How Regional Partnerships Can Accelerate Water System Improvements
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I recently read an article that explained how small water utilities could benefit from forming regional partnerships to repair or replace aging water infrastructure. What exactly is a regional partnership, you ask? Read on for the details.
What Regional Partnerships Can Do for Smaller Water Utilities
It’s no secret that water utilities are facing a tremendous number of headwinds right now, from lead pipes to emerging PFAS regulations to cyberattacks. And unfortunately, smaller water utilities don’t always have the resources necessary to address these challenges. This is where the notion of regional partnerships can come into play.
One example of a regional partnership is to essentially ‘connect’ 2 separate systems under the same management umbrella. Doing so would allow both operators to share technologies, expertise, and administrative functions, thereby providing an overall expansion of institutional knowledge as well as the ability to share resources and costs.
This arrangement offers the benefits of greater access to funding, shared resources, access to a higher level of expertise, and enhanced safety without the need to indulge in mergers and/or acquisitions. Therein lies the beauty of the arrangement – greater access to ‘big utility benefits’ without the need to actually become a ‘big utility.’
The merits of this approach are evident in the fact that states like California, Maryland and Texas are pursing some variation of it. The California State Water Resources Control Board, for example, supports water utility partnerships to “decrease costs and afford specialized personnel and equipment while sustainably managing local water supplies.”
With the growing number of challenges facing the water utility sector, the idea of regional partnerships makes a lot of sense. Fixing our nation’s aging water infrastructure requires time, money, and expertise that small utilities may not have in-house. By forming regional partnerships, small utilities will be better equipped to improve their systems, thereby improving service reliability.
