes that already have six breaks will on average experience the seventh break within 1 year. By building out that dataset and looking at the average time between breaks, you can analyze how quickly your system is deteriorating.

A relatively minor break in a small pipe undermined this road in Los Angeles, proving that it is difficult to quantify the consequences of failure of any given asset.

Joshua Dill: How does HDR’s data-driven water main renewal and replacement analysis work?

Allan Scott: The foundation of our datadriven analysis is leveraging historical main-break data from the utility. When we propose doing that, the initial response of most utilities is that they don’t have very good main-break data.

However, we can almost always take the data they have, and through some initial analysis, enhance the data and help them fill data gaps to get a solid, main-break history dataset. That dataset can help determine the characteristics of the system and help the utility hone in on what factors are driving the breaks.

Typically, in any given water distribution network, only a small percentage of the pipes are actually breaking. Most of the pipes are performing well and not breaking at all. The objective is to identify the pipes that are breaking and understand

The next step is to take a look at what parameters are contributing to that, for example, pipe vintage, which refers to pipe material and manufacturing date.

Asbestos pipe that was manufactured and installed in the early 1960s or earlier has consistently exhibited much worse break characteristics than asbestos pipe that was manufactured and installed later. Metal pipe has also been manufactured differently over time, so metal pipe also has different break characteristics depending on its age. We will analyze 20–30 different factors and start to tease out which ones contribute most to main breaks.

We focus on the high contributors by assigning higher scores and weighting factors to pipes with those characteristics and build the risk model based on that.

The risk model assigns a numerical risk score to each pipe based on two components: the likelihood of failure, which expresses how quickly the pipe MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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ADVERTISEMENT is expected to break again, and the consequence of failure, which indicates what the effect of a break would be. Would it inconvenience a couple of folks on cul-de-sac, or is it going to make the nightly news? Obviously, the pipes with the higher risk scores are the ones you want to focus on the most because these may break sooner or have bigger consequences if they do.

Trent Stober: We can use some of the utility’s existing tools, like its hydraulic models, to evaluate the potential effect on customer service of a break in each pipe in the system. We can simulate the effect on the public or on critical customers like hospitals and large industrial users to understand the consequences of breaks for each pipe and to provide greater insights into risk. Those with higher consequences may need a more aggressive approach to replacement or renewal over less important pipes that break at the same rate.

Joshua Dill: You draw the data in each case from the specific utility rather than from data gathered nationwide, correct?

Trent Stober: Correct. We see large differences in break history among regions of the country. Different pipe materials have historically been used in different parts of the country, and the environmental conditions that influence pipe breaks differ across the country as well. Many factors affect how those pipes age and what we can expect from them. We have a large national database that helps us understand those regional differences.

Joshua Dill: After you do your initial study and you create this model, what does the agency do with it? What are the next steps?

14 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

Joshua Dill: Who are your clients, and how big are they?

Trent Stober: We have clients in just about every region in the country. They are predominantly mid- to largesize utilities, those serving populations from thousands to millions. They have a good amount of data.

Allan Scott: I most recently completed work in Northern California for the Contra Costa Water District and the City of Santa Cruz. In both cases, we did a full analysis based on their break history and have helped them develop a consistent, data-driven process for replacement planning and a transparent framework to communicate and justify their plans to their board or the city council.

One of the other key drivers that motivates utilities to do this is the fact that they’re losing a lot of their more senior workforce, who know the system and intuitively understand where the problem areas are. That was the case with Contra Costa Water District. It had recently had several key folks retire who knew the system well and did most of the pipeline replacement planning. This prompted the district to establish a more formal, repeatable process that was independent of individual staff members’ institutional knowledge or system experience. That’s why the district developed its current approach to pipeline renewal and replacement planning, which relies on its main break history and our data-driven methodology.

Trent Stober: There’s also a really good opportunity to coordinate with other municipal functions. We’re increasingly seeing that utilities are partnering with other agencies within the city, like public works, so that community disruption due to infrastructure improvements is minimized. For example, if a major road project exposes a buried asset, should a utility proactively replace or rehabilitate that asset, even if it wouldn’t be scheduled for maintenance for a few years? Doing both projects at the same time may be less disruptive to the community in the long run. M Allan Scott is HDR’s lead for utility management services in Northern California. He can be contacted at allan.scott@hdrinc.com.

Trent Stober is HDR’s national director for utility management services. He can be contacted at trent.stober@hdrinc.com.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF HDR.

Allan Scott: There is a two-step process. We’ve been focusing on the first step, which is developing a risk model.

That answers the question of which pipes are problem pipes and which should be addressed first. The second question is how the system should be managed in the long run through replacement and rehabilitation. That goes back to the question we discussed earlier regarding how much utilities spend on rehabilitation each year. How much should they apportion to replacing pipes versus their other assets? The second part of our analysis helps them answer that question.

We go back to that break history, and, analyzing the pattern of breaks, we can start to do some forward-looking analysis and assess how many of those pipes are likely to break in any given year in the future based on their break history and the average break characteristics of the system. That analysis helps our utilities identify how many miles of pipe they should be replacing each year in order to keep breaks at a manageable number and achieve their goals—whether those involve maintaining the current break levels or reducing them—and helps them balance their annual capital investments between their water mains and other assets.

Trent Stober: This approach also arms the utility with information to explain its financial needs to the community and elected officials and collaboratively set level-of-service goals.

This helps build the utility’s case for the resources it needs.

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Black & Veatch: Management for All Stages of the Asset Life Cycle

Black & Veatch’s asset management services can help a utility decide when to rehabilitate or replace buried infrastructure.

B

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

16 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

Will Williams: I started my career in 1990 in the United Kingdom after the privatization of the water industry. I joined the Water Research Center (WRC), which had been the government research center into anything to do with water and wastewater. Because the industry had been privatized, WRC became a research-based consultancy.

It was a time of transition, as WRC went from being a government-subsidized research center to being more commercially focused. Because the industry was newly privatized, the new water companies were trying to understand the condition, performance, location, and age of all the assets they had. WRC started developing a lot of the principles that we now consider central to asset management, risk-based planning, and condition assessment.

I spent 16 years at WRC and left as an executive director. I then went to another large international consultancy called Halcrow and set up an asset management practice there.

This was a global practice with people in the Middle East, Australia, and North America. I moved over to grow the

PHOTO COURTESY OF LAURA BALCH.

lack & Veatch is a global construction and consultancy firm with more than 100 offices worldwide. One of its many services is its asset management practice, which works with clients in the water field, including municipalities, state governments, utilities, and research organizations.

