Municipal Water Leader Nov/Dec 2021

Volume 8 Issue 10

November/December 2021

General Manager Adel Hagekhalil: Planning the Future of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California

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General Manager Adel Hagekhalil: Planning the Future of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California

Contents

November/December 2021 Volume 8, Issue 10 5 A New Head for MWD

By Kris Polly 6 General

Manager Adel Hagekhalil: Planning the Future of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California 14 H ow Los Angeles County Public Works Passed Its Ambitious Measure W Water Quality Program

18 A llen Davidson: Modernizing to Conserve Water at Rowland Water District 22 H ow Moleaer’s Nano-Scale Aeration System Makes Wastewater Treatment More Efficient 30 H ow Masuen Consulting Saves Its Clients Money

by Reducing Water Use 39 JOB LISTINGS

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

an American company established in 2009.

STAFF: Kris Polly, Editor-in-Chief Joshua Dill, Managing Editor Jeff Kightlinger, Contributing Editor Elaine Robbins, Copyeditor Tyler Young, Writer Stephanie Biddle, Graphic Designer Eliza Moreno, Web Designer Caroline Polly, Production Assistant and Social Media Coordinator Tom Wacker, Advertising Coordinator Cassandra Leonard, Staff Assistant Milo Schmitt, Media Intern SUBMISSIONS: Municipal Water Leader welcomes manuscript, photography, and art submissions; the right to edit or deny publishing submissions is reserved. Submissions are returned only upon request. For more information, please contact our office at (202) 698-0690 or municipal.water.leader@waterstrategies.com.

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

CIRCULATION: Municipal Water Leader is distributed to all drinking water and wastewater entities with annual budgets or sales of $10 million per year or greater as well as to members of Congress and committee staff and advertising sponsors. For address corrections or additions, or if you would prefer to receive Municipal Water Leader in electronic form, please contact us at admin@waterstrategies.com.

@MuniWaterLeader

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 | November/December 2021

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COVER PHOTO:

Adel Hagekhalil, General Manager and CEO, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF METROPOLITAN.

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

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

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A New Head for MWD

T

he Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides water to 19 million people across 6 counties, has a new general manager and CEO, Adel Hagekhalil. We are pleased to have the opportunity to introduce him to our readership in this issue of Municipal Water Leader. In this month’s cover story, Mr. Hagekhalil tells us about Metropolitan’s efforts to respond to drought, increase local water supplies, build infrastructure, and introduce the One Water philosophy of integrated water management.

We also feature a conversation with another top Southern California executive, Mark Pestrella, the director of Los Angeles County Public Works, on his agency’s Safe, Clean Water Program, which aims to optimize local storm water for water supply and to improve the quality of L.A. County’s surface water.

Rowland Water District, based in Rowland Heights in Los Angeles County, is doing its part to improve water use efficiency with its advanced metering infrastructure program.

We speak with Allen Davidson, the district's field operations supervisor, about the new initiative.

Moleaer has created a novel and highly effective aeration system that injects water with billions of tiny air bubbles,

By Kris Polly thousands of times smaller than a grain of salt. We speak with Moleaer CEO Nick Dyner about the attractions of the company’s technology for wastewater treatment and other municipal applications.

Masuen Consulting, a Washington State–based outdoor water management, system design, and consulting firm, is able to reduce the water use of many of its clients by up to 50 percent, simply through better management practices. In our interview, Masuen President Mitchel Andrew Walker explains how.

We applaud leaders like Adel Hagekhalil, who are aggressively pursuing water supply solutions in Southern California and throughout the country. I hope the ambitious projects and new technology highlighted in this issue inspire you in your own work. M Kris Polly is the editor-in-chief of Municipal Water Leader magazine and the president and CEO of Water Strategies LLC, a government relations firm he began in February 2009 for the purpose of representing and guiding water, power, and agricultural entities in their dealings with Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other federal government agencies. He can be contacted at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

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November/December 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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General Manager Adel Hagekhalil: Planning the Future of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California water supply, reuse, conservation, storm water management, and wastewater facilities planning.

In 2018, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti asked me to lead the city’s Bureau of Streets Services, where I worked toward the goal of reforming the department and boosting morale, but most importantly, integrating a multibenefit climate adaptation program that provides solutions to enhance the quality of life for local communities.

I love my career. I tell people I’m an engineer, but I’m also a people person, and I think good communication is important. I’m all about collaboration. All my life, I have worked really hard to integrate innovation into what we do, to build consensus, and to enhance stakeholder engagement.

I am committed to providing excellent service to our member agencies and everyone in our service area. I’m proud to be able to share my skills and my knowledge with the industry at this crucial time and to move us forward to address the next 100 years of Metropolitan’s future.

Diamond Valley Lake, located near Hemet in southwestern Riverside County.

A

del Hagekhalil is the new general manager and CEO of the

Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the regional wholesaler that delivers water to 26 public member agencies serving 19 million people in 6 Southland counties. The leadership of an agency as large and significant as Metropolitan brings many challenges as well as opportunities to improve the quality of life of millions. In this interview, Mr. Hagekhalil tells us about Metropolitan’s efforts to ensure water reliability, integrated water management, and affordability for its 5,200 square-mile service area.

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

6 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2021

Adel Hagekhalil: Metropolitan was formed in 1928 as a collaborative of cities with a purpose to bring people and agencies together to bring water to Southern California—originally by building the vast infrastructure that is the 242‑mile Colorado River Aqueduct. In the 1950s, recognizing the need for additional supplies to meet growing postwar demands, Metropolitan signed on to contract for water from Northern California via the State Water Project (SWP). Over the years, our agency has grown and adapted to become the region’s water planner, ensuring a reliable water supply through conservation and local resource programs and continuing to invest in our imported water systems. Today, we serve 26 member agencies, which in turn deliver water to 19 million residents in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Ventura Counties.

I am really proud to work at an organization that has helped make the region the thriving place it is today. We continue to pursue that mission for the communities we serve. We have employees working in facilities spanning our 5,200-square-mile Southern California service area, all the way to Lake Havasu on the Arizona-California border. Our system includes 5 water treatment plants, 830 miles of pipelines, and about 400 service connections with our member agencies. We have a great team of municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF METROPOLITAN.

Adel Hagekhalil: I have a passion for water and over 32 years of diverse experience in the industry, working on initiatives that include integrated water planning. I also have worked for many years to elevate water awareness and have led many programs on green infrastructure, One Water initiatives, and storm water programs across our region and at the state and national levels. I spent 10 years as the assistant general manager of Los Angeles’s Bureau of Sanitation, where I led the city’s wastewater collection system, storm water and watershed protection program, advance planning, and facilities. I also helped develop the city’s 2040 One Water L.A. plan, a regional watershed approach to integrating

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us about Metropolitan’s history and describe its mission and service area?

ADVERTISEMENT innovators—people who think outside the box. We are anchored by our collaboration with each member agency, and we leverage our resources to deliver safe, reliable water to the region.

