Today, Aquasight's Mahesh Lunani welcomes Andrew Lee, CEO of Seattle Public Utilities. He currently manages about 1,400 employees, and has previously worked in Bellevue, San Franscisco, and various consulting firms.
First and foremost to Andrew is a desire to serve people. Yes, in Seattle they service large corporations like Microsoft and Amazon, but Andrew takes pride in serving the most vulnerable and underserved communities. This means more than infrastructure - it also means wealth building and jobs. Today's guest works at the intersection of service, faith, and engineering and technical skills.
Overall, SPU provides water to 1.5 million people and drainage/wastewater servivces to abourt 800,000 on an annual budget of $1.4 billion.
While investments in the future are primarily driven by regulatory compliance and asset management, SPU is also looking at improvements for frontline workers, and even AI -which Andrew sees as a tool to be implemented, not feared. And it can be used to educate customers.
Andrew believes in partnering with residents and customers. Cutting down on waste can be helped by reducing consumption. In fact, SPU's vision statement is "community-centered, one water, zero waste." Public perception often focuses on rates. But when customers are invited in to see all the work Seattle Public Utilities are doing, the focus often shifts from rates to awe, with regard to everything SPU is tackling.
Andrew wants to battle the "silver tsunami" in our industry by promoting the purpose of jobs in the water sector, as well as reaching out to underserved communities with job opportunities. In fact, he wants his legacy to be turning the tide of long-held practices and policies that have disavantaged certain communities.
More:
Seattle Publc Utilities website: https://www.seattle.gov/utilities/
Aquasight Website: https://aquasight.io/
Mahesh: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I am with Andrew Lee, Chief Executive Officer for Seattle Public Utilities. In his current role, Andrew manages about 1,400 employees, providing water, sewer, and garbage services for over a million and a half residents. Prior to Seattle, Andrew's professional career spanned across the City of Bellevue, Washington, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, and various other consulting firms.
He has Bachelor's in Civil and Environmental and Master's in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University. From my own interaction with Andrew, I see him, and I'm not saying this because he's a guest, but I see him as a decisive and action-oriented leader. He's willing to listen and really knows how to connect the dots, which is an amazing strength that I've seen interacting with him. I look forward to getting to know Andrew and how he sees the challenges in water, wastewater, and the opportunities and how he's going about addressing them. There's a lot to unpack. Welcome, Andrew. Look forward to the discussion.
Andrew Lee: Thank you so much, Mahesh, for having me. I really appreciate being on.
Mahesh: Real pleasure. I want to get right into it. How did your career shape up and what is the most exciting thing you've done to date?
Andrew: I started off with a desire to serve people. Part of that was inspired by my faith, but a ton of that was just a desire to be a civil servant, to be meeting just basic needs that people have and serving, I would say, the most vulnerable, not just in our local communities, but also in the world. I saw an opportunity to do that by studying civil and environmental engineering. I loved the aspect of science coupled with public policy and engineering and technical skills to be able to address, again, basic needs of people like sanitation, drinking water. That led me into, again, about a 20-some-year career spanning public agencies as well as consulting firms.
I feel like each of my experiences has been incredibly rewarding. I loved being in consulting. I loved being in the public sector. That blend, again, of public policy combined with the technical engineering services has just been a perfect match and a blend for me. Maybe not the most exciting, but I'll say the most meaningful work to date for me has been always interacting with community. My first experience with this was in San Francisco after they had some 100-year floods in the city, causing some of the greatest damage that the city has ever seen related to stormwater and sewage flooding into people's homes.
That launched me into just a strong desire to always connect with community and especially serve those communities where infrastructure is lacking and not serving, again, those basic needs. We're currently doing that type of work in the South Park community in Seattle, where we're working really hard to advocate for basic infrastructure as well as funding to address things like sea level rise, flooding, sewer backups. Also extending beyond just the traditional infrastructure, because what we hear from the community is, yes, they struggle with the flooding and the sewer backups, but they also struggle with housing.
They also struggle with wealth building, you know, jobs. They want more open space for their community. They want better air quality. Figuring out how do we implement approaches that are going to be helping them with those type of real needs that the community faces while also addressing their basic needs for safe drinking water and sewer and sanitation and drainage services. To me, that's, again, some of the most valuable work that we do, the most meaningful work that we're engaging in.
Mahesh: It's fascinating. You talked about that you're operating at an intersection of service, faith, and engineering and technical skills. It's an amazing Venn diagram-
Andrew: Yes.