Black & Veatch’s asset management services for water agencies include strategy development and implementation, information solutions, and condition assessment. These services cover all stages of asset management, including planning, design, construction, operation, maintenance, and rehabilitation.

In this interview, Will Williams, associate vice president of Black & Veatch’s water asset management practice, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about how the company helps its clients as well as the trends he sees in water utility asset management today.

ADVERTISEMENT North American business about 10 years ago, and then I joined Black & Veatch 7 years ago and started to help us grow our asset management practice in the water business.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about Black & Veatch’s asset management services practice.

Will Williams: We have over 50 staff in the United States.

We work throughout the United States as well as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Southeast Asia.

Our services fall into three broad areas. The first is asset management strategy and implementation. That involves working with clients to understand how they manage their assets currently, doing a gap analysis against best practices as defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard ISO 55001, and then putting in place an improvement roadmap to help them to improve the way that they plan and manage the asset life cycle. That involves improving the way in which they understand risk, the way they collect data, the way they turn those data into information for decisionmaking, and the way they prioritize investment.

The second area is information solutions, which involves helping clients improve the way they collect, store, use, and analyze data. That is done broadly through the use of geographic information systems (GIS) and computerized maintenance management systems as well as business intelligence and dashboards to enhance the visualization of data for decisionmaking.

The third area is condition assessment and rehabilitation assessment. We assess the physical condition of aboveground facilities as well as buried structures like pressure pipelines and gravity pipelines of all different diameters, analyze the data we collect to understand the rate of deterioration, and then develop targeted rehabilitation programs. Our services cover the whole asset life cycle.

While I mentioned three areas of focus, we always provide tailored solutions. For example, in our work for the California Department of Water Resources, we started off with a gap analysis of its current practices, wrote an implementation roadmap together, developed an asset management policy and strategy, reviewed its approach to condition assessment and data improvement, and then developed a risk-management program. We are currently helping develop a risk-based capital investment program.

Those service areas are combined to meet the needs of the client. I guess you could say that all of them have elements of people, process, and technology.

Joshua Dill: What are the most common gaps you identify during a gap analysis?

Will Williams: A lot of utilities have been running their assets for a long time. The barrier to becoming even more efficient is often that the processes and procedures are not

documented properly. That makes them vulnerable to the aging of the workforce as well. It is important to standardize processes and documentation and make sure that there is a link from the overall strategy of the organization all the way to down to the work at the asset level. Taking a risk-based approach is key to a lot of that. That means understanding where the most critical assets are and what condition they are in and targeting investments to deal with the highestrisk issues first. That leads to efficiency and enables an organization to deliver more value from its existing budget.

Joshua Dill: What are the most common data collection gaps?

Will Williams: That varies by utility. Some clients are data rich and information poor. They may be collecting the data but not storing them properly or analyzing them in such a way as to turn them into information for decisionmaking.

In some cases, a lot of effort is expended to collect condition data, but as long as a certain threshold is not exceeded, the data just get stored. However, we find value in analyzing those data to identify trends and underlying deterioration.

Joshua Dill: Who are Black & Veatch’s asset management clients?

Will Williams: They include municipalities, state governments, utilities, and research organizations.

Joshua Dill: When a client works with Black & Veatch on asset management, do you provide them with a one-time report with recommendations or with an ongoing service?

Will Williams: It varies depending on the client’s needs. It could be the selection, implementation, and integration of a new software solution. It could be the development of a riskprioritization model to help to justify a capital investment program, which is something we would come back and update annually. However, it could also be a multiyear condition assessment program in which we systematically analyze the condition of a client’s entire system, or a multiyear asset management implementation program where the initial report and recommendations are turned into an implementation plan and we work with the client to implement the plan.

Our services are targeted at each stage of the life cycle. You might be planning, designing, building, operating, maintaining, or deciding whether to rehabilitate or replace. We might get involved in the planning stage of an asset, and then later in the life cycle, get involved in optimizing its maintenance.

Joshua Dill: What results can Black & Veatch’s clients expect to see from its asset management services?

Will Williams: The services are focused on getting better efficiency from the existing assets. That could be efficiency MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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ADVERTISEMENT savings, better targeting operations and maintenance expenditures, or developing an optimized capital investment program that targets investment efficiently. We help clients to put large multiyear capital improvement programs in place, which can bring significant savings, for example, by delaying expenditure if it does not increase risk. Clients can expect to see long-term improvements in the awareness of the state of their assets from our condition assessment programs, which can help them build their long-term budgets. We can help optimize long-term investment as well as short-term investment.

Joshua Dill: What trends do you see today in asset management?

to each asset and target the most critical first, then use condition data to predict their future performance and adjust planned maintenance accordingly. This increase in adaptiveness is a long-term trend that will continue.

The third area is resilience. Risk-based planning has been around for a while. But at the end of last year, the American Water Infrastructure Act (AWIA) was passed. It mandates water utilities of different sizes to consider risk and resilience. It is a new concept for a number of clients.

Resilience is the ability of a system to recover from an incident, whether that is a weather event or a malevolent action, and to continue to deliver service. We’re involved with a new Water Research Foundation project focused on developing a common framework for resilience for water, wastewater, and stormwater infrastructure. Under the AWIA, large utilities—those with a population of over 100,000—have to put risk and resilience plans together by next March. Smaller entities will have to do the same thing over the next 18 months. These will need to be updated every 5 years. I see resilience becoming a more frequently used term in the lexicon of water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities, a little bit like risk did over the last few years. People are going to be talking about resilience-type investments. There, the challenge is going to be balancing needed investments in chronic issues like aging infrastructure against investments in improving the resilience of the system and making sure that the overall investment plan is optimized.

Joshua Dill: What is your vision for the future?

One trend in the water utility asset management world is the embrace of digital water—the use of information dashboards that allow for dynamic planning.

18 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

Will Williams is associate vice president of Black & Veatch’s water asset management practice. He can be contacted at williamswd@bv.com or at (404) 432-3860.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF PIXABAY AND BLACK & VEATCH.

Will Williams: The first one is digital water. Clients are looking to improve the accessibility of their information through things like dashboards and business intelligence.

For example, some of our clients do not want written, textheavy asset management plans. They want to be able to do dynamic planning by having current asset information at their fingertips and having that information easily or automatically updated.

The second area is dynamic maintenance planning.

Clients are seeking to understand the reliability of their assets and analyze condition data to put together conditionbased maintenance plans. They will assign a criticality

Will Williams: We’ve come a long way in improving asset data over the last 10 years or so. I think that will continue as the accessibility of things like sensors for condition data become cheaper and better. I think that the structure and use of that data to make decisions, supported by some of the trends that we’re seeing with digital water, will allow utilities to become more proactive in the way they manage their asset base. Rather than basing investment planning on what an agency has done over the last few years, I think we will see more dynamic decisionmaking or adaptive planning. That will enable much better decisions.

