Managing Your System into the Future: Rate Setting

Presentation Description:

This session will present the basics of rate structure design and how these structures may affect revenue generation, help or hinder various utility objectives, and support affordability initiatives.  This session will also cover how a community can approach starting to charge for water/wastewater and where can revenue be applied and introduce a rates analysis tool that can be used to test scenarios and help determine whether the utility needs to adjust rates to achieve financial sufficiency.

Presenters:

Ahmed Rachid El-Khattabi, Associate Director at the Environmental Finance Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (EFC)

Dr. Ahmed Rachid (AR) El-Khattabi is the Associate Director of the Environmental Finance Center (EFC) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His background is in applied economics and urban planning. He earned his Ph.D. in 2020 from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. El-Khattabi’s expertise is in policy-oriented quantitative research and data management. His research focuses on issues at the intersection of economic development and environmental planning, particularly urban water management. Before joining the EFC, he was an ORISE Postdoctoral Fellow and then an Economist in the Water Economics Center at the US Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Water. At the EPA, he co-developed an environmental justice batch screening tool (EJSCREENbatch), contributed to the development of support tools for regulatory benefits analyses, and conducted research to support national rulemaking related to Waters of the United States.

Who should attend:

Tribal Leaders, Tribal Utility Board members, Utility Managers, Tribal Infrastructure and Planning Directors, Financial Directors