Municipal Water Leader: What is your vision for Metropolitan’s future? How will you address challenges from climate change and future droughts?

Adel Hagekhalil: I believe our efforts over our nearly 100‑year history have served us well, but we are now seeing a change in the climate, resulting in more frequent dry, hot periods. Our playbook in the past has been to rely on the snowpack of the Rockies and the Sierra to slowly melt and fill our reservoirs and canals. That has completely changed with climate change.

This year, we had 80–90 percent of our normal snowpack, but the runoff that made it into our reservoirs was 30–35 percent of normal. That tells us that things are changing. I believe that what has worked throughout our history is not going to sustain us for the next century.

Metropolitan’s job is to adapt to this new normal to create a resilient future water supply that is not affected by the changing climate. This is where I feel my experience in climate adaptation and integrated planning can help.

I’m going to work hard on a One Water approach that brings people together, captures more water locally, uses our groundwater and surface reservoirs, captures our storm water, and recycles our wastewater. Our goal is to create a future in which when people turn the faucet on, no matter what’s going on with the climate, they have water at an affordable cost. We need to develop a fourth aqueduct that is not a physical pipeline, but a combination of local resources and conservation that creates a new, sustainable water supply for Southern California. We need to ensure that we are saving and reusing every drop of water we have.

Municipal Water Leader: In the more immediate term, what is Metropolitan doing to help ensure water reliability for the region as it faces a historic drought?

Adel Hagekhalil: The good news is that Metropolitan, our board leadership, and our 26 member public agencies have done amazing work to increase our local water supplies.

About 50 percent of the water we use in our region is locally sourced. Further, residents in Southern California have really listened to the call for ongoing water conservation. The amount of water we use today is the same we were using 30 years ago, despite a growing population, and that’s really helping us manage our future.

Infrastructure investments we’ve made over the years are also helping us remain resilient as we face a historic drought and other challenges related to climate change. One example of Metropolitan’s forward thinking is our Diamond Valley Lake reservoir, located near Hemet in southwestern Riverside County, which began operating in 2000. Right now, the municipalwaterleader.com

A native plant garden at the Weymouth Water Treatment Plant in La Verne, California.

water in that lake is a backstop for us as we confront the shrinking of the water supplies in our Northern California and Colorado River sources. Diamond Valley Lake was a $2 billion project; that is the kind of investment we need.

Metropolitan had 3.2 million acre-feet of water stored at the beginning of 2021. We’re going to draw on that by the end of the year and are projecting to use about 700,000 acrefeet to help mitigate the current drought.

Every drop of water that we save today is water that we can store and make available for use in the future. For this reason, our board voted to declare a water supply alert to send a signal to our region that we need more conservation.

Residents have done a great job lowering water use, but we need to look for new ways to build on that progress to get through this drought. Metropolitan continues to explore new programs and opportunities to support those efforts.

We also are exploring ways of ensuring that every member agency we serve has a reliable supply of water, particularly those that might not have access to diverse water sources, which is concerning during times of drought. We have the opportunity to work together to meet the needs of these agencies. For example, the City of Los Angeles, which typically is served by water from the SWP, is taking increased amounts of Colorado River water instead to make more SWP water available for the agencies that rely on it. That partnership and collaboration is what Metropolitan is all about.

For me, the focus right now is planning ahead for the possible scenarios that could pose risks to our water supplies and mitigating those risks. For example, even if we get rain next year and the year after, our changing climate will require us to think differently and to take action now to address those challenges. I see our job as reducing our water use; building more connectivity; creating new, reliable sources of water in our region; and creating more storage, especially in our groundwater basins.

November/December 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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Staff analyze water quality samples at the Regional Recycled Water Advanced Purification Center, a partnership between Metropolitan and the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County.

Municipal Water Leader: What actions is Metropolitan taking to increase local water supplies?

Adel Hagekhalil: Metropolitan has been investing in local water supplies for the last three decades by incentivizing our member agencies to build local projects. Now we are embarking on our own Regional Recycled Water Program.

It is a partnership with the L.A. County Sanitation Districts that would purify wastewater from the county’s Joint Water Pollution Control Plant in Carson, allowing us to reuse water that is currently being sent to the ocean and create a sustainable, drought-proof water supply for hundreds of thousands of families in Southern California. We are currently operating a demonstration facility that could become one of the nation’s largest advanced water treatment facilities.

I believe that every drop of water in Southern California needs to be recycled. It will really be a game changer. That’s the future, and we need to continue working together regionally under the Metropolitan umbrella.

Municipal Water Leader: What are your thoughts regarding the historic drought on the Colorado River and the expected reductions of water deliveries from Lake Mead?

8 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2021

Municipal Water Leader: What does the State of California need to do to make SWP supplies more reliable, and how is Metropolitan supporting those efforts?

Adel Hagekhalil: We need to reduce the SWP’s vulnerability to earthquakes and to seawater intrusion. Together with the other SWP contractors, we are working hard to protect our Northern California water supplies. I support modernizing our conveyance systems to ensure that they are more resilient. At the same time, there is a lot of tension between environmental, urban, and agricultural water users. I believe that we can come together to find a balance and decide how much water should stay in the Sacramento–San Joaquin municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF METROPOLITAN.

Adel Hagekhalil: The situation that we are all facing in the Colorado River basin is serious. By working with our partners on the river to add water to Lake Mead through various conservation and supply investments, we’ve been successful in delaying a shortage until this year. However, beginning next year, the federal shortage declaration in Lake Mead will affect Nevada and Arizona. Although California

does not face immediate effects, we expect to in the coming years as conditions worsen. This situation is a wake-up call for us to accelerate our progress toward our goal of developing more local supplies and to push our region to conserve even more. Our partnerships with our agricultural partners and the tribes and states that rely on the Colorado River will be more important than ever.

We are beginning negotiations on a new set of guidelines to promote the sustainability of the Colorado River. All of us need to work together to invest across our region in water recycling, storage, and new ways of conserving water in agriculture. I’m optimistic about that.

We also need Sacramento and Washington, DC, to invest in us. Reliability requires money, and we need to invest in our water systems if we are going to be able to ensure clean, safe, and affordable water resources for communities throughout the Southwest and in California.

ADVERTISEMENT Delta and how much water can be supplied for other uses.

I think the state should invest in protecting the delta, and restoring the environment and the fish habitat is an important part of that. I’m optimistic, because the current administration is working with the water contractors, the environmental community, and nongovernmental organizations to create a sustainable and reliable delta. I think we can do it together, but the only way is to make the tent bigger and bring everybody in.

In Southern California, we’re going to make a difference by investing in local water supplies and storage along the SWP and upstream of the delta so that we can capture and store more water from Northern California during wet years for use in drier years. All these things have to come together to ensure the reliability of these supplies, and we all have to be at the table to create balance.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us more about the meaning of the One Water approach?

