In this episode of 21st Century Water, we sit down with Glenn Marzluf, CEO and General Manager of Del-Co Water, to explore the growth, innovation, and strategic leadership shaping one of Ohio's fastest-growing water utilities. With roots in civil engineering and a unique journey through municipal roles in Florida and Ohio, Glenn shares how intentional career steps and a deep sense of purpose led him to his current role.
We trace Del-Co's origins from a rural cooperative founded in the 1970s to an expansive utility covering 830 square miles across eight counties. Glenn explains how Del-Co’s growth has been fueled by regional consolidation and a commitment to member-focused service, supported by a nimble governance model. This structure allows for flexible, proactive planning—like pre-engineering transmission lines for anticipated industrial users—and innovation in rate design. Glenn highlights their recent shift to an inclining block rate to encourage water conservation, a rare move in the Midwest, aimed at reducing peak-day demand and extending infrastructure lifespan.
On infrastructure, Glenn outlines the utility’s deliberate investments: four treatment plants, several new elevated tanks, and significant capacity at their flagship Olentangy plant. Water quality is a priority, with upgrades like ultraviolet disinfection and an upcoming granular activated carbon retrofit to combat PFAS, disinfection byproducts, and taste/odor issues. Distribution strategies focus on resiliency and redundancy, ensuring the system remains robust and future-proof.
Del-Co’s remarkable source water resiliency stems from 2.6 billion gallons of upground reservoir storage, allowing operational flexibility and water quality control unmatched by many peers. Their partnership with the City of Columbus on the Doutt Reservoir further strengthens supply.
Technology adoption is another pillar. From IBM Maximo for asset management to Esri GIS and Oracle’s cloud-based customer system, Del-Co emphasizes scalable, cloud-based platforms. Glenn even discusses canine-led leak detection, a novel tool for maintaining low water loss in a modern, distributed network.
Community engagement is intentional and deep-rooted. Del-Co has grown from an inward-facing utility to a community pillar, earning corporate citizenship honors and serving as a statewide training hub with its Wolf Water Center. Annual member meetings have evolved into educational open houses, reflecting a broader commitment to transparency and trust.
As we look ahead, Glenn defines his legacy around securing sustainable source water, leveraging data and conservation to manage peak demand, and developing the next generation of leaders. Del-Co Water, under his guidance, is a case study in how cooperatives can drive 21st and 22nd century water excellence in both growth and governance.
Del-Co Water Website: https://delcowater.org/
21st Century Water - Glenn Marzluf
Speakers: Mahesh Lunani & Glenn Marzluf
[Music Playing]
Voiceover (00:02):
Tremendous challenges and opportunities exist right now for our nation's water infrastructure. In this podcast, the industry's top leaders and innovative minds share their knowledge and insights for ensuring our water systems are operating safely and efficiently.
These discussions are designed to motivate and create vibrant 21st century water systems and the innovative workforce required to lead and operate them. This is 21st Century Water with your host, Aquasight founder and CEO Mahesh Lunani.
Mahesh Lunani (00:34):
So, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, I have with me today, Glenn Marzluf, General Manager and CEO of Del-Co Water. Glenn leads a very fast growing, member owned utility that's serving across eight counties.
With more than 25 years in the water sector, he's helping guide Del-Co through a major expansion, regional collaboration and proactive efforts around water quality, supply resiliency and innovation. Today, I'm going to dive into his leadership journey and the challenges he's trying to address in this growing region and what's ahead for one of Ohio's most recognized water providers.
Well, good morning, Glenn.
Glenn Marzluf (01:17):
Yes, thanks so much for having me on today, I’m really excited about the chance to be on 21st Century Water. I've listened to a lot of the podcasts, I know we're acquainted with a lot of your previous guests so great stories on here and hopefully I can add to legacy of 21st Century Water for you.
Mahesh Lunani (01:32):
No, you sure will. I want to get right into it. You obviously have a background in civil engineering. You're 25 years into it. What drew you into this space and more particularly, what led you to become the CEO and General Manager at Del-Co Water?
Glenn Marzluf (01:46):
You couldn't replicate it if you tried from the beginning. It's for us that are faith-based, a series of things that happened very intentionally from the outside that drove me to where I am today. But I grew up here in central Ohio, went to Ohio State and really was focused on transportation. When I went through the civil engineering field, I was very successful in the water resources classes and everything, but didn't do that initially as a career.
