“Water Environment & Technology” article co-authored by AquaPoint founder, Craig Lindell

July 13, 2020

Edit: August 2020 – The below post was written as a summary of this article, which has been made available in full by WE&T Magazine. 

Craig Lindell, who founded AquaPoint in 1992, recently had an editorial published in “Water Environment & Technology” magazine. While the article itself is available to Water Environment Federation members only (for online access & membership information click here), Craig took some time to summarize themes from both this years & last years article:

 

Water Environment & Technology, the monthly journal of the Water Environment Federation (WEF) has in June of 2019 and again in June 2020 published co-authored editorials on the importance of a scalable approach to municipal sewer . In 2019 I collaborated with  WEF’s Small Communities Committee Chair and we addressed the need for states to design a third wastewater regulatory code or “governing system” that

  • Integrated the interests of citizens and communities such as reduction in costs and increases in property values with the interests of code compliance.
  • Integrates wastewater treatment with water resource management where the economic, ecological, and social circumstances  determine the economies of scale; where environmental risk determines the  Operations and Maintenance (O and M) costs of compliance; and where just in time delivery expands the options for financing infrastructure renewal.
  • Encourages the use of root cause analysis planning technologies that enable people to think as a group.
  • Increase available capital by shifting from state revolving funds to loan guarantee programs.

In June 2020 myself and WEF’s President Elect, Lynn Broaddus, co-authored “Now is the time to do things differently.” In it we insist infrastructure renewal must go beyond rate structures and design systems that

  • Encourage states to modify legislative, regulatory, financial and ecologically responsive guidelines.
  • Enable and incentivize programmatic structures that transcend the limitations of the Environmental Health and Point Source codes.
  • Include performance based codes that include  climate change, rainfall, flooding, resource limitations and recovery, power outages and national security as essential considerations for the design of infrastructure renewal.
  • Enable communities to think strategically and collaboratively about the size, scale and risk considerations associated with the phasing of construction as well as life cycle operations and maintenance schedules.
  • Leverage scalable infrastructure renewal that is:
    •  flexible,
    • minimally disruptive,
    •  pay as you go,
    •  just in time.
  • Design infrastructure renewal:
    • to maximize capital formation,
    •  enhance non-rate based sources of revenue,
    • Converts intangible assets such as variances, ordinances and special purpose legislation into tangible assets.