Adel Hagekhalil: One Water refers to breaking down silos; engaging stakeholders; and developing an integrated, diversified water portfolio for everyone that generates multiple benefits. It’s good for the future of the economy and good for our water resiliency. It also saves money, because we’re leveraging resources rather than planning independently.

One Water is an effort that I led in Los Angeles for about 15 years before it became a national effort supported by the U.S. Water Alliance and other organizations. It means bringing together recycled water, potable water, storm water, and wastewater and viewing them all as one system. If you can bring the supply and the demand into balance, you can meet the needs of the future.

Municipal Water Leader: What are you doing internally to ensure that Metropolitan continues to be a strong leader in the water sector for the next generation?

Adel Hagekhalil: Since our formation, Metropolitan has been a leader and has brought people together. Now, we have a Mulholland moment in which we need to bring people together again in the face of climate change. Metropolitan must once again demonstrate leadership in this effort.

It’s not about what’s in it for Metropolitan, an individual member agency, or an individual person. We need to think about our community as a whole, and Metropolitan should lead the way with integration, innovation, and inclusion.

I believe strongly in our ability to reach a resilient water future. I’ve seen the young professionals across our region with an interest in water management, and I’ll tell you, we’re in good hands.

I believe our One Water Southern California planning effort will create something that makes people in the future look back and say, “Those guys in 2021–2022 were municipalwaterleader.com

visionaries who were ahead of the game and were able to provide us a sustainable water future.”

Municipal Water Leader: You have a collective approach to your leadership. How do you go about bringing together agencies and individuals that have different ideas and are sometimes in conflict?

Adel Hagekhalil: I believe in collaboration. This involves trusting each other, not surprising people, and bringing people together. I endeavor to reach out and knock on every door to engage people in every step of process. This is a value Metropolitan provides to every member agency, because at the end of the day, we all share one goal. We all want to provide a resilient, sustainable water supply at affordable rates.

Collaboration is what has made Metropolitan special. When we bring resources together, we can move forward. With a shared vision and shared commitment, which I know we all have, we can come together. What has made us strong and has enabled us to build our majestic infrastructure is that we have come together. Together, we can build the future. I want to engage people, empower people, and call people to action. I think they will respond.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your goals for disadvantaged communities.

Adel Hagekhalil: One of the goals that I share with our board and many of our member agencies is to ensure that no one is left behind. When we are investing and bringing in water, it should be for every resident, every business, and every member agency. A large portion of the communities in our region are disadvantaged and underserved with this resource.

We need to ensure that they have equitable access to clean, safe water and to rebates that will help them conserve water. Some of the rebates Metropolitan offers require larger, upfront purchases for appliances like high-efficiency clothes washers and dishwashers or for removing grass and replacing it with turf.

We want to find a way to support everyone in saving water, particularly in ways we haven’t really tapped into.

Fixing leaky pipes from the main lines to homes, especially in underserved communities, is critical. People talk about lead pipe issues, but nobody talks about leaky pipes. Our goal is to put money toward leaky pipe repair. It will create jobs and save water. I’m excited that we have a renewed commitment to focus on our underserved communities and ensure that there is no one left behind. M Adel Hagekhalil is the general manager and CEO of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

For more on Metropolitan, visit www.mwdh2o.com.

November/December 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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How Los Angeles County Public Works Passed Its Ambitious Measure W Water Quality Program

The lower Los Angeles River in Long Beach, with the Dominguez Gap Wetlands Project, one of L.A. County’s first demonstration projects for a regional integrated storm water facility, to the left. Low-flow runoff from the river is siphoned into the engineered wetlands, treated with natural filtration, and then reintroduced to the river.

L

os Angeles County (L.A. County) is the most populous county in California, and thus the one with the largest water demand and some of the biggest water supply and quality challenges.

Los Angeles County Public Works (LACPW) decided to address these challenges through its Safe, Clean Water Program (SCWP), which aims to optimize local storm water for water supply and to improve the quality of L.A. County’s surface water. To pay for this ambitious program, LACPW needed to gain the support of two-thirds of the electorate for a ballot initiative, Measure W, that would allow it to collect a property tax. In this interview, LACPW Director Mark Pestrella tells us about this process and its results.

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

14 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2021

Municipal Water Leader: Tell us about LACPW’s service area, customer base, and infrastructure.

Mark Pestrella: Our service area comprises 4,000 square miles of L.A. County. The business lines have both regional and local service areas, the latter being the unincorporated communities where the county provides all municipal services. There are 88 cities in L.A. County, and our department serves all of them in some fashion. There are also rural and high desert areas in the northern part of L.A. County that have tiny populations compared to the urban areas. Each business line has its own customer base.

In the water area, we provide flood control services to 10 million people. We maintain and operate a large flood control water conservation system in L.A. County. We also serve retail water to about 300,000 people within six water districts that are dispersed throughout the county. The largest one is in a rural area in the north and has around municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF LACPW.

Mark Pestrella: I’m a civil engineer by training and am licensed with the State of California. I studied civil engineering in college and started my career with LACPW in 1987. I’ve been there for 35 years now, and for the majority of that, I’ve been working in our water resource management core service area. It is the third-largest municipal water agency of the 200 that exist in L.A. County.

I have also made my way through multiple jobs on both the regulatory and land use sides. Most of my technical work was done on the water side of the house, but now I’m now just a manager. I spent time teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, and eventually became the director of LACPW.

LACPW is a corporate structure of six civil engineering business lines: water resources; environmental services; transportation; construction management; development services, including building and safety review and largetrack development review for the county; and emergency management. We handle some 70,000 calls a year for all things related to infrastructure, including water and waste emergencies. LACPW is the largest public works agency in the United States.

ADVERTISEMENT 225,000 connections. It’s a conglomeration of a number of small water districts. Our smallest water district, which is in the urbanized southeastern Los Angeles area, has 1,600 customers.

Municipal Water Leader: What was the motivation behind Measure W and the SCWP? Mark Pestrella: The story of water in the West is fairly well documented: In everything from Chinatown to Cadillac Desert, there are stories about dam building and the water wars between Northern and Southern California. There’s enough water for everybody in California, but most of the water is in and falls within Northern California. L.A. County happens to be the most populous county in California; therefore, we have the highest water demand. One of the major drivers for Measure W was to improve our local water supply. One of the other drivers was California’s changing weather patterns, which are making our local water supplies less reliable. There’s been a lot of pressure to find new water and to conserve and recycle water to improve the resiliency of the region’s water supply.

The surface water system in L.A. County, which we operate under the flood control water conservation system, has done a really good job of capturing storm water.

We are looking to optimize that system to improve the region’s water resiliency. While we’re already catching and conserving about one-third of the drinking water supply for L.A. County, we want to do more. Because of the hydrology and the topography of the area and the flashy nature of storms in L.A. County, it’s difficult to capture and hold the storm water, even though we have 14 major reservoirs, associated dams, and large-scale spreading facilities to capture water and replenish groundwater. Two-thirds of the water from major rain events makes its way through the system and out to the Pacific Ocean. We want to double the amount of rainwater we capture. The other resources we’re looking at include recycled water and reclaimed water— essentially, we want to move highly treated sanitary sewer water into the system and put it in the ground.