I went to work for my hometown in Hilliard where I grew up, in transportation primarily. I also did a lot of drainage and some water, wastewater kind of supported the public service team was kind of their technical advisor and working on I&I projects, working on a couple waterline replacements, but the way the satellite communities in central Ohio work is, the City of Columbus does most of utilities for them on their behalf and that was the case with Hillard.
So, I spent 10 years there. I got my professional engineers license and I wanted an opportunity for leadership and I just didn't see that within the Hillard makeup, just kind of how the things were. There's a couple midlevel engineers between me and the director spot. So, ended up leaving and going down to the Gulf Coast of Florida to Sarasota as the assistant city engineer, still focused primarily on transportation.
And shortly after I arrived there, hit the great recession and the whole entire state of Florida, they're so dependent on real estate, it’s one of their primary ways that they get income. So, that economy just was in horrible condition and the city in order to fix some things, they were moving some things into the enterprise funds, including the entire engineering department was folded into public works at the time and I was given the opportunity to lead what they called utility field operations at the time.
So, I'm 35-years-old, still pretty young in my opinion and all of a sudden, I've got a team of 80, 90 people working for me. Almost all of which were older than me, more experienced than I was but there was great culture within the utilities folks and it just opened my eyes to the value of the services that water waste had.
When I was doing transportation, it was really kind of exciting to start a project and finish a project and there's your life's work actually down in concrete and asphalt and you're making lives better. But when I got introduced to utilities when I was down in Sarasota- the day-to-day delivering the most important services to folks that they absolutely cannot live without- it changed my entire perspective.
Eventually, I got promoted to take over, running the entire water, wastewater, reclaimed water utility there in Sarasota. They were all reporting up to me and great culture. There was a little bit of challenge at the leadership level. There had been some challenges within the utility with city council in the past, so it was pretty difficult to navigate a career down there and we missed home, we missed raising our sons.
We have three sons, my wife, Ann and I, and we missed raising our sons here in the Midwest. So, we're looking to get back to Ohio and this Del-Co job opened up and I was fortunate enough to get selected from the outside to become the fourth general manager here at Del-Co Water.
Mahesh Lunani (04:30):
Oh, excellent. It's a great story. You went from Ohio to Florida and at 35-years-old you had over 70, 90 engineers and got promoted and that's a great experience at that age. So, now that you were at Del-Co, it is growing because you serve over eight counties, can you give us numbers of the growth and how you’re planning for this growth and what's driving the growth?
Glenn Marzluf (04:54):
We were founded in ‘69 but we started service in ‘74, so we're a little bit over 50-years-old at this point. And we started with the USDA rural development, it was called Farmer's Home Administration at the time but it is a rural utility, the groundwater here in Delaware County.
So, we're one county north of Columbus, Franklin County, which is of course the state capital. So, one county north of them but at the time was a very rural county and because of the poor groundwater, many of our residents lived on cisterns.
One of our founders actually drove a water hauling truck, it was part of his career. He was a farmer. He drove a water hauling truck and really saw the need for a central water system and because the county wouldn't step up and do it and none of the cities wanted to extend service out into the townships into the countryside, they started cooperatives.
The same principles, the way the nation's rural electrification started with rural electric co-ops in the 1920s and 1930s that was how our founders founded Del-Co Water, a rural water cooperative. And us, along with our partners, the Delaware County Regional Sewer District created the ability to develop Delaware County.
And I told you we're just one county away from the capital and the Ohio State University and everything that happens down in Franklin County, so it pretty quickly developed into a bedroom community for the Columbus region. And our growth was exceptional in the 90s and early 2000s up to the great recession and since then it's been more manageable.
We’re growing at 2,000 new population per year or so right now. So it's allowed us to be pretty intentional with how we do our planning. I've already mentioned the background of co-op but, really, it’s a sensational way to govern a utility.
You've got the advantage of being agile and nimble like an investor-owned utility. We're not governed by our higher revised code; we're very intentional what projects we did and which ones we assign.
We have great partners that we can develop long-term relationships so we have a couple of pipeline contractors on retainer and they know how to work for us and they're very intentional about doing a good job because we keep using them as long as they continue to perform, it allows us to be a little more, I don't want to say, lax in our inspection. But we're confident that they're doing a good job and we don't have to have a resident inspector on site, we visit with them daily, that kind of stuff.
So, it's a very effective way to do it. And then the fact that we are service oriented to our members and it's a nonprofit, we still serve the end user. We're not paying a dividend to investors, to stockholders, anything like that, we are member owned, we are service oriented, our core values actually spell out the word service.