Mahesh: -on what inspires you, I suppose. Now you run Seattle Public Utilities. It's a very large organization. Can you put a fact sheet on it? How big is it? What's the budget you're monitoring, assets you are taking care of? Can you describe SPU?
Andrew: Yes, we're big. [laughs] On our drinking water system, we serve about 1.5 million people in the Greater Seattle area. That includes many of the outerlying cities in the region, like Bellevue, Redmond, which are the centers for Microsoft, T-Mobile, as well as the communities right within Seattle. We have Starbucks and Amazon, some of the really, really large companies that people are familiar with.
From a drainage and wastewater standpoint, we serve about 800,000 people that are primarily within the City of Seattle limits, a few communities that are just north of the city. We provide on the drainage and wastewater collection side, we do everything except for treatment. The larger pipelines and the larger pump stations are operated and maintained by King County. They handle the wastewater treatments and then the eventual disposal and the biosolids, etc.
The third service that we provide is related to the solid waste utility. We provide garbage collection and services, as well as recycling and composting to, again, the roughly 800,000 residents and businesses in the City of Seattle. I think on the solid waste side, we take a really, really strong approach of waste prevention. A ton of emphasis over the last 30 years on recycling, but I think the solution set that we're seeing for the long term is just reducing waste, period. Trying to get as low to zero waste as possible.
Backing up to the water system, I glossed over that really quickly, but our water system extends out to two watersheds where we actually own a large chunk of the watershed, one in what's called the Cedar River watershed, the other one is the Tolt watershed. Those two watersheds obviously collect the water, they bring them to reservoirs that we manage, dams as well, and then eventually to two treatment plants that we operate.
We have a contracted operation actually with two different private firms. That eventually flows into those 1.5 million users. From a length of pipeline, each of our systems manages greater than 1,500 miles of pipeline. When you combine it all, it's close to 5,000 miles of pipeline. We have a significant number of pump stations, other assets related to that. I mentioned our two treatment plants. We have two transfer stations as well for our solid waste collection, so a huge number of assets that we manage.
Mahesh: Just given the role and given what you're managing, I can rename CEO as chief or a circular economy officer instead of a chief executive officer, because really you're trying to make sure that you have a total renewable cycle recycling operations. Maybe we should change the way our water, wastewater directors and CEOs are called as, moving forward. Given what you described, the investments, the assets, the budget, a lot of times you talk about investments in billions in this space, where are your investments flowing in the next five years?
Andrew: Yes, so scope in terms of budget, we manage a $1.4 billion annual budget. We are the most capital-intensive department in the City of Seattle, simply because we have such a large investment, especially on our drainage and wastewater and drinking water sides. We are so asset heavy, if you think about it. Our biggest investments for sure, if I'm going to name two top ones, they are regulatory compliance and then asset management.
Regulatory compliance primarily comes as driving our investments on the wastewater side of the world. We have a combined sewer overflow and a sanitary sewer overflow consent decree with EPA and the Department of Justice and Department of Ecology, Washington State. We're right now spending close to $600 million on a tunnel project that is going on to control sewage overflows. We're going to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars more in fact on that.
On the asset management side, obviously this is bread and butter for many water utilities and wastewater utilities. We are actively in replacement of aged assets. In our drainage and wastewater utility, we're spending close to $40 to $50 million in replacement of aged assets per year. Our drinking water utility is a little bit less than that or I should say a lot less than that, but we're slowly ramping up replacement of our drinking water assets as well.
If I move away from those two biggies, regulatory compliance on the wet weather side and then asset management, I would say there are probably three other things that we're trying to invest in, especially over the next 5 to 10 years. Some of these are longer term. One is facility improvements for our frontline workers. For so many years, we've been reliant on very, very old facilities that were [laughs] constructed in the 1960s or 1970s. That has an impact on our frontline workers, and so we are trying to invest more in frontline facility improvements.
Another thing is technology investments. You're very familiar, I'm sure, with advanced metering infrastructure. We're looking for upgrades such as that. Then the last thing, which oftentimes is not a central focus of water utilities or wastewater utilities, but we're going to be doing some pretty significant investments in sediment cleanup as well to address historical pollution into one of our most polluted waterways, which is the Duwamish River. We're going to, again, invest hundreds of millions of dollars into sediment cleanup over the next 10 to 20 years.
Mahesh: That would fall under your responsibility in terms of cleaning up the river or is it something as stewardship you're trying to do for the region?
Andrew: Yes, yes. We are one of three or four major parties to cleanups that are Superfund cleanups. Technically, they're managed by EPA on behalf of cleanup projects. However, as a participant and a key participant in a performing party, we typically help manage and lead the design work on these projects and then oversee the construction on them as well.
