Water utility governing boards serve a critical role in ensuring the provision of clean, safe drinking water. Governing boards are tasked with making important and complex decisions in line with the utility’s mission, and they ultimately serve to keep water … Read more

  This 23-slide PowerPoint was presented at a webinar hosted by the American Water Works Association (AWWA). The presentation highlights research about revenue trends and adaptive practices in utility financial management.  

When the five small water systems in Hampton County, South Carolina decided to band together to create the Lowcountry Regional Water System (LRWS), they, like many other small water systems across the country, faced a number of managerial and financial … Read more

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

Water utilities face trying times when communicating the need to increase rates to cover the increasing costs of operating water and wastewater utilities. The issues are complex. The public is constantly bombarded with news from their phones, TVs, computers, etc., … Read more

Growing up in a country where school uniforms were mandatory, I viewed uniforms as, well …, “boring!” At least that was the way I felt in high school. One of the most engaging classes I can recall was when the … Read more

Mary Tiger is the Chief Operating Officer of the Environmental Finance Center at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The water industry, just like any other, suffers from a variety of financial constraints and challenges. Over the last decade … Read more

Glenn Barnes is senior project director with the Environmental Finance Center based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He is the co-director of the Smart Management for Small Water Systems Project. Drinking water systems of all sizes … Read more