Measure W was about optimizing local storm water for water supply and improving the quality of the surface water in L.A. County, given the importance of that surface water for human health and for the supply system. Those two altruistic, high-level drivers are what motivated our elected officials to take a shot at improving how we capture, conserve, and use storm water in L.A. County.

Another driver was the Clean Water Act (CWA).

L.A. County has been the subject of much regulation. It has its own municipal separate storm sewer system (MS4) permit that regulates the quality of all the surface waters in the county as well as, to some extent, that of our drinking water supply.

Surface waters in L.A. County are heavily polluted by legacy pollutants—every single open water body in L.A. County has some legacy pollutant in it and is considered impaired.

Municipal Water Leader: What does the SCWP entail? municipalwaterleader.com

The 10.7-acre Oxford Retention Basin, located in Marina del Rey and owned and operated by the Los Angeles County Flood Control District as a flood control retention facility. The water inside the basin is a mix of urban and storm water runoff, groundwater, and tidal inflows from Marina del Rey Harbor.

Mark Pestrella: The SCWP is a capital improvement program that is going to be managed by LACPW. It is a watershed-based program that covers 85 of the 88 cities in L.A. County and aims to improve the county’s water supply and the quality of water in the county. Its revenue source is a property tax on residents; the measure will collect nearly $300 million a year. The program will be governed by a representative group of stakeholders from six major watersheds in L.A. County that will get together on an annual basis to approve projects for the region. Our elected officials on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors and the water agencies affected by the program will make appointments to the governing body. This representative, watershed-based governance model allows for the inclusion of environmental interests and disadvantaged community interests.

One distinctive feature of this program is that the money stays in the watershed it was collected in. The regional programs will be managed by LACPW. We will eventually end up maintaining and operating the facilities that are defined by that regional governance.

There’s also a provision in the act that provides money directly to the cities that are charged with complying with the CWA through their own MS4 permits. Those cities are required to develop their own capital improvement plans.

They’re subject to an audit by LACPW and the county to make sure the funds are being spent to provide clean water and improved water supply to the community.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the process of building support for the ballot measure.

Mark Pestrella: After initially considering raising money via a benefit assessment method, under which customers would pay based on the value of the services provided November/December 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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ADVERTISEMENT to their property, we started moving toward the idea of a property tax. However, flood control agencies do not have the authority to charge a property tax, and in California, a property tax requires approval by two-thirds of the electorate. To pass a property tax, we needed to obtain authority from the state legislature. We used our special district authority, the Los Angeles County Flood Control District (LACFCD), which covers the majority of L.A. County, to obtain the authority to pass a property tax.

We then attempted three times over a period of 13 years to pass a tax, finally succeeding in 2018.

It took 13 years and two droughts, one of which was really big, to develop an awareness of the importance of water and to create a water ethic in L.A. County. We spent a lot of time working with the community, the government, local jurisdictions, and local water agencies to put together a 3‑year, $8–9 million messaging and education campaign about the importance of water for health and daily life.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us more about how the program activities are divided between LACPW and the cities?

Mark Pestrella: LACPW negotiated with the cities about supporting the program and created a program component through which 40 percent of the revenue is provided by the local agencies, meaning that 40 percent of the money coming out of a city is returned directly to it. The county collects the money, which gives the elected officials in the cities a lot of coverage, and the money is then reintroduced to the cities. There’s a lot of flexibility about where they can spend it, but they’re supposed to spend it on compliance with the CWA and the values of the SCWP. Another 50 percent of the overall revenue that is collected goes to the regional watershed committees I described and is administered by the LACFCD. We call that the regional component of the program. This money will go to largescale, regional projects.

The remaining 10 percent goes to the LACFCD to pay for SCWP administration, educational programs, and science.

The 40/50/10 split was negotiated by all the entities that were going to benefit from this program: the 85 cities within the county; the LACFCD; the 9 watershed-area steering committees; the 17 voting members, with at least one watershed coordinator in each; municipal representation; and agency representation. They passed the capital improvement program to the board of supervisors, which must approve it every 5 years.

Mark Pestrella: The demand for water in L.A. County is somewhere around 1.6 million acre-feet, or 521 billion gallons, of water per year. Per capita water use has been

16 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2021

Municipal Water Leader: What are the effects the program has had so far, and what are your future goals for it?

Mark Pestrella: In Los Angeles, as in many places, the goal of the infrastructure that has been built through the years has changed. At the turn of the 20th century, it was about making the economy run. There was little to no thinking about effects on the environment or natural resources like water. This program seeks to change that and correct the disparity in investments. We believe that the economy will thrive when we build out our infrastructure with those values in place.

Our goal is to build the program to full scale and, in 50 years, to be fully self reliant for our water supply so that we do not have to import water other than for emergency purposes. For our surface water, we share the goal of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and of our local and state water boards that all our waters be drinkable, swimmable, and fishable. It’s a high, aspirational goal. We envision someone swimming up the Los Angeles River someday. M Mark Pestrella is the director of Los Angeles County Public Works.

He can be contacted at mpestrella@pw.lacounty.gov.

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF LACPW.

Municipal Water Leader: How will the SCWP reduce Los Angeles’s dependence on imported water supplies?

shrinking over the years, and we’ve kept it stable for almost 20 years through conservation and the optimization of our local storm water. As I mentioned before, we capture about one-third of the water that falls on the larger watershed, which equals about 250,000–300,000 of the 1.6 million acre-feet we need per year, and we want to capture another one-third. It will probably take 30–50 years to achieve that.

In the first year of the program, nearly $100 million was approved for multibenefit projects across the region.

There are 41 infrastructure projects and studies aimed at improving the amount of water we capture and put back in the ground. In L.A. County, we store most of our water in underground aquifers and basins. The rainwater we capture becomes groundwater. We replenish the groundwater basins, and the retailers have rights to pump that water. We are projecting spending about $380 million a year over 5 years.

We have annual goals, such as using storm water to supply 33,000 more families each year.

One of the mechanisms available to an arid region is to use nature to clean the water. We’ve done a lot of experimentation and found that water can be cleaned by sending it through alluvium and clean soils. In fact, our CWA compliance is tied to how much water we capture and send into the ground, not necessarily how clean the water is on the surface. We’ve been able to fold a lot of regulatory compliance and sustainability efforts into this regional, watershed-based effort.

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Allen Davidson: Modernizing to Conserve Water at Rowland Water District

F

inding new and better ways to manage finite water resources is a vital task for any water district. Effective system management saves water and reduces costs for the district and its customers. Rowland Water District (RWD), based in Rowland Heights in Los Angeles County (L.A. County), is doing just that with its new smart metering program, which is greatly improving leak detection, reducing reading time, and improving efficiency for the district and the communities it serves.

