WLI 2025 Final Project: Embracing Innovation to Lead Water Sector Transformation

Each year the final project is a major part of the Water Leadership Institute. The WLI 2025 cohorts wrote articles on turning challenges into strengths through resilient leadership.  

Embracing Innovation to Lead Water Sector Transformation

How effective leadership encourages innovation and problem-solving

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “innovation?” Probably shiny new equipment, a new computer program, or advanced technology that can solve all your problems. However, this is one of the biggest myths about technology, innovation, and problem-solving that needs to be reimagined.

Instead, innovation and problem-solving can take many forms:

• Innovating with and optimizing existing technology
• Fostering a culture of accountability and innovation
• Collaborating in new ways across the industry

Leaders must be the driving force of innovation. Yet, creating a culture of innovation and problem solving is easier said than done. Leaders must champion an empowering and creative culture while understanding the "hard truths" of operating in a sector that provides a crucial resource for day-to-day life. These "hard truths" highlight that:

• Systems are built for consistency, not agility.
• The water industry is stricken with old infrastructure and an aging workforce.
• Our industry is risk-averse. The consequences of failure could be massive regarding public health and safety.
• Innovation can be costly, and justifying new capital projects is hard without regulations.
• Some new technologies do not fit under regulatory standards, creating an additional barrier.

Lessons learned from three utilities, small and large, demonstrate that innovation can occur when barriers are removed and the right leaders step up.

Borough of Mechanicsburg, PA

The Borough of Mechanicsburg, PA, with a population of 9,500, faced rising costs for disposing of biosolids from its water resource recovery facility. In 2008, landfill disposal cost was $40,313, representing 3% of the Borough’s Water Pollution Control Facility budget. Although this was a relatively small portion of the budget, upcoming facility upgrades and changes in local land use were expected to increase biosolids production and disposal costs. As land development expanded and farming declined, biosolids had to be transported farther for land application, further increasing expenses. Rather than accept these challenges and higher costs, Borough leadership proactively sought a solution.

Leadership decided to investigate whether their waste could become an asset. The Borough piloted a biosolids composting program to assess the facility’s ability to produce Class A biosolids. In 2012, the Borough completed construction of the composting facility, and today, Waste-No-More™ is sold as a soil amendment to the public. In 2024, the cost to the Borough to compost biosolids was $23,856, including revenue from the compost. It was estimated that the cost to haul the biosolids to the landfill would have been $81,500. Not only did composting the biosolids result in cost savings, but it also created a valuable use for the water resource recovery facility’s “waste.”

Minnesota Wastewater Regionalization Projects

The wastewater industry in Minnesota faces new and stricter effluent regulations along with ongoing challenges such as staffing shortages and limited funding for plant upgrades. Regionalization is emerging as a practical solution, focusing on leadership and collaboration rather than new technology. Shifting from individual plant upgrades to regional projects requires long-term vision and resilience to deliver cost savings, improve efficiency, protect the environment, support growth, and promote sustainability.

Regionalization combines resources and infrastructure to treat wastewater efficiently and cost-effectively, often through shared facilities and inter-municipal agreements. This approach leverages economies of scale to improve treatment performance and reliability while reducing the financial, environmental, and regulatory burden on individual communities. It is especially beneficial for smaller communities with aging infrastructure or capacity limits.

Despite these benefits, regionalization projects often struggle to gain support from local officials who fear losing control and local jobs. Utility-to-utility collaboration can ease these concerns. Seeing a new technology or treatment model succeed at another utility reduces the perceived risk for others. The Minnesota cities of Montrose and Waverly benefitted from seeing a neighboring utility’s effective regionalization project for more than 10 years before deciding to join the regionalized facility.

The project succeeded due to the city engineer’s leadership in fostering collaboration, building trust, and advocating for change. By highlighting the long-term benefits of a new treatment model, the engineer guided the city councils through concerns and helped develop a robust, cost-effective solution.

Sacramento Area Sewer District- Harvest Water

The Sacramento Area Sewer District (SacSewer) is addressing California’s Central Valley irrigation challenges with its Harvest Water program . Groundwater levels in the region have declined for decades. To stop further aquifer depletion, SacSewer’s leadership envisioned a collaborative solution that:

• Replaces pumped groundwater with recycled water
• Recharges local aquifers
• Will raise groundwater levels by up to 35 feet over 15 years
• Will deliver 16 billion gallons of recycled water each year to irrigate over 16,000 acres of farmland

This project depended on partnership. In 2010, a new discharge permit required SacSewer to change its treatment process. Instead of simply updating the facility, SacSewer and its partners prioritized the agricultural economy and explored an innovative water management option – water recycling. The resulting EchoWater Resource Recovery Facility, completed in 2023, meets high water quality standards for irrigation. With this facility operating, the Harvest Water project is under construction and aims to begin operation in 2027. Harvest Water’s infrastructure will deliver water to farmland through a major pump station, an extensive pipeline, and numerous farm connections.

At the heart of this historic program is community partnership. SacSewer prioritzed understanding community needs and building local trust by conducting 1:1 conversations with farmers and other stakeholders and then aligning engineering recommendations with the public’s needs. SacSewer’s approach demonstrates how innovation, leadership, and strong partnerships can reimagine water management. Through consistent engagement with the agricultural community, SacSewer overcame project challenges and introduced recycled water use – an advance only possible through collaborative leadership.

Lessons Learned:

Decisions made by utility leaders enable these communities to embrace technology and innovation. In most cases, innovation is not a new, shiny piece of technology: it is the ability for leadership to remove common barriers that exist in the water industry to allow for new, innovative ideas to be realized.

Authors:

Andrew Beatty, Curtis Huey, Jan Nowak, Nikki Ong, Bennett Parsons, Kathryn Serra and Sara Sietsema