So, we are all about serving our members and we think that this governance structure makes us very effective in how we carry it out. So, this eight-county region, we're continuing to look at ways to be effective and expansion.
We have acquired and consolidated several municipally owned utilities over the years, where it makes sense, we'll step in and help folks where it doesn't make sense and where they don't want us; we try not to get in folks' way that way. But we have found a great opportunity to acquire a couple of big municipally owned systems and now we're looking for the future, we have several big projects on the horizon.
Mahesh Lunani (08:08):
Well, clearly you started with one and then through this cooperative model, you are expanding and consuming multiple municipal loan utilities into your model and that sounds like a strategy of growth. Now talk about a little bit about infrastructure. You have number of elevated tanks, you've got towers, treatment plants, capacity, can you put in numbers just the size of the utility that you are today?
Glenn Marzluf (08:35):
The cooperative started in the southern part of Delaware County and has since grown to become the largest single retail distribution area in the state of Ohio. We cover about 830 square miles over eight counties. Primarily, we cover Delaware, Morrow, and Marion Counties, significant portions of those and smaller portions of five other counties.
And do we manage our growth the same way other utilities do? We have a master plan. In fact, our last master plan was done in-house by our deputy general manager. He's since retired but he was also our chief engineer. And during COVID he had some time to work from home and we said, “Well, why don't you work on this?” So, that's what he did.
And he did a very specific master plan, looked at every single parcel of reasonable size and tried to identify what was likely to go in there, what was the likely timeline for development of that, so it was very specific, much better job than most consultants could do for us because we know our utility better than consultants do.
So, we have a new area of focus and that's potential industrial users. We are by and large residential by and large single family residential. So, we do have a lot of condominium complexes and we have some apartments that have come online here in the last 5 years, 10 years, but by and large single family residential.
And now we've got Amazon web services planning on locating on here and we've had a couple other significant data centers and potentially some other users were going to come onto our system. So, one of the tactics we're using is areas that we think are likely to lead to some kind of industrial growth or any kind of growth in an area that we don't have robust service, we're pre-engineering transmission lines out there.
So, rather than wait for someone to come and knock on the door and say, “Oh, we'd like to build this development out here on this timeline,” we're pre-engineering it and we're acquiring the easements and right aways necessary, and we'll have it reasonably available, shovel ready, on the shelf and build it if somebody comes in and says, “Yes, we're ready to move out here in this area,” summary, that kind of stuff, then we might be ready to act on that.
So, we got three or four projects that we're doing early engineering on. I have another big task that we're working on. So, we have significant capacity here at our largest water treatment facility, what we call the Olentangy plant and we're working on several transmission line projects to take this available capacity and transmit it where it's needed.
We have enough capacity today and for the next decade plus or so, assuming we can get the water where it's needed. So, we're really very intentionally trying to find ways. In fact, we have one project right now where we're actually designing a transmission line that will go around one of our other plants, which will both help augment that plant but also help us with redundancy so we can take that one down and expand it and not have to worry about keeping it in operation 24/7, 365 as you typically need to do. So, we’re doing that.
One of the advantages we have is we're a newer utility. We have acquired a few municipal utilities that have older infrastructure and we've done some reinvestment there already but by and large we have very reliable infrastructure. So, it's given us a time to put in hopefully what's going to lead to be a very robust asset management system.
So, when it does come time to reinvest in our pipelines and our plant projects we're going to have a great data set. We're really going to understand appropriate timing, appropriate remedies for this infrastructure when it comes time to do that so that's something that we're blessed.
I know most of the municipally owned utilities and just general utilities around the nation are really dealing with aging pipelines and so much reinvestments needed just to keep the current system in operation, that's not our case. Absent of a dig in by a contractor working on our system line breaks, line leaks are fairly rare so we're fortunate that way.
Mahesh Lunani (12:08):
Clearly, I mean it sounds to me like you got pre-ready infrastructure if businesses and industrial users wants to come in and set their shop, you're almost ready to go and that's the kind of future you're trying to create here at Del-Co Water.
I want to talk about rates and financial strategies. Can you walk me through, just given it's a cooperative arrangement, how do you have your rate structure and how do you drive conservation using an innovative rate structure?