In this interview, Allen Davidson, RWD’s field operations supervisor, tells Municipal Water Leader about the innovative smart meter system and how RWD intends to continue being on the forefront of implementing new technologies into the future.

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

Allen Davidson: I started in the water industry in 2006, working for the City of La Habra as a maintenance I worker. I worked there for about 5 years and then got a job at RWD. I came in as a maintenance I worker and did that for about a year before working into a maintenance II position, running the crew out in the field.

I did that for another 2 years before being promoted to the position I’m in now, field operations supervisor. I’ve been doing this for about 7 years and have been at RWD for about 10 years.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about RWD. Allen Davidson: RWD was established in 1953. Our service area encompasses a 17.2‑square-mile area in southeastern L.A. County. We currently provide potable and recycled water to approximately 58,000 people. We have 13,500 service connections in Rowland Heights, Hacienda Heights, La Puente, and the cities of Industry and West Covina.

Municipal Water Leader: Why did the district decide to convert to smart meters?

18 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2021

to and from our office. We work to reduce fuel and carbon dioxide emissions. Basically, we seek to increase efficiency and reduce operating costs for our customers.

Municipal Water Leader: What kind of meters are you using, and how did you select them?

Allen Davidson: We chose to go with Master Meter’s Allegro AMI system. On our first go around, we moved from walk reading to a wired automatic meter reading system. Under that system, the meters were wired to modules that sent a frequency to a laptop in our truck as we’d drive by to get a reading. The two major issues facing RWD consisted of wires getting pinched or cut by field service staff when they lifted, opened, and closed the lids and of gophers chewing through the wires. Given these problems, we were searching for a wireless AMI system in which all electronics would be contained within the module. We looked at a few different products, but Master Meter’s was the only one we found that was truly wireless. That was a big selling point for us.

Municipal Water Leader: The new system directly reports all its measurements to your office, correct? municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF RWD.

Allen Davidson: At RWD, we’re always looking for technology advancements that can allow us to reduce costs and conserve water. The advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) project complements other investments that we’ve made. We’ve tried to make our office paperless. We’ve also started using iPads in the field to increase communication and reduce the time we need to spend going back and forth

Work on RWD's new AMI system.

ADVERTISEMENT Allen Davidson: That’s correct. The system currently gets a read every 12 hours and uploads it to its Harmony MDM software platform. That information is available to us 24/7.

Municipal Water Leader: Did you seek grant funding for this upgrade, or was it something you paid for through your regular capital budget?

Allen Davidson: The AMI project was basically funded through the district’s capital improvement budget. We wanted to ensure that it would be a smooth transition, so we did some careful planning and chose to do the project in sections over several years. We know that at some point these are going to fail, and we didn’t want to have 13,500 service connections go out at the same time. We wanted to minimize disruption and control costs.

Municipal Water Leader: How will the AMI system save your customers water and money?

Allen Davidson: The AMI system empowers customers by providing detailed information, daily and weekly usage monitoring, and phone leak alerts. Leaks are probably our biggest concern, and without this tool, we were unable to identify leaks on a customer’s property unless staff or customers notified the district about them. Now, we’ll immediately know when a customer has a water leak. It’ll cut down water loss, reduce consumption, eliminate a lot of high bills, and promote conservation and water use efficiency awareness.

Municipal Water Leader: How does the system sense a leak on a customer’s property?

Allen Davidson: It constantly monitors water usage and can flag continuous usage. If there’s continuous usage for an hour, it’s going to be able to tell that there may be a leak in the customer’s home—and if there’s continuous usage for 24 hours, it will raise an alert. A lot of on-property leaks were too small for our old metering system to pick up on.

The new AMI system can actually read to a 1,000th of a cubic foot, so it will be able to identify many small leaks that the old system wasn’t able to identify.

Municipal Water Leader: How will the AMI system change the district’s operations?

Allen Davidson: What used to take us a month to read we can now literally read in a day. As I mentioned, we will also be able to identify even small on-property leaks. It will also free up RWD staff to work on preventative maintenance throughout the distribution system.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us about your Harmony software system? How do the data from the meters come into the program, and what can you do with the data? municipalwaterleader.com

Allen Davidson: The new AMI interface that we’re trying to transition to will show customers their daily use. They’re going to be able to set notifications for specific water usage amounts. They’re also going to be able to set parameters for their desired daily usage. It’s going to give them some guidelines and provide them a first look at what their bill will look like. Before, customers would see a bill once a month or once every 2 months and want to know why their bill was so high. This tool will give them and us better insight into what they use each day, which days they use a lot of water on, and why.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us about RWD’s other water conservation initiatives?

Allen Davidson: We do a lot of public outreach to promote water conservation. We continue to update our website weekly to better educate our customers on how crucial it is to save and conserve water. A lot of people don’t understand that water is a limited resource. They’re not aware of how precious water really is.

Municipal Water Leader: At what point will RWD’s entire system be converted to the AMI system?

Allen Davidson: Currently, we’re more than 90 percent converted.

We’re hoping to have the district fully converted by June 2022.

Municipal Water Leader: Is the district currently working on any other infrastructure upgrades?

Allen Davidson: We currently have six repeaters and three AMI towers, which receive signals from each module and send information to the Harmony software platform. We are currently adding a seventh repeater to the infrastructure but will be testing at different sites to maximize its coverage.

Municipal Water Leader: What is your vision for the future of RWD and its operations?

Allen Davidson: We’re always trying to look at what technology is going to bring us into the future. We were big on building our GIS system when that was the latest technology. RWD has always pushed advancement in technology to gain efficiency. I think a lot of that will relate to how we read meters. We’ll install AMI, and then within the next 10–15 years, it’ll probably be replaced by another, more efficient reading system. We just need to be open to that and keep adapting as new technology becomes available. M Allen Davidson is the field operations supervisor for Rowland Water District.

He can be reached at allend@rowlandwater.com.

November/December 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

| 19

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How Moleaer’s Nano-Scale Aeration System Makes Wastewater Treatment More Efficient

A Moleaer nanobubble generator on-demand trailer system at Fallbrook Municipal Wastewater Plant in Southern California.

M

oleaer has created a novel aeration system that is vastly more effective than traditional models. It injects air in the form of miniscule bubbles only 100 nanometers in size—thousands of times smaller than a grain of salt—that, unlike larger bubbles, spread throughout a water body and do not float to the surface. Moreover, they also remove surfactants from wastewater, increasing the efficiency of treatment processes. In this interview, Moleaer CEO Nick Dyner tells us more about this impressive technology and its uses.

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

22 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2021

Municipal Water Leader: Tell us about the history of Moleaer.

Nick Dyner: Moleaer was started by Bruce Shelton, who is our chief technical officer, and Warren Russell, our chief commercial officer. They had previously worked together informally on projects in which Warren was selling his microbiology for wastewater treatment and Bruce was building custom water treatment equipment for various municipal and industrial uses. Warren came across a project in the Middle East in which the client was using his biology in a shallow, temporary lagoon in a high-temperature environment. When water temperatures rise, it becomes challenging to maintain dissolved oxygen (DO) levels that are high enough to allow the microbiology to do its job. Also, it is challenging to use municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF MOLEAER.