We’ve developed processes and procedures for managing the asset life cycle, but the gap has been the data and information necessary to make the best decisions. We’ve got the principles and the structure sorted out, but the major leap forward is going to be improving the data, which will allow us to improve analysis and then improve decisions. M

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The Town of Cary’s Buried Infrastructure Asset Management Plan

Cary’s Town Hall.

I

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

22 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

Dave Hallgren: I started my engineering career at a smaller municipality where I worked on a variety of capital projects, including water, sewer, sidewalk, and greenway. About 10 years ago, I moved to North Carolina and started working for the Town of Cary, where I continued to manage utility capital improvement projects. As the town started take a more proactive approach to asset management, there was an opportunity to make a career transition, and today I am the town’s asset manager.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about the Town of Cary’s water and wastewater services.

Dave Hallgren: We serve the citizens of Cary as well as customers at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, the Wake County portion of the Research Triangle Park, and the neighboring town of Morrisville. Our collection

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE TOWN OF CARY.

n 2018, the Town of Cary, North Carolina, developed a buried infrastructure asset management plan. The town, which is near Raleigh in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, had relatively new water and wastewater infrastructure and had a variety of ongoing asset management practices, but they were not integrated, transparent, and fully documented. Through a year-long process of general and area-specific meetings, the town developed a plan that included immediate, short-term tasks to be completed and also established regular asset management procedures.

In this interview, Dave Hallgren, Cary’s asset manager, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about how the asset management plan was developed and the benefits it has brought to the municipality.

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The Town of Cary’s Buried Infrastructure Asset Management Plan covers topics like level of service, risk and prioritization, maintenace and capital planning, and funding.

and distribution system consists of over 1,000 miles of water main, 980 miles of wastewater main, and 56 miles of reclaimed water main, with treatment handled by three wastewater treatment facilities and one water treatment facility. While the population of the Town of Cary is approaching 170,000, our customer base is even larger because we provide utility service outside town limits.

Joshua Dill: What motivated the town to take a more focused look at asset management, and how did it decide to formulate the buried infrastructure asset management plan?

Dave Hallgren: We are a relatively young community as far as infrastructure is concerned. Our infrastructure is just starting to mature. Much of our infrastructure was installed from the 1970s to the 1990s, and because of this, we have experienced few asset failures. We are lucky that we are ahead of the curve in this regard; it provided us the opportunity to create a unified asset management plan before our assets begin to reach the end of their service life.

The goals of this plan were to prioritize assets to reduce risk, optimize maintenance and renewal, and reinforce fiscal responsibility. We know that our utility assets are going to age, but having a plan in place will help us maximize their lifespans while continuing to provide safe, reliable, and cost-effective service to our citizens and customers.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about the development of the plan.

Dave Hallgren: We focused on our linear buried assets, specifically utility infrastructure, including water, wastewater, and reclaimed water, since we already had a robust inventory of utility assets in our geographic information systems (GIS).

Because the plan serves as an umbrella over many different activities, we gathered feedback from nearly every department.

We held a kickoff meeting in May 2017 with representatives from a wide spectrum of the town’s departments, including nonsupervisory staff, managers, and directors. Each department elected individuals from this group to participate in focus groups and drill down into more specific content within the plan. When we began to assemble the plan, we outlined the chapters based on the U.S. Environmental

Protection Agency’s 5 Core Questions asset management framework. Each question became the focus of a chapter of the plan. In addition, we added an introductory chapter and a final implementation chapter. The entire process took about a year, but this amount of time was vital to ensure that we created the best product possible. In the end, this approach gave Cary a common direction: Town staff from across the organization went through the asset management plan development process together and created a unified vision for the long-term stewardship of our buried infrastructure.

Joshua Dill: What kinds of things is the town implementing based on the analysis that was made in the plan?

Dave Hallgren: In the final implementation chapter of our plan, we have a 5-year task list that provides us with a short-term list of action items and projects to accomplish. We have begun risk-based prioritization for our capital projects to further guide data-driven decisions. This prioritization is most effective with an accurate asset inventory, which for us resides in GIS. Every day, we are improving the GIS schema for each of our asset types to ensure that we have the most up-to-date information available, including pipe size, material, and date of installation.

We are also developing and using new technological tools, such as a work order system in Salesforce; cloud-based closed-circuit TV (CCTV) inspection; and ESRI Collector apps, which gather data directly from our operations field staff. Another big initiative on our 5-year task list is the acquisition of risk-prioritization software to allow us to assign risk scores to all our assets regardless of utility type.

This decision support software will be used to reinforce decisions about where and when to perform preventative maintenance and renewal activities.

Joshua Dill: Would you tell us about the challenges of assessing the state of your assets, especially buried and pressurized pipeline?

Dave Hallgren: On the wastewater side, assessment has been straightforward, as we regularly conduct camera inspections on our gravity pipe and condition assessments on our force mains. The water side has been more challenging, since the pipes are not regularly inspected by CCTV. For our critical raw MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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ADVERTISEMENT and finished water lines, we have excavated sections of the pipe and performed visual and ultrasonic thickness testing as well as soil testing. We also take advantage of routine opportunities like water main tie-ins, taps, and repairs to obtain physical pipe samples and photographs of existing pipe conditions.

Joshua Dill: What kinds of regular assessments are you going to be doing in years to come?

Dave Hallgren: We have begun issuing an annual asset management report that outlines the status of our asset management progress. This document increases the visibility of the asset management program, reinforces awareness of completed and upcoming action items, and provides a dashboard of town performance based on key performance indicators.

The first half of the report highlights the year’s accomplishments and provides a preview of the expected progress for the coming year. The second half of the report provides the year’s key performance indicator results and compares them to goals established in the asset management plan as well as historical performance.

Dave Hallgren: I would definitely recommend it. It doesn’t need to be as in depth as ours, but it is good to have at least a simple plan laid out in advance. One of the struggles with underground infrastructure is that it is underground and therefore easy for people to forget about or underprioritize.

A plan helps spread the message in a consistent fashion, provides a goal to focus on, and helps everyone understand and remember the vision. At the Town of Cary, we are fortunate that everyone in our organization is already on board with the concept of asset management, but that is not always the case. An exercise like this can be valuable for municipalities that may need to convince their communities, staff, and elected officials of the necessity of an asset management program. The bottom line is that asset management has to work for your community, so you need a customized solution based on your particular challenges and goals. M Dave Hallgren is asset manager for the Town of Cary. He can be contacted at dave.hallgren@townofcary.org.

