Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to The Executive Exchange, a premier podcast series for on-the-go senior executives. Each episode features short, impactful podcasts where industry leaders share key insights and experiences from the water industry.
[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15-minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders around the globe.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark, and my guest today is Rebecca West from ReWa in the United States, and we'll be talking about what ReWa is in a few minutes. But the main topic we're gonna be covering today is how do you engage with your local community? How do you maintain that license to operate?
[00:00:28] Piers Clark: Rebecca, brilliant to have you with us. Thank you for taking the time.
[00:00:31] Rebecca West: Oh, thank you for this opportunity to be with you today.
[00:00:35] Piers Clark: I do feel I should say that we are recording this at 9:00 AM in the UK, and it is 4:00 AM for you, and I did offer that we could have this a little later in the day, but you said, "No, no, Piers, I'm an early starter, 4:00 AM's fine."
[00:00:47] Rebecca West: Well, 4:00 AM may be just a little early for my start time, but I'm a person that once I start, I get rolling. Especially in the role I have with Renewable Water Resources, we have so many engagement opportunities and meetings, and I truly like to show up and it's full engagement until it's time to fall asleep.
[00:01:05] Piers Clark: Now tell us, what's the role you play at ReWa, we'll talk about what ReWa is in a minute, but what's the role you play at ReWa, and what did you do before you came into this role?
[00:01:15] Rebecca West: I'm the Chief Executive Officer for ReWa, which stands for Renewable Water Resources, and prior to that, I served as the Chief Operating Officer for not only ReWa, but Spartanburg Water and Greenville Water, and so I've had an opportunity to serve in a leadership role in multiple utilities in the upstate of South Carolina.
[00:01:34] Rebecca West: Where we are in South Carolina, we have a tremendous responsibility for the headwaters of the state. It is the fastest growing state within the United States, and we're at a critical time for water, for infrastructure, and just for change in our state.
Costs are not low anywhere in the world at this point in time, so making those investments are even more critical today to ensure that they're the right investments at the right cost, and certainly supportive for the future.
[00:02:00] Piers Clark: Excellent. So for people who don't know South Carolina very well, help us with the geography. Where are you based? How many people do you serve? What sort of services do you provide?
[00:02:10] Rebecca West: So South Carolina in and of itself has a little over six million people. We're in the southeast part of the United States. For people that are into cars, we're in the area where BMWs are made in the United States.
And Renewable Water Resources, or the community that I serve, is located in Greenville. Primarily we serve five counties in the upstate of South Carolina. So if you look at South Carolina, we're in the northwest quadrant of the state, pushed up against the Appalachian Mountains.
[00:02:39] Rebecca West: And also, we just have beautiful waters here originating from rivers and streams that come from the mountains or adjacent to those areas. And they're very pristine water streams still, despite the growth that we have. So our goal is to keep them pristine and also ensure that we're returning enough water back into the rivers and streams to support the remainder of the state as that travels to the coast.
[00:03:01] Piers Clark: Excellent. Now the topic we're gonna talk about today is the things you've done at ReWate to engage with the local community, and I like to call it ensuring you've got the license to operate.
[00:03:10] Piers Clark: How do you ensure that the communities you serve understand and value what you're doing, especially as you just outlined, when you're in a time when globally there is a cost of living crisis.
[00:03:21] Piers Clark: So, walk me through some of the things you've done to engage with your local communities.
[00:03:26] Rebecca West: Renewable Water Resources used to be called Western Carolina Regional Sewer Authority. We provide used water services to our community. So of course no one wants to engage in talking about used water. And so if you think about, we've got some barriers and challenges there.
[00:03:41] Rebecca West: Back in the early 2000s, our board and our leadership said, really we're not into just wastewater. We're into recovering resources from water that we're provided to clean. And so we changed our name to Renewable Water Resources.
[00:03:56] Rebecca West: And that name change began our engagement, one, to talk about what that branding change means. Two, to talk about, here's this used water that has so much value to it, and so how do we recover and reuse and be sustainably responsible for that.
We were engaging in our community before. We started the first biosolids program in the 80s, but I think our big turning point was that level engagement. So as we've walked through that change in our utility, we find ourselves today continuing to look for those opportunities for resource recovery.
We have a goal of being energy neutral within the next 10 years so that we really push ourselves to try to extract every bit of resource from that.
