It can be hard being a water utility when nobody needs you. Or worse yet, when you have to push people away. But the news seems rife with such stories of unrequited demand for service from water utilities that invested … Read more

It’s college football season again, and thoughts among many in the South, and elsewhere, turn to tailgating and touchdowns, hot dogs and sodas, field goals and fun. (Here in Chapel Hill, we like to remember alumnus Andy Griffith’s famous 1953 … Read more

  As mentioned in last week’s blog post, some utilities are creatively setting varying base charges for subgroups of customer classes in order to more equitably distribute the (fixed) costs of the utility among customers with varying demands. One way … Read more

  Base charges are critical for water utilities’ finances given that the majority of utility expenses are fixed in the short term and require a stable revenue source to pay for them despite decreasing demands. The most common practice is … Read more

This post originally appeared on June 20, 2014 in GOVERNING Magazine Online. Written by Liz Farmer If Washington, D.C. is undertaking a project that will benefit – at minimum – the next three generations, then why make just one generation … Read more

As water utilities across North America undertake capital campaigns to finance the replacement and expansion of their systems, the need for confident revenue projections grows. Yet many water utilities are subject to factors that can affect revenue variability, including volatile … Read more

Many government-owned wastewater systems in the United States are enterprise funds.  That is, they are business-like units within the overall government that should be self-sustaining, taking their revenue from the rates and fees charged to wastewater customers rather than from … Read more

This is Part 2 of a 2 part blog post on utility financial risk. Part 1 focuses on utility revenue risk, and Part 2 focuses on utility debt risk. In our first blog post on utility financial risk, we discussed … Read more

In honor of the World Cup that began last night, we are re-posting a wonderful image that made quite a splash online a few years ago. EPCOR Utilities, Inc., the water utility that serves the City of Edmonton in Canada, … Read more

This is Part 1 of a 2 part blog post on utility financial risk. Part 1 focuses on utility revenue risk and Part 2 focuses on utility debt risk. On April 29, 2014, the Texas-based utility Energy Future Holdings Corp. … Read more