Nick Dyner: I’ve been in the water industry for almost 15 years.

I got into the industry through General Electric (GE). I was moving from business to business within GE, and around 2005, I landed in its water business. I fell in love with the industry. I was primarily focused on GE’s desalination business, which produced reverse osmosis (RO) membrane systems for industries like power; semiconductor production; and drinking water for hotels, resorts, and island municipalities.

In 2010, I joined a startup called NanoH2O, and my wife and I moved to Los Angeles. NanoH2O was a technology company focused on developing a new type of thin-film RO membrane for seawater desalination. I was fortunate enough to be the first commercial hire, and I eventually led the sales marketing/app engineering/tech service organization and commercialized the company’s product globally. I got a chance to do business in 92 countries. It was an incredible experience.

In 2014, LG Chem acquired NanoH2O, with successful outcomes for all parties involved. I stayed with the company

for about 2½ years to help LG during the transition, teach it about the water business, and help it grow globally. It now has the second-biggest market share in the RO membrane field, which is fantastic to see.

In late 2016, as I was coming to the end of my time at LG, I was lucky to meet the cofounders of a company called Moleaer. I got interested in the potential of nanobubbles for various industries, particularly for the treatment of industrial process water and surface water. In early 2017, I and a few others invested in the company, and I joined the team to help grow the business. Now, 4½ years later, we’ve got over 1,000 nanobubble systems installed globally. Irrigation water is our biggest market, and surface water, including lakes and ponds, are our second biggest. The business has been growing rapidly ever since. I am fortunate to get to be Moleaer’s CEO, a role I have held since the company’s inception.

ADVERTISEMENT conventional aeration systems to effectively dissolve oxygen into shallow water, because traditional aeration systems only dissolve about 1–2 percent of the oxygen they release per foot of water. If you’ve got a 4‑ to 5‑foot-deep lagoon, you’re only going to get around 5–10 percent of the oxygen transferring into the water before the bubbles reach the surface. It’s really inefficient. Moreover, hotter water holds less oxygen. Faced with those obstacles, Warren reached out to Bruce to see if he could develop a way to make very small bubbles that would take longer to rise to the surface.

While developing the technology, they realized that it was behaving completely differently from what they expected.

The oxygen levels were rising rapidly and staying high for long periods of time, even after the system was shut off. This suggested that the bubbles weren’t leaving the body of water.

Warren and Bruce filed patents on the technology so that they could explore it further, and they eventually started a business together. They formally incorporated Moleaer in August 2016.

Soon, through third-party research and instrumentation, they realized that the bubbles they were producing were on a nano scale. I joined Moleaer after we funded the company in January 2017. In June 2017, we launched our first product, a nanobubble generator with a rate of 200 gallons a minute with a pump designed to focus on wastewater.

Municipal Water Leader: Is your company based in the United States?

Nick Dyner: Yes, we are based in California. We design and manufacture all our products in our assembly facility, which is 15 minutes south of Los Angeles International Airport.

We use only our own patented, proprietary technology, and all our systems are designed in the United States.

Municipal Water Leader: How does the technology work?

Nick Dyner: When you inject air or oxygen into water, you form bubbles. As I mentioned before, the bubbles rise, and typically, they dissolve at a rate of only 1–2 percent per foot of water. The bubbles from our system dissolve at a rate of more than 85 percent per foot of water because the vast majority of the gas we’re injecting is in the form of 100‑nanometer bubbles. These gas nanoparticles lack the buoyancy to come to the surface and pop, so releasing them in water is like blowing smoke into a room. They dissolve everywhere throughout the body of water, from the bottom to the surface.

Because we all came from a water/wastewater background, we targeted that market first. Over the course of 6–9 months, as people were hearing about our product’s value proposition, we began to look at additional industries that were interested in oxygenating water more efficiently, including horticulture, surface water, and aquaculture. We started to expand into those markets. Today, more than three-quarters of our business is in industries that have nothing to do with wastewater, including agricultural municipalwaterleader.com

irrigation; algae and aquatic weed control in lakes, ponds, and canals; fish and shrimp farms; and even oil, gas, and mining. Today, we have 42 employees, primarily based in Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, and the United States, and we’re now entering Spain.

Municipal Water Leader: How small are the nanobubbles?

Nick Dyner: A 100‑nanometer bubble is 2,500 times smaller than a grain of salt. It’s about the size of a virus. At that scale, you can’t see these bubbles, no matter how high a concentration we put into the water. We put between 500 million and 1 billion nanobubbles into each milliliter of water. Even at that scale, you cannot see these bubbles without an instrument. We use a laser particle-tracking analyzer called a NanoSight to detect them.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your technology’s advantages for wastewater treatment.

Nick Dyner: Wastewater is where we got started. Initially, we focused on retrofitting existing biological wastewater treatment plants so that they could increase DO levels more effectively.

There are probably thousands of wastewater treatment plants that have outgrown their original designs, meaning that the loading that is coming in exceeds their design capacities. This leads to the constant need for retrofitting, upgrading, and expanding. Our systems increase DO levels cost effectively through a system that is easy to install and allows those treatment plants to successfully treat the amount of wastewater that is coming through. We had some really interesting results, particularly in high-strength biological treatment plants like membrane bioreactors (MBRs), where we were able to rapidly increase DO levels, enabling the plants to increase loading and throughput.

As we started to grow as a business, we looked at more applications and more industries, including irrigation water, aquaculture, service water, oil, gas, and mining. We took our eye off wastewater, but recently we’ve come back and revisited it in earnest as we’ve done larger-scale biological treatment and municipal projects.

We’re starting to understand another benefit nanobubbles provide. We’re going to be launching an educational campaign over the next 6 months based on pilot-scale third-party studies we’ve had done on applying nanobubbles to wastewater treatment processes. We initially could not figure out the mode of action by which our technology worked, because when you add nanobubbles to a waste treatment process, you get an increase in DO, but it is not caused by the bubbles alone. The increases in DO we observed exceeded the amount of oxygen we were injecting.

Something else must have been happening to the plant.

We have now learned that injecting nanobubbles actually removes things like surfactants in wastewater. The reason that this occurs has to do with the charge of the bubbles and the way the bubbles separate the surfactants from the waste stream.

November/December 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

| 23

ADVERTISEMENT Surfactants include the soaps that you put down the drain or the chemicals used by industrial users for their daily cleaning.

These contaminants limit the ability of existing aeration systems to transfer oxygen more efficiently. One of the reasons that traditional aeration transfers only 1–2 percent of oxygen per foot of water is that the presence of surfactants prevents the bubbles from dissolving more efficiently. In cleaner water with less surfactants, that could rise to 2–3 percent. The reduction in oxygen transfer efficiency of conventional aeration through the presence of surfactants is a concept known as alpha factor, which is familiar to the wastewater treatment industry, particularly aeration companies.