[00:04:40] Rebecca West: That's also a financial sustainable strategy because as I look at our operating budget, our energy usage is a strong 30% of our budget, if not more.
[00:04:51] Rebecca West: As I mentioned, we're at the headwaters of many of our rivers and streams in the upstate of South Carolina. So we have very stringent nutrient removal requirements. We do biological removal at a majority of our facilities. With that, we're already recovering nutrients of nitrogen and phosphorus, which makes our biosolids nutrient-rich.
[00:05:11] Rebecca West: We have nine water resource recovery facilities. Of those nine , we have five that have anaerobic digestion. So that again is not only a capital intensive, but also with biological phosphorus removal, we use a lot of air. We use a lot of pumping. We have UV disinfection at all of our facilities. So, very energy intensive.
[00:05:30] Rebecca West: So as we have this push to talk about energy neutrality, we also realize that our customer base is changing. With this being, as I said, the highest and fastest growing state in the United States, our demographics are completely different than where they were even 10 years ago.
[00:05:47] Rebecca West: So whatever engagement we had with our community to say who we are and what we do, that's changed. We have new customers with new perspectives.
[00:05:56] Rebecca West: We see the struggle of growth versus no growth. "We need to accommodate, and we want people to move here, but wait a minute, I don't want it to change too much." So, putting infrastructure in place you either decide on the size of the pipe, or the size of the system, or you don't. And that's a significant investment that takes several years to move forward.
[00:06:16] Rebecca West: So as we're making those decisions and those investments, engaging in our community to talk about what that cost means how we make that investment, where we put the newest treatment facility, how we expand our infrastructure, because it's gonna impact them, we may have to expand the size of our treatment facilities, or even build a new one.
[00:06:36] Rebecca West: No one ever wants to have those conversations, so how we engage has really become important for us, and we're finding new and different ways to do that.
[00:06:44] Piers Clark: So walk me through some of those ways that you're engaging with the community to keep them on board.
[00:06:49] Rebecca West: We are in the process of building a major upgrade to our collection pipes that collect our wastewater, that travels not only through our city of Greenville and Greenville County, but in the northern reaches of our city.
[00:07:03] Rebecca West: So this is gonna be close to an $80 million investment by the time we finish, and we are beginning to put the largest pipes that are closest to our treatment plant in place right now, and it's very disruptive.
We have walking trails that everyone loves in our community. Our major walking trail is called the Swamp Rabbit Trail, has a little over 2 to 3 million people a year that just walk and bike on this trail, and just enjoy it, and it's in through the heart of our city.
[00:07:32] Rebecca West: So we're gonna host a day at the very popular cafe along the trail. We're gonna have some breakfast. We're gonna have some coffee. We're gonna talk about these big pipes that we're putting in place, the purpose of it. Why we have part of the trail closed, some of our challenges of just installing infrastructure that size, they get to see how big it is.
It's through a floodplain area, so you've got the challenges of putting pipe in that might pop up and float, how do you build those supports for who gets to work on those pipes in perhaps the next 50 years, or make a repair?
[00:08:05] Rebecca West: We're going through a part of the oldest part of the city, so who knows what we find? So we find old landfills, and it's the challenge of going through a city that's been built on top of a city. What is it we're gonna discover today when we dig this hole that we thought was just dirt and kudzu?
[00:08:20] Piers Clark: Feels to me like there's a reality TV show, that you can have a TV crew- Absolutely ... with you following it on, digging. What have we found, whatever It might be.
[00:08:28] Piers Clark: Now, a key thing there is, you're the Chief Executive and you're going to be there today. You're going to be glad-handing the general public, explaining to them what this project's going to be.
[00:08:38] Piers Clark: Have I got that right?
[00:08:39] Rebecca West: Absolutely, and I'll be there with my team of engineers and contractors and communication and finance people, because we're talking about how we're financing this project. We have a policy for our capital projects to try to cash fund 50% of it so that we don't continue to add exorbitant debt long term.
[00:09:00] Rebecca West: And so, we have a chance to talk about a cool project, to let them see the muck and craziness that we have to do, kind of like the engineering feat which is fascinating in itself. We get to talk about how we're funding it, and how we're being responsible to keep rates low, our strategy for doing that.
[00:09:16] Rebecca West: And it's just a great touch point of different people along the day. We're gonna have our political leaders there. We've invited people to join us, and I'm excited because I've got the mayor of a community that's in the northern part of our county that is benefiting from this project. We've got a state representative that will be there today, and our county council chairman of Greenville County that has really been supporting smart infrastructure growth long term.
