Featured Webinar: Regionalization and the Power of Partnership

This hour-long webinar recording from Environmental Finance Center Network discusses various regionalization models and approaches to collaboration like: Informal information sharing, sharing personnel, leveraging shared purchasing power, how to prepare your utility for knowledge or technology transfer, and Regionalization options.

This webinar discusses the process for water systems to acquire and maintain adequate technical, managerial, and financial (TMF) capacity. It provides some questions utilities can consider regarding their capability to consistently provide safe drinking water to the public and whether a partnership may be beneficial.

Technical

• Is your infrastructure inadequate or aging? 
• Do you have an asset management plan, and can you get the funding to follow through?
• Is your treatment, storage, and distribution adequate?
• Do you have a certified operator who has the technical knowledge needed to operate your utility?
• Is your source water of poor quality or quantity?

Managerial

• Do you have appropriate staffing and organization?
• Do you have a history of water rates that are too low?
• Do your decision makers have a limited understanding of financing options?
• Does your staff have a lack of expertise in long-term water system planning?

Financial

• Is your revenue sufficient to cover expenses now and into the future?
• Do you have good credit worthiness?
• Are your water rates adequate?
• What kind of fiscal management and controls are in place?

Featured Case Studies Within this Webinar

• Some examples of information sharing that can be implemented between small community systems.
• Equipment sharing ideas from Great Falls & Helena, Montana, as well as Tremonton, Utah.
• Sometimes utilities have a hard time getting needed equipment and it can be beneficial to buy consortium and work with other systems to buy chemicals and supplies in bulk like the Southern Maine Regional Water Council.
• The Salmonella Outbreak in Alamosa, Colorado which exhibits the benefits of regionalization in action through WARN Operational Plans. The clean-up effort was estimated to take 3-4 weeks but was completed in 13 days due to the sharing of resources.
• An example of interconnection between Aurora, South Dakota and Brookings, South Dakota when one utility was consistently violating MCL for nitrate, the nearby utility was able to split the cost of a transmission pipeline to interconnect the systems.
• Panora & Des Moines, Iowa systems show how operational collaboration can work between a large system and small system.