Glenn Marzluf (12:41):
So, one of the blessings of being a nonprofit cooperative is we're not governed by the PUCO (Public Utilities Commission of Ohio). We have a nine-member elected board, we're very engaged in governing this utility and it gives us the ability to set rates and make changes on our own. And we have just finished just this month, Mahesh, we finished what is a more traditional arrangement you see here in the Midwest, which is a declining block rate.
And we've gone to an inclining block rate, which is somewhere to what you see in the South and the West and the U.S. it's very, very uncommon in Ohio and the Midwest to see this. And our challenge is we have a very affluent customer base and our seasonal water demand is significant. That peak day related to lawn sprinkling drives all of our infrastructure investment for storage, source, transmission, treatment capacity that is what dictates it to us.
So, we switched to this inclining block rate very intentionally just like you would see in the West. One of our goals for the future, one of our sources is conservation. If we can trim that peak day down, and if we can continue to get our customer base to use water differently, well our existing infrastructure might last a decade or more longer before we have to invest in new sources and new treatment capacity.
And it's unbelievable the expense that capital is causing today, just five years ago with probably 40 to 60% of the cost of what it would take today to build pipelines and to build particularly treatment, it's so pricey. The city of Columbus is getting ready to spend over a billion dollars on their new plant.
So, we coupled this incline block rate the first 4,000 gallons, and that's about our typical average wintertime demand, it's still at the lowest rate and we think it's very affordable. Our typical water bill would be in the $30 range, still very affordable.
We have great members. Our delinquency on bills is amongst the lowest in the nation. In fact, I would say that our write off, it's almost unbelievable a write off. We write off $15,000 to $20,000 on $26, $28 million and that just is the quality of the members that we have.
And in fact, we do work with a couple partners. We work with local non-profit called People in Need, and we help them fund lifeline assistance. So, it's not an ongoing affordability rate that we have in there, but if folks get in some kind of a bad situation, people in Hilliard will help bail them out once or twice per year. I don't know exactly the parameters of that relationship, but they do that for us.
We try to stay in our lane, we try to do what we do, we do what we do well, and we don't want to try to figure out if somebody qualifies for low income or if their particular hardship qualifies for that. So, we bring in partners that do things well and help us out so that's an example of that.
Another thing that we do that I'm not sure is always done across the nation, even though I think American Water Works, which is just best practice, but we try to charge a true system development capacity fee upfront.
So, our tap-in fee for a single-family residential home is, I think it's $4,600 plus $800 for the actual meter cost to take that and install that. So, that way our intention is for growth to pay for growth. So, we have a pretty significant investment account right now that is dedicated to growth, and we have all this growth-related infrastructure.
We can spend all these funds, they're all accounted for and they're all assigned to projects moving forward. But by charging that true system development fee, tap costs initially it allows for growth so our existing members aren't supplementing the cost for a new development to go in somewhere.
Mahesh Lunani (16:05):
Great innovation and sounds like the structure of your organization allows you to think about both the inclining block rate as well as the system development one-time fees for any new members coming into your system.
I want to talk about: you got 800 square miles, four treatment plants, a huge swing in demands between summer and winter, which means the water can sit in those pipes, which means water quality is critical. So, what is it you're doing on the water quality treatment innovations to ensure you got the treatment and kind of water quality expected by your members?
Glenn Marzluf (16:44):
Well, this is one that's in progress, but we do a pretty good job focusing on our plant treatment capabilities. We expanded our largest one, the Olentangy plant from 19 to 29 million gallons per day back in 2020 that went live and we added ultraviolet disinfection as an example to deal with potential crypto sporidium.
We've never had that here in our system, but it's not uncommon here in the Midwest. So, we thought we would take advantage of that expansion opportunity to do that. One of our board members actually our … I told you we have a very engaged board, they truly make our utility better on the way they govern us and the way they lead us.
We travel regularly to the WaterPro Conference for National Water Association and to CoBank events. And our then president back in 2018 went to a session at the WaterPro Conference on PFAS and came back and said, “We should check this out.”
And I felt very confident at the time, I said, “We have checked it out.” We went through our own testing regimen with UCMR five or four, I can't remember which one. It was back in 2014, retested and we had all non-detect throughout our area. But at his request, I kind of did a little bit of research and I said, “Well, the testing methodology's gotten more precise potentially, we might see something.”
So, we actually started testing back in our watershed back in 2019, 2020 and did find kind of what you might expect within a lot of the surface water and in our nation that we have small levels, what we think are small levels as is well before the health advisory level was changed.