Mahesh: Got it. Those are some of the investments you talked about. Those are some big checks to cut and big projects to deliver. I suppose one of the competencies of the water sewer departments is, how do you manage these effectively on time, on schedule, on money? I want to talk about, no utility today is dealing with complete smooth operations. You are confronted with big challenges. Beyond the consent decree and asset management, what other big challenges you have in the water sewer space today?
Andrew: Yes. People oftentimes ask me, "Andrew, what keeps you up at night?" The number one thing I will always mention is rates. The cost of our services is increasing. Our average rate increases for the last, let's say, three to six years has been around 4.2%. Prior to that, in the previous six-year cycle, it was estimated to be around 5% per year. Those are significant increases for our customers. I think about it all the time, "Are our most vulnerable customers able to pay for those bills?" We're talking about basic services, drinking water, wastewater. These are not optional, so making sure that those services are affordable for our customers is a huge challenge for us.
We have a lot of approaches to try to do that, like affordability programs. We're really been pleased with the amount of federal funding that's coming in more recently, but this is not a challenge that is going away anytime soon. When you think about it, the amount of external funding that we're getting is still a drop in the bucket. It's going to be a future challenge that I'm going to be confronted with during my entire time as a General Manager/CEO for SPU.
More stringent regulations is a huge challenge. I talked about regulatory compliance. Any of the regulations we're facing today, we know that they're going to be more stringent in the future. One of the biggest costs, and this relates directly to rates, is new nutrient regulations. There is something that's being executed right now by the department of ecology that's going to require nutrient treatment in the Puget Sound area. The cost for that will be in the billions.
There's a massive amount of infrastructure as well, primarily treatment infrastructure that will need to be built to comply with that. That's going to be a huge burden on our rate payers, but a necessary one, I will say. I never want to paint a picture that these regulations are not important. They're incredibly important to the water quality of the region, but they are incredibly costly.
Three other things that I would say are challenges that keep me up at night. One is seismic resiliency. We are an earthquake-prone area, so I think a lot about, "Are we ready for the next 'big one'?" Making sure that our systems are robust and we're ready to tackle that challenge is hugely important. A second one is cyberthreats. We have not been immune to cyberthreats. There is a quotation, you know, "There are two types of people, the people that have been attacked and the people that don't know they've been attacked," right? [chuckles] from a cyber threat.
Mahesh: Right, right.
Andrew: It's just not a matter of if, it's a matter of when or how, I guess you could say. Actively thinking about how we're preventing that, how we're mitigating it, or how we're limiting the damage that could result from it. Then the last thing is just climate change. This is everyone's thing, but we're experiencing this real-time. We have communities along the Duwamish River, which is tidally influenced, that recently had their worst flood that anybody can remember. The sea level was two feet higher than the high tide that was predicted back on December 27th.
We're seeing more wildfires. It's funny, I can remember 10 years ago when no one was talking about wildfires. Now, every single year, we have at least two weeks of smoke in the Puget Sound area. That's unheard of. Changing temperatures are affecting our snowpack and our rainfall patterns. More intense storms are causing more flooding, more CSOs, SSOs, so the whole picture of climate change is one that we're actively needing to address as a challenge. It's very real for us right now.
Mahesh: By just listening to this response to this question, rate increases, stringent regulations, seismic resiliency, climate change, cyberthreat, you wonder, "Anybody wants to take this job up?" Right?
Andrew: [laughs]
Mahesh: These are real threats that are beyond a human or organization that can handle. It requires an entire ecosystem, right?
Andrew: Yes.
Mahesh: I guess as a leader, it's really important to have the best you can do in terms of mitigation plans, right?
Andrew: Yes.
Mahesh: Really, this is a test of leadership as I see it. Getting ready. Now, as I was researching for this discussion of ours, I love getting into specific details, there were three things that popped up during my research. One is the 6% water distribution leaks you currently have, which is below the 10% target. How'd you get there? That was one. Second is you have about 2.6 overflows for every 100 miles. What's your strategy to get that down? Then I&I in general is a problem. That's the main reason why you run into wet weather events. Otherwise you can separate these flows. How are you tackling each one of these now or in the future? What's your view on this?
Andrew: Yes, the distribution system leaks on the water side. I would love to give credit to a very, very [laughs] strong and calculated asset management program. The reality is that although we have older pipes in our system, the soils in our region have generally been more favorable when it comes to pipe degradation. With the particular material that we have overall, our leakage rates have been lower than other parts of the country and the world with similar pipe material and ages.