Joshua Dill: What is your advice for other municipalities that may want to bring together their asset management activities into an integrated plan?

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PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TOWN OF CARY.

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Reducing Maintenance Risk and Expenses Through SUEZ’s Asset Management Program

A worker works on pipe infrastructure.

F

PHOTO COURTESY OF SUEZ.

or small and medium-size municipalities and water utilities, the regular maintenance of assets like water tanks, metering systems, and wells may require significant expenses of time and money—especially when these assets break down earlier than expected. To address this problem, SUEZ North America has begun providing continuous maintenance services to utilities that cover the entire life cycle of an asset.

Agencies pay a steady yearly subscription for yearly maintenance plus 100 percent coverage of any unexpected emergency repairs.

In this interview, Jonathan Cato, SUEZ’s senior vice president of lines of business, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about how SUEZ’s asset management program can reduce municipalities’ risk and expenses.

Joshua Dill: Please us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

Jonathan Cato: I am an engineer by training. I started out in the industrial sector and the mineral processing industry, and after about 10 years, I moved over to

SUEZ Utility Services and our operations group, where I held a number of positions. Through my career, I have gone from project manager to business unit leader to vice president of operations. Now I manage all SUEZ’s lines of business, meaning the product offerings and service offerings we sell to municipalities throughout the United States.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about SUEZ’s asset management program.

Jonathan Cato: There are three divisions in SUEZ North America. There’s the Utility Division, which owns and operates assets around New Jersey, New York, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Then we have the Environmental Services Group, which does operations and management of municipalities’ water and wastewater collection systems. The group I am in is called Advanced Solutions. We provide water and wastewater services to municipalities. Advanced Solutions has over 600 employees nationwide and 20 delivery centers throughout the United States.

MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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A water storage tank is cleaned with chemicals.

Joshua Dill: What services does the Advanced Solutions department provide?

26 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

perspective. They no longer had to send people to climb the tanks or things like that. Overall, we provided peace of mind.

The risk of managing an asset was turned over to SUEZ. Our contracts are typically evergreen, meaning they automatically renew every year. SUEZ can only cancel due to nonpayment, but the customers can cancel whenever they want.

We started that program in the late 1980s and now have over 6,000 tanks in our long-term asset management program. We replicated the same program with water wells and now have over 400 wells in our asset management program. With wells, we go beyond just maintaining the asset; we maintain performance and capacity as well. We’re also expanding these services to filters, filter plants, and concrete tanks, and we are looking for other parts of water and wastewater systems to include as well.

We’re starting to see some growth in our other lines of business as well, including water meters. These are all advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) meters, which provide data wirelessly via radio frequencies from a home into the cloud and then to the customer’s billing system.

We’ve initiated an asset management program that covers the meters, transmitters, collectors, and the entire AMI system. We maintain that for 15 years, which is typically the lifespan of the meters and the AMI transmitters.

Within that period, we handle any problems with the meters or transmitters for the customer, we handle all the software upgrades, and we maintain the cellular backhaul communications to cover the data transfer. One of the challenges with AMI systems in the early days was that smaller and medium-size municipalities would implement them but not have budgeted for the software upgrades that might be released in year 5 or 8. Our services cover that. We

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SUEZ.

Jonathan Cato: In 1964, we began offering tank maintenance services. SUEZ Advanced Solutions started out as just a tank maintenance contractor. Tank renovation typically means painting a tank and making any necessary repairs. Steel tanks can last 100 years if properly maintained, and we found that we kept painting the same tanks and doing the same renovations for the same customers every 10–15 years. Some of our customers who were forced into a low-bid approach came to us and told us that they’d prefer to contract with us for the long term instead. In response, we came up with a subscriptionbased maintenance program. We renovate the tank; bring it up to all necessary standards established by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; the American Water Works Association (AWWA); and federal, state, and local ordinances; and then we maintain it regularly through a subscription-based program. As part of that program, all future renovations are covered with a lifetime warranty.

This was attractive to smaller customers for a couple of reasons. First, they didn’t have to worry about maintaining the asset. They would turn the maintenance of the asset over to us, and we would maintain it going forward. Second, they no longer had to budget for large capital expenses. With our subscription approach, it became a professional service with a flat annual fee. Moving that spending from capital expenses to operation expenses was significant. Third, the lifetime warranty meant that if the coatings failed in year 5 instead of year 15, the asset would be renovated with no argument.

Fourth, the fact that we did the asset management was a relief for some smaller municipalities from a health and safety

A maintenance worker scales the exterior of a water storage tank.

ADVERTISEMENT launched our AMI service 4 years ago, and we may have 50,000 meters under contract by the end of this year.

All these markets were fractured. Take the tank market: There was an engineer, a coatings manufacturer, a third-party inspector, and a contractor. We combine all that and assume all the risk of project maintenance and future asset management.

The same was true in the metering industry: There were metering distributors, meter companies, AMI companies like Sensus and Aclara, and installers. We took the same approach.

We call it “one throat to choke.” You don’t have to chase down the vendors or the installers, you just come to us.

Joshua Dill: When a client contracts with SUEZ through this subscription model, does SUEZ maintain the asset on a regular basis, or does it only come in when there’s a problem?

Jonathan Cato: Both. We certainly come in when there’s a problem. We rate problems by severity, and we take care of the most serious problems—like a water tank hatch that is open, allowing things to get in—within 24 hours. If a meter is not providing us any data, we’ll monitor it and visit it within a month. We monitor the specific capacity of water wells at least on a yearly basis.

In any case, even if there is no repair needed, we do an annual inspection of every asset and provide a condition assessment report. For tanks, we document the condition of the tank in each of the five AWWA categories—security, sanitary, coating, structure, and site—and make sure everything’s compliant. If something is wrong, we fix it to extend the life of the asset. We do the same thing with wells. We come out and treat the well with a carbon dioxide injection to create a disruption to free up the formation to let water begin flowing freely again, do an initial and a final pump test, and then draw up a condition assessment report, which explains how it is performing compared to its design capacity and how to improve its performance. On the metering side, we also issue monthly reports attesting that all the meters are active.

Joshua Dill: Who are your asset management clients?