But we started testing for this, but we were seeing running averages in three and a half to four and a half parts per trillion and engaged RK slightly before that health advisory level to help us work to find treatment.
And it took us quite a while to go through the design and permitting, but Ohio EPA’s recently authorized us to change out our rapid sand filters back here with full depth manomedia activated carbon.
So, sometime this year in 2025, we intend to install that project, which will deal with PFAS also help us with this infection byproducts. When you have a large distribution system, you're talking about water quality within the distribution system, water age is a concern, so we think this is going to go a long way to address both of those challenges.
We also have taste and odor compounds occasionally with algae that this should remedy. So, we're excited about that project, we hope that that will start construction in 2025. That'll be a big game changer for us and then whenever we upsize our other surface water plant, we'll probably add similar treatment technology there as well.
Mahesh Lunani (19:10):
Got it. That's excellent because it sounds like you're really moving forward in terms of investment in addressing both the distribution issues as well as the treatment issues. I want to talk about source water resiliency. When we were researching, I couldn't believe, but you have 2.6 billion gallons of up ground reservoirs in your system. How exactly are you managing that and how do you use that as a way to offset hedge against any kind of major demand upswing or drought condition?
Glenn Marzluf (19:42):
So, here in the Midwest and central Ohio, we are near the top of the watershed. So, if you go very much further north than us then cross from the Great Lakes divide and the river start flowing north, the Lake Erie and probably everyone's heard the Great Lakes Compact but we cannot acquire anything that's in the Great Lakes watershed.
So, what we find ourselves with is, even though we get a lot of rainfall annually, our rivers and streams are small, so not reliable. So, the two choices are you either dam up a river and you create a significant impoundment, or you have to store it offline because the river's not going to be reliable by itself.
Or back in the 70s when our utility started, we simply didn't have the kind of funding that would be necessary to acquire ground for an entire valley in order to dam up the oil in the river. So, we started with up ground reservoirs.
So, we have offline storage, we've got a couple of both service buildings, we found waters out of the rivers when there's adequate capacity in them and we stored on our off-ground reservoirs to utilize when we need that water, that was the original tactic. So, as we've grown, we've added more of these things and they work in series and actually, it has been a real brilliant mistake, I would say the way this thing functions.
So, here at our Olentangy plant, we've got about 1.6 billion offline storage and we pump water out of the river depending on time of year and demand. It varies a little bit, but it's essentially about a year's worth of storage back in a reservoir system. So, we've got that tight of a buffer off the river, so it provides us a very consistent source water under our plant.
We don't worry about turbidity in the river, we don't worry about quick changes in pH or anything, it's a very consistent as it enters the treatment plants and that buffer, it also allows us to be very selective in what we pump. So, we very intentionally don't pump right after we believe farmers may have put fertilizer on their crops as an example.
If we get a call from the EMA that says, “Hey, we had a tanker spill down here,” we simply turn off the pumps because we already have the storage in the reservoirs. We let that go by, we feel adequately that the water quality's been restored and we turn it back on. We also have a couple of online sensors that are always monitoring for things like nitrates, that type of stuff so we want to keep the amount of nutrients to our reservoirs at a minimum.
And then we also control the quality of water within the reservoir. We have a whole team, not a big team, it's two folks that work full-time on it, but we have a watershed team that look at quality and they're doing things like we have ultrasonic devices that we've added to deal with or at least reducing the amount of algae growth we have back there.
Occasionally, we'll need to treat it with copper sulfate, something like that to take good care of it. But the fact that we know that every single drop in that reservoir system eventually is going to flow through our treatment plants we can proactively treat and make sure that we keep that at a high-quality level and we've never had any issues with harmful algae.
Mahesh Lunani (22:23):
Which is big. Well, it sounds to me like this reservoir is a boon not only from a resiliency point of view and redundancy, but it gives you a consistent water quality coming into your treatment plant so you don't have to keep fluctuating your treatment technologies.
Glenn Marzluf (22:40):
That's very true. And I would say we would certainly trade it if we could get a spot on Lake Erie or a spot on Lake Michigan with that kind of quality and that kind of volume. But absent some kind of great asset like that, we think this up ground reservoir system makes us one of the most resilient for surface water utility of our size around. We really appreciate the fact that we've got this infrastructure back there.
We also, speaking of up ground reservoirs, we have a great partnership with city of Columbus. They have built something we call the Doutt Reservoir, named that for John Doutt, a former worker of Columbus. It's over 9 billion gallons further up river here in our county and we have a partnership with them.