It's not something that we necessarily designed, but it's something that we've inherited. It's true, actually, broadly across the Puget Sound. We're largely glacial till soil. Again, it's more favorable for pipelines in terms of material. I will highlight though, we take an incredibly data-centric view when it comes to reducing anything, whether it's leakage or SSOs, like you mentioned the 2.6 SSOs per 100 miles. We weren't always there when it comes to SSOs. In fact, I can look back, not quite 10 years ago, but probably about 13 or 14 years ago, when our SSOs were up there in the 8 to 10 per 100 miles range.
We took a very, very proactive and data-centric view to reducing those down to where they are right now. Some of this was obviously in cooperation with EPA and Ecology. They had certain requirements for us. What I will say is we focused on, "Where were the problems occurring? What were the factors that were contributing to those causes? What did we need to optimize our cleaning schedules, our rehabilitation schedules, our inspection schedules? How did we need to optimize that to tailor it to the risk of an SSO for each individual pipe segment?
What I can say is we could have taken a very, very draconian approach to this, like, "We're just going to clean every single pipe every five years," or "We're going to inspect every single pipe every 10 years." I think that could have gotten us to where we are today, potentially, but the reality is that would have also cost us a lot of money, right? [laughs]
Mahesh: Right.
Andrew: A much better approach is to look at the data that we have available to us and to tailor the mitigation program, whether it's cleaning, inspection, or root cutting, or no matter what it is for treatment, to what are the problems that are occurring and how often are they occurring. The result is we have pipelines that we may clean every 20 years. Then we have pipelines that we actually clean every 6 months or some even every 30 days, because the risk is simply higher.
We have areas of our system where we focus tremendously on FOG, fats, oils and grease prevention through outreach and enforcement. We have other areas where we don't spend any time on that, because it's not an issue. Again, we've completely tailored our program based on the risk that is occurring. What I'm excited about, by the way, on this is we created systems and tools to be able to do that. Nowadays, these systems are coming out very much more automated, and so using machine learning tools to study the data and study other factors that are contributing to this. We have not stepped into that space yet, but I absolutely believe that that's the future.
Just give a computer a bunch of data, which we have and allow the computer to figure out what's the optimal schedule for these mitigation measures. You asked lastly about I&I. Our I&I problem varies throughout the city. We have some areas where I&I is incredible and we have other areas where it's not as intense. We approach this through a case-by-case analysis of the problem using primarily hydraulic modeling and monitoring. To quantify the issue and then do a thorough options analysis to address the issue. Again, a very high focus on data approach to addressing it and making sure we're doing the optimal approach to solving it.
Mahesh: It sounds like you're using data and intelligence to be a sharpshooter than the shotgun approach-
Andrew: Yes, [crosstalk]
Mahesh: -to each of these problems. That's the way the future is headed. Now, the next step for you is to automate everything in a way that can actually tell you without any human resources. Now you can still have a mitigation plan. So more cost-effective way-
Andrew: Yes.
Mahesh: -to achieve the same objective. I know you have a very complex-- because you're dealing with the residents, you're dealing with wholesalers who are getting water from you, you're dealing with the regional partners like King County, it's a very complex role and complex interactions. How are you engaging with residents, with your stakeholders, and with King County to manage these challenges that you talked about, including rates?
Andrew: This is an incredible challenge. I will be the first to say that while I love engaging with people in general, that external-facing communications is an area where we have tremendous opportunity to grow as a utility. Our vision statement is three things. It's community-centered, one water, zero waste. The community-centered piece is at the heart of everything that we do. I heard a person talk about the four ways we can spend money. This is an economist that talked about this. He said, it can be my money spent for myself. It can be my money spent for someone else. It can be me spending other people's money on myself or other people [laughs] spending on other people. That last one other people's money on other people is the hardest one because the further we distance ourselves from spending our money on ourselves, the more likely we are to not necessarily make the best decisions, right?
Mahesh: Yes.
Andrew: Yet, my challenge and our challenge in public utilities is to do that in a way where it's as though we're spending my money on myself. That's so critical. In order to do that, we have to be incredibly engaged with our community. We have a really multifaceted approach to this. We have a customer review panel that's composed of customers who are appointed by our mayor or council that informs our strategic business plan. We do continuous surveys and focus groups with residential and business community to get feedback on how they feel about our services.
What I will say, and I love telling this because it's powerful, when I was at Bellevue Utilities, we would invite customers to take like a class actually about city services. This class is called Bellevue Essentials. The very first year the city manager did this class, there were 30 people that came up and signed for it. They took a class on police. They took a class on fire. They took a class on parks and transportation. The city manager completely forgot to include utilities in this, so we took offense at that. We're like, "Why would you forget to include utilities?
