The Brown’s Creek Watershed District (BCWD), located near Stillwater, Minnesota, was recently recognized by the Water Environment Federation with its Water Quality Improvement Award for reducing runoff and pollution to the trout stream it works to protect. Despite being located in a quickly urbanizing area, the BCWD has managed to improve the biological health of local water bodies with the result that native species are returning in a sustainable manner. In this interview, BCWD Administrator Karen Kill tells Municipal Water Leader about the agency’s activities and the successes it is seeing. 

The City of Pueblo, Colorado, recently undertook a renovation of its James R. DiIorio Wastewater Reclamation Facility, installing an Ntensify nutrient removal system that has made its treatment process significantly more efficient and has reduced chemical and energy expenses so much that the improvement will pay for itself within 2 years. In this interview, Pueblo’s director of wastewater, Nancy Keller, tells Municipal Water Leader about the benefits of the Ntensify system and about the Pueblo Wastewater Department’s other top issues. 

The Eastern Municipal Water District (EMWD) provides water, wastewater, and recycled water service to more than 825,000 people living and working within a 555‑square mile service area in western Riverside County, California. To ensure that it can provide these essential services far into the future despite the challenges of drought, population growth, and development, it carries out a variety of master planning and strategic planning activities. One significant area of wastewater planning relates to septic-to-sewer conversions, which must be accomplished with future decades of growth and development in mind so that the infrastructure that is planned and built is adequate to handle all the flows an area could potentially generate.…

Charlotte Water in North Carolina is working on a major refurbishment program to improve its McAlpine Creek Wastewater Facility and address the aging of the infrastructure, some of which dates back to the 1960s. The project aims to rehab the heart of the plant, and will involve refurbishing or replacing aeration systems, blowers, and clarifiers and performing recoating of selected elements. In this interview, Charlotte Water’s deputy utilities director for operations, Ron Hargrove, tells Municipal Water Leader more about this major undertaking and about the utility as a whole. 

The municipal government of the city of Auckland, New Zealand, has created a program to easily present up-to-date information on water quality and hazards at local beaches to the public. The Safeswim program uses regular testing, real-time data on the performance of wastewater and storm water infrastructure, and data modeling to generate its recommendations. Meanwhile, Auckland Council and its water utility are 3 years into a 10‑year infrastructure program to reduce the occurrence of wastewater overflows. In this interview, Safeswim Program Manager Nick Vigar tells Municipal Water Leader about how the program functions and the benefits it brings Aucklanders. 

Many of the nation’s large, federally owned hydropower dams are aging and in need of repairs, which are often funded by agencies like the Bureau of Reclamation. However, such funding streams are often not open to smaller, state-regulated private and municipal dams. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is helping address this gap through its National Dam Safety Program (NDSP), which provides pass-through grants to states, which in turn award the money to subrecipients who sponsor rehabilitation projects. In this interview, James Demby, the senior technical and policy adviser on dam safety issues and program manager for the NDSP, tells Municipal Water Leader about the projects that the program funds…

South Platte Renew (SPR) is a regional wastewater facility serving approximately 300,000 people in and around the cities of Littleton and Englewood, Colorado. As part of its energy optimization activities, it recently installed a gas recovery facility that allows it to capture the methane that is created as part of the wastewater treatment process, purify it, and sell it to Xcel Energy. In addition to the money it gets from Xcel, this earns SPR significant credit from federal and state renewable fuel standard programs. In this interview, SPR Director Pieter Van Ry tells Municipal Water Leader about the genesis of the program and his advice for other utilities that are…