[00:09:42] Rebecca West: So I've got those audiences there that I get to spend a little time drinking coffee, walking on the trail, looking at the pipes, talking about how we plan for the future for our community.
And it's also an opportunity to talk about when you put infrastructure in place like this, you can't snap your fingers and do it overnight. The project inception started 15 years ago.
Like I said, the Swamp Rabbit Trail and this cafe is truly like the hip place in our community. So you've got a wide range of people that will be there, and we're just hoping that people that we have no idea were gonna show up will just engage.
[00:10:17] Piers Clark: The bit I love about this is you've taken what could in some utilities be seen as a relatively mundane engineering project that would just be technically running on in the background, and you're turning it into a media event that will engage with the public, and hopefully inspire, not people just to think, "Gosh, ReWa's really doing great work," but it actually might inspire the next generation.
[00:10:37] Piers Clark: There'll be people looking at this going, "Oh, this is what a utility does. Oh, this is what an opportunity might look like." It's brilliant.
[00:10:44] Rebecca West: And we've had a same level of engagement with our biosolids program. We were just out about a month ago now and we're changing how we apply our biosolids. We're moving from a more liquid product to a solid cake product.
We were out there with our farmers talking about it. We have one farmer that is so excited about it and standing in the field, watching biosolids fling out of the back out of a- ... manure spreader, saying how great this is, talking to their neighbors, and then listening to that farmer's excitement, because now he's our spokesperson.
[00:11:17] Rebecca West: And being able to hear his story of how this is great, and look at how green his farm is, his pasture is, but how it's saving money in this time of challenge for farmers, especially because of the cost of fertilizer and how he couldn't maintain his farm, and how it's also preserving a generational farm that he's gonna pass on to his sons.
[00:11:37] Rebecca West: And, you know, it's those types of stories and those days that just make my heart sing. I'm glad we're doing this. We're doing the good fight for biosolids. But to have a farmer tell me that he trust our product more than fertilizers, PFAS or not. He understands it.
[00:11:53] Rebecca West: And I just think again, that's how you continue to talk about our business and get support when you have tough roads ahead of talking about what's PFAS and what is the safe level, and what does it really mean to the person that's using that product.
[00:12:06] Rebecca West: And we wanna make sure it was being applied the way he wanted it to be applied instead of just go, "Here's your biosolids. Good luck with that." I think we take that extra touch and that extra responsibility and engagement. That's one thing I'm most proud about ReWa for, because we're not afraid to have those tough conversations to continue to get support.
[00:12:24] Piers Clark: Excellent. Unfortunately, Rebecca, we are running out of time. We always like to finish with a bit of a personal question.
What advice would you give someone entering the water sector now, someone going to be working in the sector from now until, say, 2080?
[00:12:39] Piers Clark: What advice would you give them?
[00:12:41] Rebecca West: I would tell them to jump in to any aspect of the water sector that appeals to them. There are so many facets to the water industry that's so different than when I first got into the sector, you know, it was kind of like you had this pathway.
Well, there's no pathway anymore. That's what I love about the circular water conversation. It's opportunities everywhere.
One of the questions I ask people if I'm engaged in the interview process for new people that come to join us at ReWa is when they go swimming, do they dive in or just jump in the deep in, or do they wade in?
[00:13:13] Rebecca West: And if a person says, "Oh, I just jump in the deep end," I'm gonna probably hire that person because it's like jump in to get fully immersed, and that, that's my advice. I mean, there's so much that is available today. As we all talk about we have so much need for support in our industry from a workforce support.
[00:13:32] Rebecca West: So I think it's truly your oyster. You know what? Pick whatever you wanna do, jump in there. Engage, and then I like to try to come alongside somebody and then pour as much as I can into them, you know, share experiences open doors for them, and then swim on, you know, continuing with the swimming analogy.
[00:13:49] Rebecca West: And then help them navigate to where they wanna go next. So, there's many of us in the water sector that wanna pour into new people, share our experiences, share how we can help them move to wherever they want to in the water sector.
[00:14:03] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Rebecca West, Chief Executive at ReWa in Southern Carolina in the United States.
[00:14:14] Piers Clark: We've been talking about engaging with the local community and keeping your license to operate.
[00:14:22] Piers Clark: Thank you to our sponsors. Keep asking questions, keep sharing, and keep safe.