The next year he did, so we were class number 8 out of maybe 10 or something like that. No joke, at the end of the entire session of all these 10 classes, the people are polled to ask them, "What are your favorite classes?" Hands down, utilities was everyone's favorite. People loved what we talked about. Next year, we did it and same exact thing. Everyone loved utilities. The conversation we had with people and the feedback that we got was, "We had no idea what you guys did." This is so hidden and yet it's a gem.
Fast forward, six years later, I'm here now at Seattle Public Utilities. We did this online focus group over several days with about, let's say, 20 to 30 customers. Totally a variety of people. Some single, some married, some old or retired, just economically, socioeconomically diverse, racially diverse, gender diverse. When people started the focus group, the first question was like, "Well, tell me what you know about Seattle Public Utilities?" People started talking about, "Well, I think they do our electrical utility." We don't do electricity. [laughs] They had no idea who we were.
Then the next comment was, "Boy, my bills are really, really high." That's our first impression, high bills. Then as we started talking about our services, we started hearing a complete change in the conversation. The change was people started to say, "Oh my gosh, I didn't know you were doing all this work to prevent climate change." "Wow, I had no idea you guys had such an amazing focus on serving the most vulnerable in our community and protecting them from sea level rise and sewage overflows." "Oh my gosh, I love the work that you're doing in the watershed to protect our most valuable resource."
The more people found out about this, they were like, "Oh gosh, I would want to give more money to you guys because the things that you're doing are so incredible and your values, SPU, Seattle Public Utilities, are so in line with my values. This is where I want to see our money spent on." The entire conversation shifted. It was incred-- and this was just over three days. We're talking a very, very short amount of time, but I've seen this time and time again. That when people engage with us, they actually grow to appreciate us so much more and they stop talking about high rates and they start talking about, "Wow, the value of what you provide is incredible."
I feel like that engagement is something that we need to do so much more of and we can do such a better job of improving the level of understanding that people have of our services. Just to cap on one last thing, King County is a huge partner in everything we do. You asked about our relationship with other stakeholders. We actively partner with the county on our CSO projects, our SSO projects. We also work with them on our flood control districts. Our objectives are incredibly aligned in terms of improving water quality, but keeping rates affordable, especially for our most vulnerable community. It's a strong partnership that we have there. We try to work together with them as much as possible.
Mahesh: It's a great storyline about what you experienced in City of Bellevue and because it's hidden, infrastructure is hidden, not many people know. You open the tap or you flush the toilet and nobody knows what happens after. Is that a permanent fixture now in City of Seattle for you or is this just a one-off thing?
Andrew: Yes, it may become a more permanent fixture. [chuckles] I think we're in that mode of trying to assess our engagement tools with the public and see what should we be making as an annual thing? What should we do more continuously? What tools are we not tapping into already?
Mahesh: It takes time. It's not easy. Somebody's got to tell the story, every time. It takes away your resources. You talked about asset management program. Where do you see the biggest opportunity for improvement from here on in your asset management program?
Andrew: Yes, two things. I would say number one on the technology side, we already talked about this, the opportunity to automate tools, to determine what is the optimal assets to be addressing in terms of aged assets, as well as what is the optimal timing for replacement. I think those two things are going to be incredibly-- they're just going to push us so far forward in terms of less reliance on, I would say, on our human resources, which will enable our human resources to do other things actually. I don't see this as a job elimination thing.
I see this as simply expanding our ability to do other important work, but I do think that the artificial intelligence, machine learning tools that are now available are going to continue to improve. As more utilities sign up, there's more data available. It's going to really, really transform the ability of utilities to prioritize and focus their assets, their asset replacement or assets rehabilitation, renewal strategies in a very, very focused and timely way. That's the first thing when it comes to asset management.
I think the other thing that we're seeing when it comes to asset management is just a really, really strong emphasis on just new technologies in terms of actually just addressing the aged asset, the underground asset issue. Digging up our pipelines is incredibly, incredibly expensive. I'll say it this way, our reliance, I think, on underground infrastructure in some ways is going to always be there. How else are we going to get rid of drainage infrastructure and things like that? I do see a potential shift down the road when it comes to asset management in terms of decentralized infrastructure.