By removing surfactants, nanobubbles enable existing aeration to dissolve oxygen more efficiently. This provides two important benefits. First, it reduces the amount of energy the treatment plant needs to achieve a given level of DO. Aeration consumes about 2–3 percent of the world’s energy.

It’s an enormously energy-intensive process and an expensive line item for municipalities and industrial treatment plants.

Second, the inverse of this is that plants can now treat more wastewater without having to increase their energy use.

Municipal Water Leader: Are you totally replacing the aeration systems of wastewater plants, or are you enhancing them?

Nick Dyner: For the most part, we are enhancing them. We replace them only if the existing aeration system is no longer operational. Our technology allows plants to increase their DO by removing contaminants without having to redo the entire aeration system. Our system requires significantly less energy than having to redo an entire aeration system.

Generally, we’re not creating a whole pretreatment plant—we’re connecting our system to the head works, a clarifier, or even the aeration basins themselves. There’s a lot of flexibility with installation.

Municipal Water Leader: How large an increase in efficiency can a normal municipal wastewater system expect from implementing your technology?

24 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2021

Municipal Water Leader: What is the estimated return on investment with your technology?

Nick Dyner: It depends on the size of the treatment plant.

Typically, we estimate that a municipal customer will see a return on investment in 6–30 months, depending on energy costs and the treatment capacity of the municipal treatment plant. We haven’t run that analysis on the industrial side.

Our target is to reduce the operational expenses of each plant by about 30 percent through the addition of our system to the pretreatment process.

Municipal Water Leader: If one of our readers is interested in your technology, what steps should they take?

Nick Dyner: We have a commercial team scattered throughout the United States and Canada. We would connect them with one of those folks or, if it’s more technical, with one of our engineers. The easiest way to get in touch is to come to our website, moleaer.com, and fill out the contact form so that we can direct you to the correct person.

Municipal Water Leader: How long does it generally take to install the system?

Nick Dyner: It only takes a half-day or so to install our system once it arrives on site, and our lead times are fairly short.

Municipal Water Leader: What is your message to wastewater treatment plants?

Nick Dyner: What we’re learning as we’ve started to deploy our systems at more wastewater treatment plants is that a simple plug-and-play process will allow treatment plants to operate at a more-cost-effective level. Let’s see if our process can be a solution for you. Let’s remove the contaminants that are limiting the effectiveness or efficiency of your existing system. We provide a solution that is simpler and more cost effective than trying to expand the old-fashioned way. M Nick Dyner is the CEO of Moleaer. He can be contacted at info@moleaer.com.

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF MOLEAER.

Nick Dyner: We installed our system at one treatment plant about an hour outside of San Diego that processes 1.4 million gallons of water per day. Moleaer was pretreating 100 percent of the feed water coming through. During the trial period after the plant installed our system, we increased the existing aeration system’s oxygen by 60 percent, improved the plant’s energy efficiency by 48 percent, and increased its treatment capacity by 20 percent. We are planning to install our system at an industrial wastewater treatment plant run by one of the largest food processors in the country so that we can repeat these gains not just on the municipal scale but on the industrial scale. We’ve also increased the loading on an MBR at Bear Republic, a brewery in Northern California, from 10,000 to 17,000 milligrams per liter in mixed liquor concentrations

and mixed liquor suspended solids. At the time, we didn’t understand how that was possible, because we weren’t putting in that much more oxygen. We now know that the anomaly we saw was driven by the exact same value proposition: The addition of nanobubbles into the waste stream removed contaminants that prevented the existing system from running at an optimal level.

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Creative Construction Sequencing Aids Light Rail Construction

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he L.A. Metro is in the final stages of constructing an underground light rail line trunk line that will allow riders to travel through downtown L.A. Known as the Metro Regional Connector Transit Project, it will connect three existing light rail transit (LRT) systems through downtown Los Angeles. Regional Connector Constructors (RCC) was awarded the design-build contract to construct this 1.9‑mile underground transit way.

While the tunnels for the twin rail lines were excavated with a 400‑foot tunnel boring machine, the stations were excavated by open cut. In order to open cut to the needed depths in a high-density metropolitan area, the contractors first had to safely get past numerous older utilities, many of which needed repair or replacement. The Historic Broadway Station was the most challenging to construct due to having the most congested existing underground utilities in the area, including a 10‑foot diameter reinforced concrete (RCP) storm drain that had been constructed around 1960.

A creative construction sequencing plan devised by RCC would expose the existing utilities along the 400‑foot station zone to make any repairs or replacements. These exposed utility lines would then be suspended.

The electrical, telephone, fiber optic, and natural gas lines were easily enclosed in a suspended casing, but the 10‑foot diameter RCP storm drain was a larger challenge. The contractors immediately realized that due to its weight and uncertain structural integrity, the storm drain would have to be either rerouted or replaced with something lighter. HOBAS pipe was chosen as the lighter, stronger, less expensive, and more efficient option for the project.

A temporary support system for the pipe installation was devised using vertical supports and a series of threaded rods to attach nylon web slings that would suspend the pipe from the temporary ceiling/supporting deck beams for the 2nd Street decking. There it would remain suspended for the remainder of the excavation, station build-out, and backfill to the pipe’s grade.

Upon completion of the connection, the remaining lower portion of the RCP was removed. The new section of 126‑inch HOBAS CC storm drain, totally and permanently encased, will continue serving the L.A. Flood Control Department and the citizens of Los Angeles indefinitely.

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How Masuen Consulting Saves Its Clients Money by Reducing Water Use

M

asuen Consulting is an outdoor water management, system design, and consulting firm based in Newport, Washington, that works primarily with clients in the urban irrigation and storm water management fields. By updating clients’ technology and helping them operate their irrigation systems more efficiently, Masuen is able to reduce their water use by an average of 50 percent. In this interview, Masuen Consulting President Mitchel Andrew Walker tells us about the company’s services and the results it can achieve for its clients.

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

1995 and went into Masuen Consulting full time. Today, we have 14 employees. We focus on outdoor water management, primarily in the irrigation and storm water management fields, with irrigation as our primary focus. Our three irrigation segments are urban, golf, and agriculture. We look for mindsets and approaches that are not standard in the industry and allow us to save a lot of water. Our customers are landscape architects, civil engineers, government agencies, water purveyors, developers, homeowners’ and property owners’ associations, corporate campuses, farmers, ranchers, golf courses, and sports complexes.

Municipal Water Leader: How many states are you active in?

Mitchel Andrew Walker: We have people in Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Texas, and Washington, and we have worked in more than 20 states.

Municipal Water Leader: What is the story behind the company’s name?

Mitchel Andrew Walker: It’s my wife’s maiden name. When I started this company, it was called Walker Design and Consulting. My wife, meanwhile, had a horticultural consulting business. We eventually decided that it made more sense to marry them. When we married them, we kept her name.

Irrigation uniformity testing in Cinco Ranch, Texas, in preparation for the switch to reuse water.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the company.

