Water 2050's Vision for Regional Collaboration

Abstract

Welcome to 2025. By the end of it, we will be a quarter of the way through this century and halfway to AWWA's Water 2050 vision—a vision that charts the future of water to the year 2050. In the near term, five Water 2050 strategic initiatives have been formed, one of which focuses on the creation of a one-water governance and policy model. Within that driver is a recommended action to improve utility economies of scale through regional collaboration.

Water professionals share ideas and best practices with great frequency—it is a cultural strength. Water 2050 envisions taking an additional step to gain greater economies of scale with utilities working together on a wide range of regional collaborations—everything from a shared workforce, to shared infrastructure, to shared governance.

The United States has roughly 50,000 community water systems, with 82% of them being either very small or small and serving 9% of the US population. At the other end of the spectrum, 8% of these utilities are large or very large, serving 82% of the population (see table).

AWWA's 2024 State of the Water Industry Report shows that in 2025, many utilities will face significant challenges in meeting operational and financial requirements of water quality regulations as well as making adequate investments in infrastructure, workforce, and cybersecurity.

While not necessarily a panacea, regional collaborations are a logical strategy to gain efficiencies and economies of scale to address these and other challenges. Think of it this way: regional collaborations could mean that rather than 50,000 utilities independently doing the same thing to meet all the water sector's challenges, a smaller number of regional collaborations (i.e., groups of utilities) could meet the challenges for everyone. This would likely result in operational and financial efficiency and reduce the inefficient redundancy of everyone doing everything.

In the drinking water and clean water sectors, a group of associations and other leaders, including AWWA, have joined to frame approaches to regional solutions. This collaborative group has developed a white paper titled No Community Left Behind: Blueprint for Affordable, Equitable and Sustainable Water and Wastewater Services. It advocates for regional solutions as the most promising future opportunities and frames five types of regional collaboration (see sidebar). The white paper can be found at https://nclb-water.com.

I believe that economic and regulatory pressures, among others, will drive water utilities to seek alternative organizational and governance structures and regional collaborative models. It is hard to imagine 50,000 water utilities independently addressing lead services lines, PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), workforce challenges, cybersecurity, source water protection, and infrastructure investments in the most economic, efficient way.

The vision, planning, and implementation of these organizational and governance structural changes is why Water 2050's road map can be so impactful. By starting now, thinking strategically, and taking steps toward the best approaches for your water system and community, the change can be planned and benefits achieved. Waiting for the future to come to you is not a sound strategy. The good news is, several communities have already implemented these changes. In March I will share one of those case studies with you.