I firmly believe that decentralized infrastructure provides us the opportunity to potentially avoid having to replace some of our aged assets. Take a simple example like wastewater. Right now, 100% of people's wastewater goes into pipes that go into bigger pipes, eventually making its way down to treatment plants. If we have the ability to treat onsite and to eliminate the need for that centralized infrastructure at a very, very small scale, that could potentially really, really transform our need to, again, spend billions of dollars on replacing and rehabilitating aged assets.
I think those types of things are going to potentially enable us to leapfrog the need or the driving need to replace billions of dollars of aged assets. It's like the word processor completely changing out the typewriter or eliminating the need for the typewriter. I think our industry primarily because of the cost that we're facing, we're going to need innovative solutions like that that are going to change the way that we provide services in the future.
Mahesh: I 100% agree with you, Andrew. I was on a Water 2050 panel and think tank that was run by AWWA, but I was also on the panel here in Toronto, speaking about it. One of the points I was making is exactly, you need eight gallons per day of drinking water for a family of four, but per day, per capita is 85 gallons times 4, about 250, 300 gallons. The remaining 350 minus 8 gallons is something you potentially can recycle locally or within a community or within a neighborhood. What you're talking about, decentralized infrastructure. The best parallel I can tell is, as we switch to electric cars, there's no more centralized charging infrastructure. Everybody's got a charger at home or in a housing neighborhood and so on.
I believe that there's no reason to treat the 350 million gallons and pump it when you only need 8 gallons to drink per day or whatever you need to touch your inside of the body and the skin and the food you eat. Somebody has to disrupt, somebody bold has to think in strategically changing that infrastructure. It may be beyond my lifetime for sure, to think like that. You talk a lot about climate change in all aspects, from sea level rise to pollution, to wet weather events, et cetera. How are you actually getting resilient through these things? What are you tactically doing to be more resilient to these events?
Andrew: When it comes to climate change, there is, "What are we doing to mitigate climate change and then what are we doing to adapt to climate change?" Both are incredibly important and we have to do both. From the mitigation side, we're doing what many other utilities are doing, which is we're actively working on electrification of our buildings, so again less dependence on fossil fuel sources. Where we can, we are looking at opportunities for renewable energy sources. That could be PVs, photovoltaics, solar power on our transfer stations or some of our pump stations, et cetera. It's also including things like looking into sewer heat recovery and looking into also our pressure-reducing valves, looking at putting in microturbines on that to generate electricity.
Again, we're looking at all of those things and we have some projects underway. We just built a huge photovoltaic array-- Not just, it's about nine years old, but on one of our transfer stations. We are in the process of installing a microturbine at one of our pressure-reducing valve stations. This is exciting stuff. The payback, unfortunately, right now, it's not short. Typically, the payback on these things ends up being 15 years or 20 years even. It's a long-term payback, but still I think it's absolutely the right thing to do to reduce our carbon footprint. Interestingly, because we work on the solid waste side, and I realize a lot of your listeners may not work on the solid waste side, but the opportunity to-- you talked about circular economy at the very beginning.
Mahesh: Exactly, yes, yes.
Andrew: That is so key to reducing carbon emissions. People oftentimes-- Single-use plastics, for example. Incredible amount of carbon goes into that and energy. Food waste, right? The largest sources of methane are landfills. This is true across the country. Methane, it can be up to like 20 times to 100 times as powerful of a greenhouse gas than just carbon dioxide. The primary source of methane in landfills is going to be things like food waste. It's the microbials breaking it down, going anoxic, and then obviously producing methane as a result of the processes there.
The more that we can reduce food waste, a huge, huge benefit in terms of reducing carbon dioxide getting into the environment. We have programs right now that try to take food waste from places that-- from supermarkets that are about to throw the food away and bring them to people who need the food, people with food insecurities. Talk about a win-win. We reduce carbon, but we also serve people and enable them to get food that they need.
Similarly, composting is a huge thing. The more that we can push food away from landfills and put it into the soil where those nutrients get used by new plants, talk about another win-win. It's, again, circular economy, right? We're putting things back into where they're meant to be as opposed to putting them in landfills producing methane. That's all on the mitigation side.
On the adaptation side, we're actively working on things like green infrastructure to address flooding. That's a huge place where we can sink in both carbon, because we're adding trees to the environment, but also absorb the flooding that's occurring in these neighborhoods. We're creating multi-use floodable areas in the city. We built one about 10 years ago in the Madison Valley area. It's a park space, but it's floodable. When there's intense rains, it can actually fill up with water.
We're changing our design standards. Interestingly, and maybe not surprisingly, what used to be like a 10-year storm is now occurring every 5 years. What used to be a 25-year storm is occurring every 10 years. We've changed our design standards to match that changing storm frequency. Again, just a few examples of how we're trying to adapt as well as mitigate.
