By Kris Polly

This month, we are proud to bring our readers features on the work underway at five municipal water utilities, spanning our country from coast to coast. In our cover story, we interview Zach Renstrom, the general manager of the Washington County Water Conservancy District, which serves the fast-growing St. George, Utah, metro area. We talk about the district’s conservation efforts; its significant water reuse initiatives; and Colorado River issues, which remain critical.

Janisse Quiñones is the CEO and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP). In our interview, she discusses the utility’s response to this year’s devastating wildfires and goes deep on LADWP’s modernization plan and long-term water strategies.

Moving up the coast to the Bay Area, we check in with Jake Walsh, San Jose Water’s vice president of engineering. We discuss major infrastructure and battery projects, leak detection, and community outreach.

Next, we visit the Midwest with our interview with Tami Madsen, the executive director of Central Iowa Water Works (CIWW), which started operations this year. CIWW’s 12 member agencies, which serve more than 600,000 people, have joined forces to share the costs of major capital expansions and increase their collective resiliency.

Reaching all the way to the East Coast, we interview Scott Firmin, the new general manager of Portland Water District in Portland, Maine. We hear about current capital projects as well as the utility’s super-pure water source, Sebago Lake.

After that, we turn to Jon Ullmark of technology provider Netmore. Based in Sweden and active globally, the company provides low-power wide area networks—perfect for advanced metering infrastructure projects—and can also deliver entire custom systems to municipalities as part of its platform-as-a-service or network-as-a-service models.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific and everywhere in between, municipal utilities are working around the clock to provide safe and reliable water resources for our growing cities. I hope that this month’s stories renew your appreciation for this critical work.

Kris Polly is the editor-in-chief of Municipal Water Leader magazine and the president and CEO of Water Strategies LLC, a government relations firm he began in February 2009 for the purpose of representing and guiding water, power, and agricultural entities in their dealings with Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other federal government agencies. He can be contacted at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.