We participate in the cost of that and the cost to maintain that, and we're able to acquire that water down here close to us, and we use that as part of our source that we fill up our reservoirs with too. So, appreciate that as another asset we have for up ground reservoirs.
Mahesh Lunani (23:32):
Absolutely. And that's your raw material and you’re to keep it plumbed, totally. I want to talk about technology. What does technology mean to you and how are you deploying, especially when you have such a diverse area and you cannot possibly move people around all the time because then they're just spending the time on the trucks. So, what's your view on that and where you are headed on this topic?
Glenn Marzluf (23:54):
We're always trying to get better; that's the bottom line. So, what can we deploy that has potential to make us a better utility? We've added GPS location devices for our vehicles simply so we know who's proximate to an area when we have an issue come up can allow us to avoid a long truck roll and it could be a very short one.
Our IT philosophy has been … we got a very small but talented IT team and in order to take some of the burden off of them and to rely on experts that do more specialized work every day, we've been very intentional to try to take any of our new technology deployments and move them to cloud-based.
So, we went to IBM's Maximo as our asset management platform back in ‘21. So, the day we went live, we joined a group of, I don't know exactly how many, but dozens if not hundreds of utilities around the nation that rely on IBM's Maximo. So, they actually have their own set of conferences and stuff related to this.
So, it's all maintained in the cloud, maintained by experts that do nothing but maintain these databases every day. Our team works with them, with some other experts to deploy it to our field personnel so every single one of our trucks has connectivity to the internet at all times. We do have some devices that allow us to sync up and stuff if they should lose connection here or there, but we're deploying the technology alive in the field.
Huge investment in geographic information system with Esri's products. Again, it's all cloud-based, but we do a lot of work from the map, we use maximal, but a lot of our field base, they actually work in the GIS and they get their work orders in the GIS and they use the map, execute them, to record them, and it all goes back and stores that data so that we can make good decisions with it in the future.
We just went to Oracle's customer cloud system, I think is what it's called. Same deal, we picked a really big, really expensive product, but because it's tried and true and we think it's future proof, at least that's our ratification, is that hopefully 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now, we'll still be on some new version of Oracle and it will still be providing the best product for our customer base, for our members down in the future. So, that's been very intentional.
How things were done with technology, we're starting to get into the distribution system, something you spoke about before, really haven't done a lot with it yet, we're trying to get much more intentional in how we do that.
We do have a pretty robust unaccounted for water program, something that American Water Works when you run through their audit program would say, “Well probably don't have enough water loss to invest in this.”
But we did so quite intentionally, we've onboarded a canine leak detection animal, Keena, a couple years ago. One of your former guests, Tad Bohannon, was the original pioneer with Vessel and we know Tad pretty well and said that worked out pretty good, and that's a really good mascot for utility.
So, we've done the same thing here and we're actually looking to try and find ways to use our expertise. Zach Lower is our professional that keeps and runs and works with Keena and we're trying to find ways to maybe to train new dogs and deploy them to other utilities. We've had some other interest from some of the big utilities here in the state of Ohio, so we think that's a real cutting-edge technology that we're deployed.
Mahesh Lunani (26:54):
Got it. Well, excellent. I mean it sounds like a lot and who would've thought that you would also host canines as part of your leak detection program, but that's just the progress we are making in all kinds of spheres.
I want to talk about collaboration, public trust. From what I know, you're very active in the local chamber. You actually, I think, chair the local chamber and a number of regional water groups, how are you utilizing this position of yours in terms of driving big changes in initiatives going forward at your own agency or at these other participating organizations?
Glenn Marzluf (27:33):
Well, when I arrived here in 2012, we were very much a member focused service organization, but we were very internally focused. We did very little to engage the outside community and we very intentionally, the board kind of said, “We should do this,” so I've taken their direction and we've been very intentional trying to do just that so we've become very strong community partners.
So strong that in fact, in 2022, we were recognized by both the chamber of commerce here and by our county foundation as the corporate citizen of the year award. So, we've got a pretty good philanthropy program going forward.
On the outreach side, something that was never done prior to about 2018 is we've been really focused. We onboarded Laura, Terry's actually just getting ready to retire, she's one of our associates and she's been our original outreach coordinator, so, so thankful for the work she's done but we go and serve in charities.