Mahesh: If you are into science and technology, this is how you're going about mitigating and getting ready and being resilient. That's a fascinating space because you're talking about microturbine to methane to recycling. It's just fascinating for any science and technologist to be in this area. You talked about technology, which is you talked about AI, ML, and so on. Beyond that, what are you most excited about? What gets you inspired as you look forward from a tech point of view? It can be any tech. It could be treatment tech or IT tech, whichever form it is.
Andrew: Yes, I would say any technology that engages customers and puts the power to change in the customer's hands. This is one of the things that excites me so much, actually, about AMI. I know AMI is not a new technology, but it puts control in people because they now have the data on their water usage. They now have the ability to see when they're leaking and they have the ability to proactively change their actions or take actions based on that data.
Again, anything that changes that dynamic of a complete dependence on a utility that's a black box to them, that they don't know about, to one where customers are now engaged because they have the data in their hands and they're able to make substantial changes. That I think is powerful. On the waste side, for example, and again, I know they were talking about garbage right now and I love garbage [laughs] in addition to love [crosstalk] water, wastewater, but how many times do people think about what they're throwing away and then the impact that that has downstream?
No one thinks about that. They just throw their stuff away. What would it look like if we were to put information and have technology to put information in the customer's hands to say, "When you throw this away, this is the impact it has downstream." Could that affect the decisions? Could it affect purchasing decisions, for example? Maybe I'm not going to go ahead and buy a new shirt or a new text-- or whatever it might be, a new piece of equipment.
Maybe I'm going to make a different decision because I now know how much carbon that's going to emit to the environment or whatever it may be. Again, the technology piece and the customer engagement piece is the thing where I feel like we can advance the most. Water conservation is a very obvious thing, but ultimately going downstream into waste I think is going to be huge as well.
Mahesh: The parallels to this is when we have calorie count on every food packet that we buy, in the ingredients. That transparency changes our behavior. In the same way, you like to bring transparency in what consumers are doing so they can change the behavior, whether it's consumption or disposal of waste, which I think ultimately-- but the problem with this is it's gotten expensive, like deploying AMI is very expensive.
As innovators, we have to find the most cost-effective way to provide this information back to the consumer so they can drive behavioral change. I think there is a room for improvements there for many companies. You talked about AI and you are in Seattle, which is in many respects, a massive amount of investment flowing, massive excitement. What is your perspective and where do you see use case and application in the business you run?
Andrew: Everywhere. [laughs] I will confess I am not-- and maybe this is a downside for me as a leader, but I'm not as paranoid actually in terms of the potential negative repercussions of AI. I think that the potential is absolutely incredible, from analyzing customer data to be able to better serve customers, from the standpoint of being able to optimize, we'd already talked about this, our activities when it comes to replacement and cleaning and inspection of our assets.
I think down the road, AI can be a powerful tool for, like we mentioned before, decentralized systems as well. The biggest inhibitor I would say to people wanting to deal with waste systems in their own homes or in decentralized buildings is the fact that they just don't want to deal with it. They don't want [laughs] to deal with their waste. I think AI provides an incredible opportunity actually to meet the customer's needs through contracts that are incredibly informed with sensors that are enabling the customer to have as minimal interaction with the actual waste facilities that may be in their buildings.
Yes, so on all levels. We talk about control of assets as well, and I know this is a very tricky topic for a lot of folks, but our water system and our waste water system are incredibly dependent on SCADA systems for data acquisition as well as control of those systems. I think there is incredible potential to have those systems be controlled more through use of artificial intelligence and machine learning systems. I think that actually we could very much reduce the number of errors that are occurring in our systems through these things.
I think about, gosh, the last probably three or four dry weather overflows we've had, which are not allowed by regulations, generally had to do with some component of human error, actually. Something was left open or some blockage was not addressed satisfactorily or someone missed an alarm or something like that. I think, again, those types of things could be very much mitigated through computer systems that are more robust and more resilient. Again, I think there's huge potential all the way across the board when it comes to AI.
Mahesh: Yes, so I would say you're bullish on AI, and that's a good thing. You're quite bullish on that topic. Where do you see-- As a leader, you cannot run utility SPU without people. Talent gap is huge, especially if you look at the City of Seattle. There is a great amount of talent gap in the city. How are you filling this gap? First of all, do you have it? If so, how are you filling it?
Andrew: Yes, people talk about the gray tsunami or [laughs] the retirement of a lot of--
Mahesh: Silver tsunami.