Jonathan Cato: Right now, our clients are probably 99 percent in the municipal space. We do have some industrial customers as well as our legacy product lines with tanks, but our maintenance programs are most popular with municipalities. Most of our clients within that space are small to medium in size—municipalities with a population of 100,000 or fewer. We have found that the smaller the customer, the better our services fit their needs. Larger agencies or utilities have their own engineering or asset management departments, but smaller agencies may not have dedicated staff to check on the assets or do capital improvement plans. We can bring economies of scale to those smaller customers of the same type that are available to the larger municipalities. For example, the City of Atlanta can get a good deal buying meters because it buys several

hundred thousand of them at once. The City of Perry, Georgia, a city of 10,000 people, could not get the same deal, but when SUEZ steps in to procure materials, we can get those savings and pass them along to the customer.

Joshua Dill: Will a client contract with SUEZ just for one asset that they find particularly difficult to manage, or do they want you to manage all their assets?

Jonathan Cato: Once we start managing one asset, we typically are able to expand into other parts of the system.

Customers who have a good experience with one of our services, like the tank maintenance program, and have liked the transfer of risk, the guarantee of service, and the annual condition assessment are generally open to our other services as well. When we start talking to them about their filters, wells, or meters, it is an easier sale. They already understand the subscription-based concept, and they like that they can budget a set amount for asset management and not worry about spikes in capital expenses. All our current meter customers except one are also tank maintenance customers.

As we look at new offerings, we are trying to identify municipalities’ other pain points. One is water quality compliance. We have two in-tank technology offerings. Trihalomethane Removal Services addresses trihalomethanes, which are disinfection byproducts that form when disinfectants, such as chlorine, react with organic compounds present in the water. We use active mixing as well as trihalomethane removal systems inside the tanks to help maintain compliance with water quality standards. These services can be bundled with our tank asset management program, or they can be purchased individually.

Joshua Dill: What results do clients see from SUEZ’s asset management program, and how can the program save them money?

Jonathan Cato: We can show that our approach, over the 20- to 30-year life cycle of an asset, can save a significant amount of money compared to the standard run-to-failure approach. However, even if there were no distinction in life cycle cost, there is another benefit. The typical run-to-failure approach provides no coverage between the initial renovation and the next round of renovations 10 or 20 years down the line. Our program, by contrast, provides 100 percent coverage for emergency repairs. That extra coverage is valuable to customers and provides them with peace of mind. M

Jonathan Cato is Suez’s senior vice president of lines of business.

He can be contacted at jonathan.cato@suez.com.

MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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Managing Natural Assets Alongside Engineered Ones Columbia, was doing to recognize its natural assets as core infrastructure. The Town of Gibsons, the Smart Prosperity Institute, the David Suzuki Foundation, and my own firm, Brooke and Associates, also realized the national potential of Gibsons’s work. From this realization, MNAI was born in 2015, and I have been working there ever since.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about MNAI.

Natural assets like wetlands can provide services like water storage and purification.

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sset management is a familiar concept for most local governments and water utility providers, but when they hear the term, almost everyone thinks about wastewater treatment plants, buried pipeline, and pump stations.

The Municipal Natural Assets Initiative (MNAI), a Canadian nonprofit, is aiming to change that. MNAI’s core insight is that natural assets like wetlands, forests, and creeks provide tangible services for municipalities that are similar to those provided by engineered assets like retention ponds and culverts. By inventorying, analyzing, and maintaining their natural assets, local governments and utilities can make intelligent decisions about whether or not to build engineered assets and the wisdom of development that will interfere with these natural assets.

In this interview, MNAI Executive Director Roy Brooke speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about the concepts behind natural asset management and the results that communities have seen from putting it in practice.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

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PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT JONES.

Roy Brooke: I spent much of the 1990s working in Ottawa as a political advisor, including to Canada’s environment minister. Then, I worked for the United Nations for about 9 years, based primarily in Geneva, Switzerland, and later in Kigali, Rwanda, working at the confluence of humanitarian affairs and environmental and climate change issues. Around 2011, after our child was born, we moved back to Canada.

I became director of sustainability for the City of Victoria, British Columbia. Later, as a consultant, I became aware of the pioneering work that the Town of Gibsons, British

Roy Brooke: The core idea of MNAI’s work is that a natural asset, such as a forest, green space, wetland, or riparian area, can provide many of the same services that local governments would otherwise need to provide via an engineered asset.

For example, a wetland can store water, purify water, and reduce downstream flooding in much the same way that engineered culverts and retention ponds could. However, most local governments, to the extent that they are thinking about natural assets at all, are thinking about them from a fairly narrow perspective: as social, recreational, cultural, or green amenities. All those aspects are important, but in seeing natural assets in that narrow manner, governments are failing to consider other core services for which they could be understanding, measuring, and managing their natural assets.

Stated differently, there’s a gap between the potential of local natural assets and the way that most local governments are contemplating or conceptualizing them.

So, there is a gap, and it matters for a number of reasons.

In the United States and Canada, there are challenges related to aging and deteriorating infrastructure and delayed maintenance. Issues like climate change are making the situation considerably worse in many communities. What used to be a 100-year storm event may now happen several times in the same winter. Local governments need a different way to conceptualize and to deliver services.

We’re finding that standard modern structured asset management processes provide a platform for thinking about natural asset management. That is because asset management, in its modern incarnation, which is derived from International Organization for Standardization standards, does not ask whether an agency needs a green asset or a grey asset.

Instead, it asks what service the agency is trying to deliver sustainably, cost effectively, and reliably. To the extent that it can be demonstrated that natural assets provide a service reliably and cost effectively, they have a place within that asset management system, just like any engineered asset.

The Town of Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, north of Vancouver, is a small community of about 4,000 people. It was one of the first local governments to stitch together the idea of modern asset management and ecosystem services. The members of the local government kind of backed

ADVERTISEMENT into it. They were looking at all the town’s engineered assets and doing inventories, condition assessments, and operations and maintenance plans. When they got to the end of the process, they realized they’d ignored the aquifer, the forest, and the forest shore, which provide the town with clean drinking water, stormwater management, and protection from winter storms and sea level rise, respectively. This was a moment of insight that led to the first asset management policy in North America to put engineered and natural assets on the same footing in a local government context. This led to a slew of other changes, including changes to subdivision bylaws and the charges that developers are charged for new developments and changes in how natural assets are managed and accounted for.

The Town of Gibsons, the Smart Prosperity Institute, the David Suzuki Foundation, and my own firm, Brooke and Associates got together in late 2015 with a range of stakeholders in Vancouver to discuss whether this work was replicable and could be scaled. Our answer was yes. That led to the birth of MNAI, which incorporated a year ago as a nonprofit.