And the one I like to highlight every year, the Friday before Memorial Day, every year we shut the utility down except for the treatment operators, some folks had to be here on site still, but for the rest of us, instead of reporting here to the utility campus, we all report up to Flying Horse Farms. This is the part of the Paul Newman Camp Network for critically ill children, and we do our camp creator day.
So, we show up there and we give them three or four hours’ work all morning long. We bring our backhoes, our excavators, our mechanics, electricians show up there and we provide them services that none of their other volunteer groups can. For those of us who don't have specialized skills like me, we'll go there and we'll help clean the bunk houses and plant trees and do whatever else they need done.
But we do that, we adjourn shortly after lunch, so everybody gets to go home a couple hours early, but they know that they've made a difference to that camp for that year that no other volunteer group can do. So, we do those type of things that we've never done historically.
We also are very active in the industry and very intentionally. So, back in 2023, we opened our newest building, what we call the Wolf Water Center. It’s named after one of our original employees and our original attorney, the Wolf Brothers, kind of our origins here.
So, the Wolf Water Center, the entire second floor is an event space. It can hold 120 desks and 300 and some if you do just standard seating. But the point is we use that to train ourselves, but we also use that with our partners in the industry.
So, American Water Works Association, Ohio Road Water Association, OWEA, others come and use this. It is the training hub now for Ohio and it was very intentional. We wanted to make it that, and I think we've arrived at that. It's probably hosts more water related activities than any other location in the state of Ohio.
We currently employ the executive director of the Ohio section of American Water Works. I'm on the board as the Ohio secretary and there was a change going on with the association that was managing before and we just stepped in and said, “We can help the section find a way to onboard a permanent staff to be the executive director there.”
And we worked with our townships and our municipalities, all the fire departments, we coordinate with them on their flushing and everything. So, I believe we are a trusted community partner. Every year we have our annual meeting of members, happens every year, this is what cooperatives do. This is when we host our elections and we do our business, but we've turned it into more of a fair.
So, they come in early and we sit down and we do tours. We drive them all back to the reservoir system, explain how our system works. We have demonstrations of hydrants, demonstrations of meters, we have a lot of our environmental team come here and show them the types of work we do on campus with pollinator gardens.
And of course they're first in Ohio, the floating solar array we have back here, and I'll talk to you about that in here in just a second, but it's very intentionally, it went from averaging between 80 and 100 folks to now we're getting 500 to 600 in so much different focus on community. Somewhere we want to get into the solar.
We had an appetite for solar. So, we've got a very engaged committee of employees that are focused on sustainability. We don't have a full-time professional for it. We've got about 120 associates total here, full-time associates and just don't have the type of bench that allows for a full-time, dedicated professional for sustainability.
So, we have a group that does it amongst their other job duties and we have an appetite for solar, like I said, but we're a growing utility and it kept on getting close to the end to make the decision and I just could not give up the five acres plus of ground it took to put a meaningful solar array on our campus and saw a webinar and one of our vendors brought this to us and we said, “You know what, this is it. We can do this.”
These reservoirs are already ground that's dedicated to a purpose and this is mutually compatible and we can get solar in here and we're not giving up ground for the future. So, that was really the primary driver, it wasn't necessarily to be the first, but we enjoy being the first.
We enjoy being innovative and leading the way. So, that led to this first, I think it's the first in the Midwest, but I know it's the first in Ohio, the floating solar array. So, we're excited to have that here. It's a sunny day today, so I know it's generating a lot of power to upgrade our water treatment plant in the campus here.
Mahesh Lunani (32:26):
Excellent. By the way, coming back to your event center, I was there, and it was fantastic. It's nice and big and new construction, et cetera. It's clear to me that you build public trust, not just providing the water supplier but actually truly integrating in the community and within the peers, your peers that supply similar water.
And I heard the word intentional quite a few times, which tells me you've thought about it, there's a strategy and you're executing it. So, I want to get to the final phase of my questions. What's ahead for Del-Co Water and what does legacy mean for you?
Glenn Marzluf (33:03):
Those are great questions. So, we're just rolling out this inclining block rate. We're hoping to pick up some additional source, so to speak, with conservation. We're hoping that peak day declines and if we could get the peak day decline just 10, 20%, that's years’ worth of growth when it comes down to, because we're fine for domestic supply, we're not stressed in any way, but that peak day is such a challenge for us to meet and to get water into the different areas of our system.
