Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance

The Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance recognizes member water systems that exhibit high levels of performance in the areas of community sustainability, customer experience and satisfaction, enterprise resiliency, financial viability, infrastructure strategy and performance, operational optimization, reliability and regulatory requirements, stakeholder understanding and support, water resource sustainability, and workforce development. These are the ten Attributes of Effectively Managed Utilities identified in 2007 by a blue ribbon panel of water and wastewater utility executives and revised in the 2024 Effective Utility Management: A Primer for Water Sector Utilities. 

Any AMWA member utility that has never won a Gold Award is eligible to apply for the Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance.

Gold Award

Recent Award Winners

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Milwaukee Water Works

2003 Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance
Major competitive improvements at Milwaukee Water Works (MWW) resulted from utilizing organization and technology strategies. The utility substantially "flattened" its organization in recent years; consolidating work units and related job duties has streamline workflow, reduced the number of job titles and allowed staff reductions at all levels without compromising effectiveness. Skill-based compensation was introduced into the plant maintenance work unit. The work force is more cross-trained with considerable broadening of skill areas allowing more flexible scheduling of work assignments and increased productivity. Automation has been implemented in many areas. A single entry of accounting information, for example, now produces financial reports in both Public Service Commission and City of Milwaukee reporting formats, an enormous improvement over manually keeping two sets of books. All 20,000 fire hydrants in the city have been bar-coded, and field personnel carry databases, which contain information about the hydrant, recently requested and/or completed maintenance and water quality data measured in the field after flushing activities. Chemical doses are automatically changed and flow-paced using continuous monitoring data, not manually set on the basis of individual grab sample results. It takes one individual 20 workdays each calendar quarter to drive by and read all 154,000 automated residential meters, a significant improvement over the 1,380 workdays it previously took for 23 meter readers to walk routes and manually read meters.

New York City Department of Environmental Protection

2003 Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance
The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has a wide-ranging mission to protect the environmental health of the city through operation of its water supply and wastewater treatment systems, HazMat and asbestos remediation, air and noise pollution control and billing services. DEP is dedicated to improving these operations and is engaged in a continuing process to improve competitiveness, efficiency and quality of service. Through an ongoing strategic planning process, DEP has created planning teams focused on key areas of the agency's operations: capital planning, community outreach, metrics, human resources and customer services. These teams are developing strategies to improve efficiency and productivity throughout DEP, and are examining relationships between its distinct functions in an effort to better integrate and coordinate resources. DEP also engages in a number of innovative, cost-saving measures which apply existing resources, technological advances and engineering ingenuity to address large-scale environmental concerns, including a comprehensive filtration avoidance program for two major watersheds, a nitrogen reduction program for a wastewater treatment plants, and an ecologically preservative stormwater management system. Through comprehensive strategic planning and innovation, DEP continually improves its ability to deliver services to its nine million consumers.

Tampa Bay Water

2003 Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance
With only 118 staff, Tampa Bay Water has committed more than $1 billion in drinking water supply infrastructure over a five-year period. The effort, which includes the nation's first large-scale desalination plant, a 15-billion-gallon reservoir and a state-of-the art 66 million-gallon-per-day surface water treatment plant, was implemented cost effectively through the creative use of business partnerships. The utility also applies the partnership approach as its model for increasing the efficiency in operations, through use of outsourcing, investments in technology and investments in personnel training. Tampa Bay Water has minimized rate increases through employment of a variety of competitive practices including financing, benchmarking, employee training, outsourcing, customer communications, public involvement and use of technology. With more than 80 percent of its costs defined by contracts for various services, the agency's Board is assured that drinking water is delivered from expensive new sources at the minimum possible cost. This assurance is especially important in considering the variable annual demand for drinking water in the Tampa Bay region.

Water Works and Sewer Board of the City of Birmingham

2003 Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance
The Water Works and Sewer Board of the City of Birmingham has proactively conducted a series of programs designed to enhance its ability to achieve its mission, including forward-looking utility planning, competitive assessment, the AWWA QualServe Program and strategic planning. The Board's Effectiveness and Efficiency Master Plan includes prioritized action plans, developed by departmental managers with input from staff, aligned with capital improvement and O&M programs and including activities designed to strengthen performance. The action plans also reflect collaborative thinking in areas such as communications, training and staff development, performance measures and interdepartmental relations. The Board recognizes that it takes motivated and highly skilled employees to achieve its mission. Its employees take pride in the organization and individual efforts often carry over to departmental team building for the benefit of the organization. Through its Employee Association, Organizational Developer Team, Ambassador's Program and periodic "Town Hall Meetings," the Board acknowledges the staff's efforts, provides a forum for discussion of job-related issues and offers opportunities to obtain internal and external feedback on performance. The staff's participation in these programs and planning processes has increased awareness of the need to constantly improve performance.