MNAI does work at two levels. One is direct work with local governments to help them identify, measure, model, and manage their natural assets using MNAI’s methodology, which is based on standard asset management practice and uses a growing suite of tools. The other is enabling work—for example, identifying funding sources for local governments and working with individual professions such as planners to help them understand the opportunities for natural asset management in their work.

change scenarios in which there are more frequent and intense rain storms in winter and potentially drought in summer?

Based on the results, we can develop different implementation options required to maintain the desired level of service.

The results that we’re getting are really interesting. After we launched MNAI, our first national cohort was made up of five communities, three in British Columbia and two in the province of Ontario. One of the latter is the Town of Oakville, which is in a fully built-out, older urban area. Winter storms are becoming more frequent and intense, and at the same time, people are pulling out their smaller bungalows and putting in larger McMansions, reducing the amount of permeable surface.

That’s putting pressure on the existing stormwater management system, which is not engineered and is largely made up of remnant streams and grassy ditches. There is also pressure from homeowners to culvert the streams and keep them out of sight. However, we calculated that to replace even a 240-meter (790-foot) stretch of this fairly unexciting-looking ditch via an engineered means would cost C$1.2 million (US$904,000).

Once you have that information, it becomes hard to ignore.

It doesn’t force you to any one particular conclusion, but it is information that the community can leverage in thinking about how it wants to manage stormwater in the future.

Joshua Dill: How is MNAI funded?

Roy Brooke: Our funding comes from a wide range of sources. When we work with local governments, they pay part of the costs of the services they receive from us. The remainder is funded by a diverse set of donors, including provincial governments, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, Natural Resources Canada, and the Real Estate Foundation of British Columbia.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TOWN OF OAKVILLE.

Joshua Dill: How do you identify a discrete natural asset in a natural environment where everything is interconnected?

Roy Brooke: We can conceptualize of a natural asset in one of a couple of ways. We can start with a natural asset itself—for example, a green space, a wetland, or a riparian area—and identify its biophysical attributes—for example, how much water a wetland stores. Based on that, we can calculate the services that it could provide. For example, if we know the storage capacity of a wetland and the rate at which it lets water disperse, we can calculate its effects on downstream peak flows and flooding. We can also, using a replacement cost method, calculate what it would cost to provide those services by other means. We also model scenarios: What would happen if everyone near the asset built as of right and reduced its total area? What would happen in various climate

This stream in Oakville, Ontario, provides the town with water conveyance services, just like an engineered asset.

Joshua Dill: Are municipal natural assets generally things that are on public land, or are features on private land also considered?

Roy Brooke: It’s almost always both. Local governments sometimes own the land that provides the service, but in many cases, the natural assets are also found in areas owned by others or within the jurisdiction of others. Of course, the natural assets themselves don’t care about jurisdictional issues. In the case of Oakville, many of those grassy ditches are on private land.

But the information provided about them creates at least the basis for a discussion related to stormwater utilities, covenants, MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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ADVERTISEMENT easements, and other mechanisms to ensure that private actions don’t create an undue public cost. In Gibsons, part of the forest is owned not by the town but by the province of British Columbia.

Nevertheless, the province gives the town permission to go in and undertake management work on land that they don’t own.

On the face of it, it seems ridiculous to do work on land you don’t own, but the fact is that they are deriving services from that land. If they didn’t do it, they’d be racking up far larger expenses.

Joshua Dill: What does natural asset management look like in practice? Are the assets being inventoried and recorded in a computer system?

Roy Brooke: We follow a standard asset management methodology that has been adapted for use with natural assets. We have developed a suite of tools that can be configured for use in different local government settings.

First, there’s typically a scoping discussion with the local government to understand what services it is concerned with, or conversely which natural assets are of interest. Then there is normally a process of inventory. We’re not necessarily inventorying all natural assets in an area right now, as this is all fairly new work. We typically start at subwatershed levels, though one of our projects in British Columbia has moved to an entire-watershed scale. We inventory the assets of concern; do condition assessments; and then, based on our understanding of the services they provide, work to model the scenarios that are of interest to the local government.

What happens if we build on half the wetland or on none of the wetland? What happens if we restore it or acquire more wetland or forests? Then we work with them to create different management options to help them secure the desired service-level cost effectively and reliably.

Joshua Dill: What have the results of natural asset management been?

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Joshua Dill: Is MNAI active in the United States?

Roy Brooke: Only peripherally, but there is enormous opportunity. We have spoken to one major U.S. city that is doing a lot in the stormwater management area but has not really knitted it together with asset management. This is an area in which much more could be said and done. Both sides of the border benefit from many of the same assets. An obvious example of this is the Great Lakes and the surrounding area.

Joshua Dill: What is your vision for the future of municipal natural asset management?

Roy Brooke: Our mission is to make municipal natural asset management a mainstream practice across Canada and to inspire action beyond. Whatever your jurisdiction, natural assets are providing services from which local governments are benefiting. Understanding, measuring, and managing natural assets can benefit local governments with everything from risk liability to service delivery. M

Roy Brooke is executive director of MNAI. He can be contacted at royb@mnai.ca.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MNAI.

Roy Brooke: The Town of Gibsons knew that a lot of development was going to occur in the upper town, and it knew it had to manage storm water somehow. It did a side-by-side comparison of an engineered option and a natural option. The engineered option consisted of 4 kilometers (2½ miles) of front line and some engineered retention ponds. That clocked in at around C$4 million (US$3 million). If you’re New York City, that’s probably a rounding error, but in a small community, which the bulk of North American local governments are, it’s a ton of money. The natural option was to do some ongoing measurement, maintenance, and monitoring in the forested area, for example dredging out channels every few years. That was estimated at C$800,000 (US$603,000), and moreover, it was not a capital expenditure. It was something the town could pay out over time. It didn’t need to be borrowed all in one shot.

In the district of West Vancouver, we began fairly narrowly by looking at the economics of daylighting, or uncovering, streams that had been culverted. That work unleashed other

considerations. Now, the district of West Vancouver has completed or is completing an inventory of all its natural assets and evaluating them. The median home price is something like C$2.8 million (US$2.1 million), and there’s an amazing amount of pressure and impetus to build. If you build without understanding the value of the natural assets, they have an implied value of $0. That means that the natural asset is going to lose every single time. An analysis of the value of the community’s natural assets doesn’t mean that it is going to cease to develop, but it does mean that it now has a basis for understanding the services it would lose in a variety of different development scenarios and the value of those services.

In all the cases that we have looked at, the natural assets have a substantial value. We looked at two subwatersheds in the Credit Valley watershed west of Toronto. In this 1,000-square-kilometer (386-square-mile) area, the wetlands we looked at have a service value of about C$700 million (US$527 million), rising to about C$765 million (US$576 million) in climate change scenarios.

