There was no shortage of interest and interaction among participants at AMWA’s 2017 Executive Management Conference, held in St. Simons, Georgia, in October. Questions and conversation were the order of the day, beginning with the SRO Sunday afternoon roundtable session, where Patrick Lehman of Peace River Manasota Regional Water Supply Authority, Cathy Bailey of Greater Cincinnati Water Works and Steve Schneider of St. Paul Regional Water Services teed-up an avid discussion of regional authorities and regionalization. High-level engagement continued through the final session, where Doug Yoder of Miami-Dade Water & Sewer Department and Calvin Farr of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management shared two very different approaches to raising revenues with an eye toward rate equity.
Highlighting the event was a workshop on attracting and retaining key personnel, featuring Mabel Miguel, PhD, of the Kenan-Flager Business School at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Working in small groups, the audience of top water managers worked through exercises involving the EPO (Effort-Performance-Outcome) model to diagnose issues of motivation, performance and expectancy. Once all were on board with the business theory, a panel including Dean Dickey of Prince William County Service Authority, Sue McCormick of Great Lakes Water Authority and Gary Robertson of Western Virginia Water Authority showed how they are addressing these key HR challenges through innovative programs at their utilities and how their approaches related to the business model. Cathy Bailey facilitated a lively interaction between the panel and audience members.
Strategic Planning 2.0, the subject of another executive panel, addressed benefits of revisiting management plans to make them living documents, not just “binders on the shelf.” Led by facilitator Darin Thomas of Raftelis Financial Consultants, Shanna Whitelaw of Nashville Metro Water Services discussed “strategy making” with an Effective Utility Management assessment, Pat Turnbull of Montgomery County Environmental Services addressed “strategy doing” with goal teams, and Beth Nesteriak of South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority described “strategy reporting” employing global metrics and key performance indicators.
Future supply reliability was the topic of Rich Harasick of Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, and he showed how the local water supply program supports the city’s sustainable water mandates through a water loss task force, groundwater basin remediation, conservation and securitization with a rate reduction bond. Ed Kerwin, whose Orange Water and Sewer Authority became breaking news on the national level in a water emergency earlier this year, made the case for preparing locally and regionally, interconnection of systems for resiliency, exercising the National Incident Management Systems (NIMS) with local partners, communicating honestly and transparently, and employing after-action reviews as a powerful continuous improvement tool.
The issue of risk was front and center in presentations by Cedric Grant, formerly with the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans and the team of Geoff Miller of Onondaga County Water Authority and Tim Taber of Barton and Loguidice, PC. Grant outlined how New Orleans is using a unique resilience measure analysis to protect water system assets. Miller and Taber walked the audience through OCWA’s process of using its Maximo asset management system to continuously assess vulnerabilities in order to improve capital investment planning. Doug Short of Trinity River Authority and Robert Lee of Dragos, Inc. took on the media hype and reality of SCADA cyber threats, looking at several high-profile incidents as well as Trinity River Authority’s experience to address the overarching problem, the purpose of intelligence and the pillars of cyber security.
Brett Jokela of Anchorage Water & Wastewater Utility and Chuck Murray of Fairfax Water joined Peiffer Brandt and Rocky Craley of Raftelis Financial Consultants to discuss how water utilities are employing AMWA’s INSIGHT utility financial information database and dashboard in their utility operations for benchmarking and reporting. The session also included a demonstration of how Phoenix Water Services Department employed the dashboard real-time in a presentation to its citizens’ advisory committee.
Find Conference PowerPoint presentations at www.amwa.net/presentations (log-in required).