So, we got that, we've got a lot of infrastructure that's coming online now. We have three new elevated tanks that will come online in the next two months to train the mission line to fill those up. Some we are in progress and we're in active construction, some are in final design, so we have those coming online.
Our next big treatment plan expansion is the Ralph Scott plant that's named after one of our founders and it's located at the base of Alum Creek on Army Corps owned ground and it's going to be a challenge for us to expand that plant.
We were hoping it was a rubber stamp, and we ended up talking with the Army Corps and they said, “No, we just don't let anybody dig holes in and around our dams. It's not a rubber stamp. You need to be very intentional and strategic in how you design this thing.”
So, we're working on picking a partner and working with the Army Corps to both extend the timeline of that lease and expand the lease hold so we can expand that plant to take advantage of source that we already have, particularly for the peak day, something that's a little bit different here in the Midwest is how can we produce more water in June, July, August than we produce in January, February, March, it's just not common.
Not that the whole nation doesn't deal with that, but just not very common here in Ohio. We have a source water partnership with Columbus. We talked to you about the Doutt reservoir already. We got the next phases of those coming online, but source is going to be one of my legacies. I really would like to leave this utility in a place so it has enough source to last through the 21st century.
This is 21st Century Water. I'd like them to start worrying about 22nd century water; that would be a great legacy for me to leave. And we already talked a little bit about the distribution. One of the things we're talking with Aquasight about is building a model based on weather trends, based on forecast, what demand we'll have in different areas of our system.
So, we've had challenges keeping some of our elevated tanks full because the sprinkling demand is so great, we can't film past them. Well, how do we know ahead of time that we're going to have an issue with that, using that on technology and proactively reach out to our customers and say, “Don't sprinkle tomorrow or just change something,” that's one of our goals.
So, deploy more technology, continue to be innovative on that front, really start looking for quality, quantity and technology within the distribution system that we really haven't done much of so that would be our next frontier and then, like I said, the biggest thing of all is people.
I've got great people here. We're fortunate, unlike a lot of utilities, we've been growing over the entire age of our utility. So, we didn't have this cliff that a lot of utilities were dealing with, there's 15 people retiring in five years, that's just not been the case for us. We've had a couple of key employees retire, but we've not had a bunch leaving us all at once.
So, one of our strategic plan initiatives is individuals and teams and we're trying to be much more specific about career paths that built into to some degree but about training and career paths so we can really engage folks and get them ready also to build the next general manager.
Fortunately, I still have a fair amount of runway before I retire, but we're going to build the best team. So, I can leave here feeling that I've done a quality job, left the utility in a better spot than where I inherited it. And hopefully we can invest in the right types of innovation and technology and just really build a quality 21st century utility that's what we're after, hopefully that will be my legacy.
Mahesh Lunani (36:35):
You laid it out very clearly. I mean, Glenn, I'll tell you what I really enjoyed. Of course, you at 35-years-old went to Sarasota, led a group of 70, 90 engineers, led the utility there, came back home, leading a cooperative through a major growth journey with 830 square miles, trying to have a source water protection and source water resiliency as your legacy, introducing new pricing scheme that would allow your peak day, peak demand trimming, running utility with extremely low write-offs.
What I can tell, continue to make progress in the water quality front and you're deploying all kinds of technology, not only what you're deployed now with specialists but also what you could do moving forward.
There's a whole slew of stuff including, and not necessarily the lowest part, but how you are engaging in the community, your organization, the outreach, there are not many what I would call water growth stories in Midwest and I think Del-Co is an exception here.
So, I enjoyed this conversation, I learned a lot and I think the audience absolutely learned a lot what Del-Co is and your style of leadership, Glenn. So, I want to thank you for being part of this call.
Glenn Marzluf (37:51):
Thank you so much for having me today. I hope that the program continues to be the quality that you've had with your other guests. Because I've listened to them, heard the story of New Orleans and John and Vegas and even Matt just a couple weeks ago at Fort Wayne, I know him pretty well and you've really had a significant story for some of these utilities to tell.
And I hope that they appreciate what we're doing here in the Midwest, in the Columbus, Ohio region and why cooperatives might be a good way to lead utilities in the future and fewer, better run utilities is what I think the legacy this nation needs for better water and wastewater services into the 21st century and beyond.
[Music Playing]
Mahesh Lunani (38:29):
Very well said. Thank you so much.
Voiceover (38:31):
Join host and Aquasight founder and CEO Mahesh Lunani for another episode of 21st Century Water produced by JAG in Detroit Podcasts.