That brings us to our second finding, which is that natural assets typically increase in value over time. That is because they’re resilient and adaptable. Unlike an engineered asset, which doesn’t grow—if your pipe is 12 inches, that’s how big it is—natural assets are inherently adaptable. Our third finding was that in all cases, the natural asset met or exceeded the provincial standards that we were looking at, namely, surface water quality standards and the ability to manage a 100-year storm event.

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Irrigation Innovation on Southern Utah University’s Campus

By Beth Fillerup

Southern Utah University’s new filter system.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF TIGER FUNK AND BETH FILLERUP.

S

outhern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah, requires a lot of water to care for its campus. On its 75 acres of mostly NCAA playing fields, 4 man-hours of labor were required every day just to maintain the secondary irrigation system’s filtering system.

Tiger Funk, the university’s assistant vice president for facilities management, says the constant clearing of filters for the secondary watering system, which is tied into Cedar City’s secondary irrigation water system line, was taking a toll. “We had to check the filters every 8 hours, which, over a season, adds up.” And it wasn’t just the frequency—because the irrigation and filter components were housed underground for aesthetic reasons, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration required two employees to be present every time a filter needed to be cleaned. “It was just getting to be too much,” Mr. Funk admitted. “Our teams are required to have recovery gear in place, use a spotter, and test the air every time they enter the vaults.” Man-hours were adding up.

The university wanted a change. In order to save overtime and money, they hired Watson Engineering of Cedar City, Utah, to help find a solution. The objective? A system that required once-a-day service instead of the exhausting threetimes-a-day service the system then required.

Mr. Funk had heard about a new filter that showed great promise for use with secondary water systems containing

a lot of debris. It turns out that NCAA fields are not only susceptible to debris, but that they are finicky about the total dissolved solids and hardness of the water that is used to water them, too. Tim Watson, principal of Watson Engineering, asked the right questions to help the university choose the filtering system. “There was a lot of research to be done, but Watson helped us find a solution,” says Mr. Funk. “The new system takes out most of the debris for us, which saves us a lot of time, and ultimately money.”

A second benefit? This system works seamlessly with the campus’s smart irrigation system. Just because the campus is large and uses a lot of water doesn’t mean it is wasteful. “We live in a desert and water conservation is a big deal. This system . . . looks at wind speed, relative humidity, and inches of rain in the last 30 days. We use a lot of water, but this system allows us to be as efficient as possible. We use a lot less [water] than we would otherwise.”

Watson Engineering managed all the civil engineering and helped coordinate the project with Cedar City. The university budgeted $75,000 in 2017 to invest in the new system, and once the solution was engineered, Mr. Funk and his men got to work. The new filters took about 80 days to install, but the outcome has been life changing for the maintenance workers.

When Mr. Funk recently visited with the groundskeeping team to ask whether their objectives had been met, the response was overwhelmingly positive. The staff is now able to sleep through the night, as midnight trips to campus for two have been eliminated. Safety has increased because the new above-ground system virtually eliminates vault entries— and there’s no price that can be put on that.

Mr. Funk sees this system as a solution that could be adopted by others. “A lot of people could benefit from this innovation,” he says, “even if it’s not this specific filter.

Large campuses, businesses, school districts, parks, and even homeowners—anyone or anywhere that uses secondary water for their irrigation needs. I don’t think [it’s a] unique situation at all. So many grounds crews are out at night because that’s when watering is required, and if there’s maintenance involved for secondary irrigation, this could save companies a lot of headaches.” M Beth Fillerup is a marketing consulting at Marketlink. She can be reached at

beth@marketlinkaec.com.

MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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THE INNOVATORS

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Compatible with mobile devices, Assura’s software can be used anywhere.

How Assura’s Configurable Asset-Management Platform Can Help Water Utilities

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Hamish Howard: Most people’s asset management starts and ends with their accounting system. They record their assets when they purchase them, the assets depreciate, and eventually either their book value is zero or they are sold.

However, every asset has a life cycle, and during that life cycle, it may need to be audited, repaired, or serviced. There may be legislative requirements relating to health and safety.

If an organization doesn’t really have a process other than recording an asset in a book, log, or Excel spreadsheet, things often get forgotten or overlooked, even though the asset might be quite valuable, both in dollar terms and in terms of the potential effects of failure.

Kris Polly: Please tell us about Assura Software.

Kris Polly: How can Assura’s software help solve that problem?

Hamish Howard: Assura Software is a New Zealand–based software company. I’m the managing director, a position that would be equivalent to chief executive officer in the United States. I run the business, and I’m also one of the owners.

We’ve got solutions for a number of different business problems from complaints to management, health and safety, and asset management. They’re all built on a workflow platform. It’s a highly configurable solution. We don’t turn up and dictate how you should manage assets or how you should handle complaints or any other business process. Instead, we ask you how you do it at the moment and then work with you on how technology might help improve the process. Then when we put the Lego pieces of our software together to achieve that solution.

Hamish Howard: Since the solutions are built on a workflow platform, once the asset is registered in the system, life cycles can be set up. That ensures that a person or group within the business is always responsible for that asset and the maintenance tasks that need to happen during its life cycle.

When they perform the tasks and update the record, that triggers the next cycle so that it happens again in the future.

If those things aren’t done in time, they are escalated within the system to the person’s manager. Managers don’t have to deal with every asset; they just see the things that aren’t getting done. The software also helps increase efficiency.

A water utility has assets spread out geographically. The software displays all the things that might be due to be performed in a particular area in the next week. You can do them all when you’re in the area rather been coming back multiple times.

Kris Polly: What are the main asset management problems that your clients are trying to solve?

34 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ASSURA SOFTWARE.

ssura Software is a Christchurch, New Zealand–based technology company that builds highly configurable asset- and case-management solutions. Its products are used by several large irrigation schemes and businesses to manage their assets and record health and safety risks and hazards. Using Assura’s platform in the office on a computer or in the field on a mobile phone app, employees can keep track of what tasks need to be done and the current status of their assets.

In this interview, Assura Managing Director Hamish Howard speaks with Municipal Water Leader Editor-in-Chief Kris Polly about Assura’s platform and how it stands to benefit municipal water utilities.

THE INNOVATORS

ADVERTISEMENT Kris Polly Your software is a platform that can be accessed both in the office and in the field, correct?

Hamish Howard: Correct. The platform is available in a browser and there’s also a mobile app, which is configurable with the web application. You can take photos, write notes, or see a list of jobs you have to perform on your phone in the field. It also works without a connection or offline.

Kris Polly: Who are some of Assura’s existing asset management clients?