Butler County (Ohio) Department of Environmental Services

2002 Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance
Butler County (Ohio) Department of Environmental Services (BCDES) thinks and acts like a privately owned utility, while keeping the high level of quality customer service that government does best. In 1998, BCDES embarked on an improvement journey that resulted in the organization meeting its goal to be the best, most competitive utility in Ohio. BCEDS even bid competitively against the private providers for the operation of the wastewater services of a nearby county. A competitive gap analysis was performed in 1998, and over the next three years the organization succeeded in closing that gap. BCDES is no longer a target for the private providers. The success of the department is attributed to the cooperation of the 150-member staff of dedicated, talented and creative people and the support of the Butler County Board of Commissioners, who have high expectations for the department. With a staggering annual growth rate of over six percent, BCDES is controlling costs, providing high quality water and sewer service and exhibiting exceptional environmental stewardship through its public outreach programs. The department was proud to announce that no rate increases for water or sewer service would be enacted in 2002 – the first time in 12 years. That is a testament to the hard work that BCDES does to stay competitive. This public utility wears two hats – the governmental hat that truly cares about the public it serves, and the private hat that works diligently to be lean and mean.

City of Boca Raton (Florida) Utility Services Department

2002 Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance
For the past two years, the City of Boca Raton (Florida) Utility Services Department participated in a competitiveness process that improved many areas within both the organization and its operations. Although a bit different than more common benchmarking and competitive analysis initiatives, the process used some elements from those types of initiatives. The core of the Boca Raton Utility Services process, known as the SPIT DUST (Strategic Planning in the Department of Utility Services Teams), is the use of employee action teams that develop and implement the action plans to improve the organization and its operations. The activities and ideas of the employee action teams led to numerous improvements, including: • Lap top computers in field vehicles with real-time communication • Increased employee training opportunities • A proactive safety incentive program • A preventive maintenance program for treatment facility equipment • An employee recognition program • A more effective employee performance evaluation process Since it is centered on employee groups and involves all of the department’s employees, the process has improved organizational efficiency, communication and employee morale.

City of Henderson, Nevada, Department of Utility Services

2002 Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance
The City of Henderson, Nevada, Department of Utility Services provides water, reclaimed water and wastewater services through a system that includes an 18-mgd water treatment plant, a 24-mgd water reclamation facility, six pumping stations and nine reservoirs for reclaimed water to irrigate golf courses, medians and cemeteries. Some of the Utility’s main achievements over the past severalyears include: • The water treatment plant is currently in the process of completing an upgrade to utilize state-of-the-art ultraviolet (UV) disinfection. • The laboratory received the 2001 Project of the Year award from the National Association of Industrial and Office Parks for its state-of-the-art facility. • The City established a team to evaluate the existing capital improvement projects (CIP) process and recommend improvements. Once fully implemented, the plan will estimate future funding needs for new utility infrastructure and repair/replacement of existing infrastructure. • The Utility installed touch-to-read automated technology on approximately half of the City’s meters during 2000 and 2001. It is currently retrofitting all of the City’s meters with a radio-read technology.

City of Scottsdale Water Resources Department

2002 Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance
The City of Scottsdale, Arizona’s reputation for innovation and creativity is based upon its receptiveness to employee initiatives. The City of Scottsdale Water Resources Department shares the City’s values and its many recent achievements are due to employee-driven initiatives to achieve competitiveness and cost-effectiveness in each of its multi-faceted activities. The Department’s vision is to improve its competitiveness through periodic assessment and benchmarking with other “best-in-class” municipal utilities. As a result of a 1997 assessment by EMA, Scottsdale embarked upon an employee-driven improvement program, which resulted in an organizational reengineering and has allowed the Department to maintain a customer-to-employee ratio of 1,475:1. To achieve further excellence in competitiveness, Scottsdale recently contracted with the firm Maximus to perform an organizational review. The City’s $200-million, award-winning Scottsdale Water Campus, a state-of-the-art water and wastewater treatment complex, operates on an aggressive staffing plan, with three-person teams working 12-hour shifts. These operators, who have dual certification in both water and wastewater, control 150 water and wastewater facilities utilizing Scottsdale’s state-of-the-art SCADA system. The Department’s innovative achievements are based upon its efforts to surpass the expectations of Scottsdale’s citizens by providing an environment that attracts and motivates a best-in-class workforce.