Mitchel Andrew Walker: Masuen Consulting has been around since 1995. Its precursor was a design-build construction company, which was the business I initially joined. I sold it in

30 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2021

Mitchel Andrew Walker: The industry as a whole, in my opinion, is supply driven. If the demand for water increases, another dam or water treatment plant is built. Infrastructure is the go-to solution for increasing water supply. Our mindset, by contrast, is to start with how much a client actually needs to accomplish what it wants to accomplish.

We have a demand focus with a conservation lens. When my wife and I started the company 40 years ago, we found that most people thought the solution to their problems was just to get more water. We found that there was a better solution that allowed clients to save about 50 percent of what the industry uses while still meeting their needs. We meet or exceed that 50 percent figure in most of our projects.

Municipal Water Leader: How do you reduce your clients’ water use so significantly? municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF MASUEN CONSULTING.

Mitchel Andrew Walker: I went to Humboldt State University in Northern California and did a double major in zoology and wildlife biology, although I did not finish the degree in wildlife biology. I was one course short when I was accepted into veterinary school at the University of California, Davis, and I decided to go to vet school instead of finishing that second degree. After 1 year of vet school, I was introduced to an interesting opportunity and decided to withdraw from vet school and go into business. Today, I work with Masuen Consulting.

Municipal Water Leader: What are some of the out-of-the-box solutions that you provide to your clients?

ADVERTISEMENT Mitchel Andrew Walker: We use water conserving technology, including efficient irrigation nozzles, sprinkler heads with check valves and pressure regulation, and central control that allows for efficient management. However, it’s mainly a mindset approach. We save most of that water just by putting people in place who really know how to manage and monitor sites and projects with a conservation mindset.

We’ve done a few internal studies that show that even if you install the most efficient, state-of-the-art technology at a site and improve its operational efficiency by 40–60 percent, after 1–2 years, its operational efficiency will go back to what it was before because of the way it’s maintained and managed. We take those sites over and just manage them better, saving an average of 50 percent of the water.

did a lot of training for those folks as well; in fact, that’s an ongoing process. We have monthly meetings with a committee of area landscape irrigation stakeholders in which we help train them in a process called usage caps. Every month, we do an analysis of the irrigated area, the plant type, the soil type, and the irrigation delivery methodology and report how much water they should use in a month, based on the weather patterns. If they use more than that, we ask them to justify it. If they use less or the same amount, we pat them on the back. It’s a system of checks and balances. We use scientific principles to make sure they’re using water wisely. In this particular job, others are doing the day-to-day management, and Masuen is doing month-to-month oversight.

Municipal Water Leader: So your business provides irrigation management services?

Municipal Water Leader: What is your message to municipalities, particularly in the West, that are concerned about reducing their water footprints?

Mitchel Andrew Walker: Yes. We actually have three departments: irrigation design, technical and field consulting, and water management.

Municipal Water Leader: What is a good example of one of your urban projects?

Mitchel Andrew Walker: We have a reuse conversion project for the Cinco Master Municipal Utility District (MUD) near Houston. The MUD supplies water and sewer services to Cinco Ranch, a 5,300‑acre master-planned community.

The MUD board realized that with the way state laws and subsidence requirements were moving, it needed to find alternative ways to reduce its water footprint. The first idea was reuse. The MUD had apparently been searching unsuccessfully for many years for a company that understood how to calculate landscape water need. It found us in 2010 and hired us, and we implemented the project. We converted 25–30 percent of all its common-area irrigation from potable water to reuse water, thus reducing water use in Cinco Ranch by about 50 percent and lowering water costs.

Municipal Water Leader: Is your company managing that project on a day-to-day basis today?

Mitchel Andrew Walker: We do daily water management for some projects, but not for that one. We came up with a specification manual that detailed what needed to be done, how to design irrigation, how to install components, and what concepts to use. We put it on the Cinco Master MUD website and made it part of the MUD’s controlling document. All new projects have to follow that spec. We also oversaw the retrofit of the common-area irrigation from potable to reuse water and made sure that everything was compliant with state code and our spec management manual. Cinco Ranch still uses the same landscape and irrigation maintenance people to manage things. We municipalwaterleader.com

Mitchel Andrew Walker: I think the starting point is that there is a 98 percent chance that they are overusing irrigation water. They are likely using 25–60 percent more than they need to. The real question is, how do you change that paradigm? That’s where we excel. We approach the question from the demand side rather than the supply side, and we’ve done enough research and projects to prove to clients that our methodology works. Water and money are being wasted, but they can be saved if you change the way you look at things, and we can help you do that.

Municipal Water Leader: What trends do you see in the industry?

Mitchel Andrew Walker: Reuse is definitely a trend. Some states, such as Florida and California, which we’ve been in for more than 30 years, have been doing reuse quite heavily throughout most of that time. Other states, such as Texas, are now getting into it.

There is also more awareness of the need to conserve water. One thing that my wife and I have chatted about many times is that when we first started this business, we were looked at like we had three heads when we met with potential clients. We had to spend a lot of time, energy, and effort convincing people of the need to look at things differently and the importance of conserving water. We don’t spend a lot of time convincing people of the need anymore; the difficult part is now figuring out how to do it. M Mitchel Andrew Walker is the president of Masuen Consulting. He can be contacted at mitch@masuenconsulting.com.

November/December 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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Upcoming Events November 3–4 Texas Rural Water Association, Fall Management Conference (North), Dallas, TX November 3–5 National Conference of State Legislatures, Legislative Summit, Tampa, FL November 8–10 National Water Resources Association, 90th Annual Conference, Phoenix, AZ November 15–18 International Water Association, Digital Water Summit, Bilbao, Spain November 17–18 Kansas Water Office, Kansas Governor’s Water Conference, Manhattan, KS November 17–19 National Association of Clean Water Agencies, National Clean Water Law & Enforcement Seminar, Charleston, SC November 18–20 National League of Cities, City Summit, Salt Lake City, UT November 29–December 3 Association of California Water Agencies, Fall Conference & Exhibition, Pasadena, CA December 7–10 North Dakota Water Users Association, 58th Annual Joint North Dakota and Upper Missouri Water Convention and Irrigation Workshop, Bismarck, ND December 13–15 National Association of Clean Water Agencies, Water Utility Resilience Forum, Miami, FL December 14–16 Colorado River Water Users Association, Annual Conference, Las Vegas, NV December 14–16 National Ground Water Association, Groundwater Week, Nashville, TN, and virtual January TBD National Water Resources Association, Leadership Forum, Phoenix, AZ January 18–20 Ground Water Management Districts Association, Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX January 19–21 U.S. Conference of Mayors, 90th Winter Meeting, Washington, DC January 21–22 Texas Rural Water Association, Rural Water Conference, Round Rock, TX January 31–February 3 Nevada Water Resources Association, Annual Conference Week, Las Vegas February 17–18 Ditch and Reservoir Company Alliance, Annual Conference, Colorado Springs, CO

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