Hamish Howard: We work with a few irrigation schemes in New Zealand, which are similar to U.S. irrigation districts, including Mayfield Hinds Valetta (MHV) Water and Ashburton Lyndhurst. Their assets include pumps, ponds, pipes, and vehicles. We work with a business in New Zealand called Ryman Health Care, which builds age-care facilities, big units for retirees to live in. They use our platform for managing and locating their tools, including trucks, skill saws, and cranes, and for making sure that those assets are tested and tagged from a health and safety point of view.

Kris Polly: How big are those companies?

Hamish Howard: MHV Water provides water to users across about 100,000 acres, while Ryman has about 5,000 workers on construction sites.

Kris Polly: Do you know how many assets these companies are putting into your software?

Hamish Howard: Not precisely, but the number is certainly well into the hundreds. The system can handle up to hundreds of thousands of assets; there’s really no limit. The assets can also be put into a child-parent relationship. For example, a pump might be made up of different components, each of which has its own maintenance schedule.

Kris Polly: Would you tell us about your experience working in the U.S. market?

Hamish Howard: I was in the United States in July for a Microsoft conference. My aim was twofold: I wanted to learn about where Microsoft was going, but I also wanted to start exploring the U.S. market for the company. We’re in the early stages of discussions with a few irrigation districts about their asset management needs. These are the early days, but there is certainly good interest so far, and we’re excited to learn from them and work with them.

Kris Polly: What could Assura’s asset management software offer to municipal water districts and utilities?

Assura's software being used in the field on a mobile device.

from paper and spreadsheets, wants to improve the visibility and efficiency of its system, and wants to attain the certainty that the right maintenance activities are being done by the right people at the right time, we can help. One of the key characteristics of our platform is that it is configurable. I use the world configurable instead of customizable deliberately. We don’t necessarily write code; our platform can be configured in a low code/no code manner. We teach people how to do that themselves. If there is additional information people want to capture or different processes they want to put in place, they can do it themselves, or we’ll happily do it for them. We don’t turn up and tell people how they should do asset management. We turn up and say, “How would you like to do asset management?”

We can provide a starting point and the client can tell us how they want it changed to reflect their work.

Kris Polly: So you help your clients set up the software and configure it for their companies?

Hamish Howard: Absolutely.

Kris Polly What would be the best way for a municipal water district to contact Assura if it is interested in working with you?

Hamish Howard: They can have a look at our website and then contact me directly at hamish.howard@assurasoftware.com. I’m planning a trip to the United States, and I’d really appreciate the opportunity to have conversations, learn more, and see if we can add value and provide a good solution for their business. M

Hamish Howard is managing director of Assura Software. For more about Assura, visit www.assurasoftware.com.

Hamish Howard: If a district or agency is trying to get away MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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WATER LAW

Preserving Federalism in Water Law

By Robert S. Lynch conceived of as containing water, let alone containing it for any period of time. In other words, Arizona has been prepared since the 1970s to examine whether the section 402 permit program Arizona is now running needs to be expanded. With the federal definition clarified, only a simple legislative addition to the state law would be required to do so.

If the WOTUS rule creates what some would consider a regulatory gap, I am quite confident that the Arizona legislature and ADEQ can examine what has happened and decide whether Arizona’s program needs to be expanded.

I am likewise confident that the other states are equally Watson Lake in Prescott, Arizona. prepared to examine this issue and decide whether a change in the definition of veryone involved in western water is keenly aware of WOTUS at the federal level requires some expansion of the controversy surrounding clarifying the definition their point-source-discharge permit programs or dredgeof Waters of the United States (WOTUS) in the and-fill permit programs.

Clean Water Act regulations. The U.S. Environmental The attacks on this process are nothing more than Protection Agency (EPA) has received over 13,000 attacks on the competency of the states. The law was comments on its proposal to do so. Many are attacks on passed to create a cooperative relationship between the the proposal, which, in my view, have to be considered federal government and the states. The delegation of attacks on the concept of federalism. Those who oppose the permit authority is the key to that relationship and has, clarification process the EPA is undertaking are essentially saying that the states are incompetent or unwilling to protect over the years, positioned the states to adequately address water quality issues under the act and its counterpart state their citizens and the quality of the water they receive and legislation. Veiled attacks on the competency or willingness use. It is my understanding that some 49 states have taken of the states to shoulder additional responsibility where delegation of the point-source-discharge permit program necessary are unjust in light of the track record of this law’s under section 402 of the Clean Water Act and a small number of states have taken delegation of the dredge and fill implementation and should be ignored.

In short, Arizona can step up to the plate if necessary to permit program under section 404 of the Clean Water Act. add to its point-source-discharge program in a way that is To the best of my knowledge, delegation of these programs supported by evidence. There is no reason to believe that the as contemplated by Congress has been widely accepted and other states would ignore that responsibility, either. The EPA successfully implemented by the states. should stay the course and keep this exercise in cooperative If clarity is brought to the definition of WOTUS in EPA federalism on track. M regulations and results in some watercourses, impoundments, or other bodies of water not being federally jurisdictional, I am quite confident that the legislature in Arizona and our state Robert S. Lynch is an attorney practicing Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) can examine in Arizona. He can be contacted at those changes and decide whether to propose the expansion rslynch@rslynchaty.com or at of our state permit program to cover these water bodies.

(602) 228-6355.

Arizona’s definition of waters of the state has, since the 1970s, covered virtually everything in the state that could possibly be

E

PHOTOS COURTESY OF KEVIN DOOLEY AND ROBERT LYNCH.

36 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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Upcoming Events November 4–8 USCID’s 2019 Conference, USCID, Reno, NV November 6–8 88th Annual Conference, NWRA, Houston, TX December 2 Annual Agribusiness Roundtable, Arizona BWC, Tempe, AZ December 4–6 Annual Conference, Washington State Water Resource, Spokane, WA December 11–13 Annual Conference, CRWUA, Las Vegas, NV December 13–14 2019 Winter Meeting, Western Governors Association, Las Vegas, NV January 8–10 67th Annual Meeting, Four States Irrigation Council, Fort Collins, CO January 12–15 Winter Conference, Groundwater Management Districts Association, Fort Lauderdale, FL January 16 Idaho Irrigation Equipment Show & Conference, Burley, ID January 20–23 83rd Annual Convention, Idaho Water Users Association, Boise, ID January 25–31 Las Vegas to Phoenix Tour, Irrigation Leader January 29–30 Operations and Management Training Workshop, Irrigation Leader, Phoenix, AZ

Past issues of Municipal Water Leader are archived at municipalwaterleader.com /MuniWaterLeader

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