City of Tempe Water Utility Department

2002 Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance
Starting in 1997, the City of Tempe, Arizona’s water utility embarked on a major ongoing effort to improve its levels of efficiency and competitiveness. Five years later, the City of Tempe Water Utility Department can look back with satisfaction at several significant achievements. First and foremost, the utility has maintained high levels of service delivery, while containing costs. The utility achieved and maintained the Phoenix metropolitan area’s lowest water/wastewater rates for the last three years. In the same period, staffing was reduced over nine percent by attrition, and overall savings were in excess of one million dollars per year for the past four years. A focus on employee training, education and participation has been the key, and the payoff has been significant. The operating savings, combined with a financially healthy retained earnings balance, allowed the utility to embark on a needed six-year, $190-million capital construction program without significant utility rate increases.

Fort Wayne City (Indiana) Utilities

2002 Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance
Fort Wayne City (Indiana) Utilities has demonstrated competitiveness through benchmarking, employee development, fiscal responsibility, innovation and excellence in customer service. A competitiveness assessment and a series of reengineering successes proved this publicly managed utility was competitive with privately managed utilities. As a result, the City began projects to reduce competitive gaps in other departments and is taking steps toward implementing best practices identified in the competitiveness assessment. Through the use of Six Sigma, the City of Fort Wayne and Fort Wayne City Utilities demonstrate that they are committed to employee development, innovation and, ultimately, becoming more competitive. Fort Wayne City Utilities is moving systematically and steadily to position itself as a business-oriented public utility. Its progress shows how utilities can reengineer and show quick wins – improving productivity and decreasing costs.

Honolulu Board of Water Supply

2002 Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance
The Honolulu Board of Water Supply (HBWS) is a publicly owned and operated, self-supporting, semiautonomous government agency of the City and County of Honolulu. The HBWS is the municipal water services provider on the island of Oahu and also provides selected business services to other Honolulu municipal agencies, the neighbor islands of Kauai and Maui, and other public utilities in the Pacific Rim. The HBWS provides an average 150 mgd of potable water through 1,900 miles of pipeline using more than 160 reservoirs and pumping station sites. In 1999, HBWS initiated a five-year transformation program to improve competitiveness and customer service throughout its service domain. This program, QUEST (Quality Utility Employees Succeeding Together), emphasizes customer service and employs a participative design and implementation approach to involve employees and their labor unions. The HBWS actively pursues and values partnership with labor to assure proposed changes are mutually beneficial whenever possible. QUEST seeks permanent quantum performance improvement. The program’s substantial savings to date are real, permanent and cumulative. HBWS has saved over $17 million in operating costs due to activities associated with the QUEST program. The QUEST program provides a model for transforming government organizations in Hawaii and is expected to deliver similar additional savings in operating costs as it moves to completion.

Houston Department of Public Works and Engineering Water Production Branch

2002 Gold Award for Exceptional Utility Performance
Houston Department of Public Works and Engineering Water Production Branch. The City of Houston began a long-term program in 1997 to improve its competitive posture, achieving parity with the most efficient private utility operating companies. This program involved: • extensive improvements to the utility’s technology utilization through implementation of state-of-the-art SCADA and CMMS systems • managing chemical and electrical costs • expanding the skill base and flexibility of the workforce • streamlining purchasing and inventory control systems • implementing more cost-effective coagulation strategies at surface water treatment plants. Efficiencies achieved by implementation of this program resulted in a 28 percent staffing reduction through attrition and a 14 percent reduction in annual overhead and maintenance costs. Chemical costs at the surface water plants were reduced at the same time the utility was adopting the stringent turbidity goals of the Partnership For Safe Water. Electrical costs remained relatively constant in a rising rate environment. These efficiencies were achieved while maintaining the quality of water and service delivered to customers. Achievement of this goal was evidenced by a 99.8 percent customer satisfaction rating throughout the period. The Water Production Branch has become cost competitive and is preparing to launch the second phase of its competitiveness program.