Andrew: The silver tsunami, yes. Sorry, [laughs] I didn't get the right word there. It's absolutely real. Somehow the pandemic, it leaps that forward. We went from approximately 8% to 10% vacancy rate up to a 13% to 14% vacancy rate very, very rapidly. It's been hard to push that down actually. Some of it-- Priorities for folks changed during the pandemic, which makes sense. I totally understand that, but bottom line is we are seeing workers leave, long-term workers, which has presented a challenge for us.
I will say a couple of things. A, water jobs are great jobs. Both the entry-level jobs that we offer as well as the senior-level jobs that we offer, we consistently hear that they are really, really, really good jobs. We have some wonderful apprenticeship programs where the feedback has been, "Gosh, I'm so thankful that I have this opportunity to serve in a career where I've really, really great benefits, good pay, and also ample opportunity for advancement," that they didn't necessarily have in the other areas that they were working.
Apprenticeship programs and bringing folks in at the ground level with not much experience I think is going to be key to addressing the talent gap that we have, especially for those frontline workers. What I think is most powerful about that mid-level worker as well as the engineering, the technical job, what I hear most often about the two things that attract people to, again, our government jobs, number one is the mission that we bring and the opportunity for people to work in an area where they're working on something that's exciting, it's progressive, it's environmental, but it's also focused on serving the community.
This is not a knock on any other tech companies in the area, but those are things that I feel like we have an incredible advantage over a lot of the maybe more lucrative careers in this area, I'd say, because you can't necessarily get that out of working for an Amazon or a Microsoft. The ability to say, "I'm working in a vulnerable community, addressing sea level rise," that's huge.
People, I think, generally are searching for a mission that they align with, and it's something that we offer. I think boosting that message in terms of our talent acquisition is going to be really, really key because, again, I hear it so often from people. People obviously work at our jobs and the pay is good, et cetera, but what keeps them here are generally relationships with their coworkers, with their bosses, and then the mission. Feeling like, "I believe in the mission of the agency." Those are the things that we're trying to really focus on to fill the gap.
Mahesh: Definitely, mission purpose job is a magnet for a role like this. I'm off to my last question. You are relatively young, if you don't mind me saying [chuckles] that. I'm not sure if you think about the legacy yet, but if you do, what do you want your legacy to be?
Andrew: Back in 2005, 2006, when I first came to Seattle Public Utilities, SPU and the City of Seattle had launched just several years earlier a race and social justice initiative. They focused on, again, systemic racism, institutional racism, and the impact it's had on communities. I was completely blown away by it. I was learning things that I hadn't learned before in any of my history classes, in terms of the history of racism in the United States.
Then seeing how that has translated into services that we deliver to customers. We have communities and have had communities for 50, 60 years with inadequate infrastructure. We talk about, again, our most vulnerable communities in Seattle. Every community has one of these areas. When I was in San Francisco, it was Bayview-Hunters Point community. They were right next to the treatment plant, lower income, more racially diverse. In Seattle, it's the South Park, Georgetown neighborhoods.
From a legacy standpoint, I would say one of the most valuable things that I feel like I can do is to lead our utility in a way where we are ultra-focused, laser-focused, bullish, if you want to call it that, on making sure we are serving the needs of our most vulnerable communities and turning the tide of years, not just decades, but hundreds of years, of practices and policies that have unfortunately disadvantaged those communities.
If it's providing basic infrastructure, yes, let's do that. If it's doing it in a way where we're providing jobs to the community, yes, let's do that. Let's be bullish about that. If it's addressing things like generational wealth building, yes, let's do that. All of those things that I feel like we have an opportunity to do and to do in an amazing way that really makes differences for people's lives. That is a legacy that I hope that I can leave as a leader.
Mahesh: I'm not making this up because I created it on the fly here. You're a chief executive officer that not only operating as a circular economy officer, CEO, but also want to operate as a legacy chief equitable officer, another CEO. That sounds like, really if I have to sum up our discussion, that really is what inspires you. Listen, it was fascinating hearing you, how you operate at the intersection of service, faith and technical, trying to empower your residents to intelligent data so they can make smart decisions.
Some bold ways you're trying to address climate change that have long cycle time and an enormous amount of budget that you're trying to very diligently put through. If I look through all this stuff, Andrew, you got a fascinating job, but also a very challenging job. I loved every minute of listening to you on how you run your business, how you think about this. I really want to thank you for being part of this podcast. I think the guests are going to love it.
Andrew: Thank you so much, Mahesh. Thank you for having me.
[00:46:04] [END OF AUDIO]