In this episode of 21st Century Water, we sit down with Jeffrey Szabo, CEO of the Suffolk County Water Authority, to explore how strong leadership and strategic planning are transforming one of the largest water utilities in New York. Szabo shares his path from public administration into the water sector, emphasizing that a technical background isn’t a prerequisite for impactful leadership. His administrative expertise and focus on culture, innovation, and accountability have positioned the organization as an industry leader.
We begin with Szabo’s early days in government and how he unexpectedly transitioned into water utility management. Initially unsure about his fit for the role, he realized his skills in project management, strategic visioning, and organizational leadership were exactly what the Authority needed. Over the past 16 years, he’s led with a clear strategic direction, focusing first on departmental metrics, then developing the Authority’s first and second strategic plans. These plans focus on core operational pillars—like treatment, laboratory science, customer service, and technology—while more recently emphasizing culture, professional growth, and employee retention.
Szabo stresses the importance of empowering staff, shifting the culture from passive compliance to active participation. Early challenges included getting employees comfortable with open dialogue, process review, and decision-making autonomy. Over time, the organization evolved into one where continuous improvement and innovation are expected and supported.
We then move into the scale of the infrastructure managed by the Authority. It serves 1.2 million residents across an 86-mile stretch, supported by 6,000 miles of water main, over 250 well fields, and 60 storage tanks. The utility draws entirely from a sole source aquifer and operates 600 wells, all maintained with a keen eye on sustainability and proactive investment. Szabo outlines a $110 million capital budget and a $175 million O&M budget, highlighting costs around labor, electricity, and ongoing treatment upgrades.
On innovation, Szabo talks about meter-reading pilots, paperless work orders, and customer service enhancements. He also shares their proactive approach to PFAS contamination. Instead of waiting for regulations, they invested early in treatment systems, funded transparently through a dedicated surcharge. The result: full compliance with future federal regulations—six years ahead of schedule.
Lastly, Szabo reflects on his role as president of AMWA and the value of knowledge-sharing among the nation's top utility leaders. He closes by defining his legacy: an organization known for innovation, transparency, and empowered people—not just infrastructure.
Suffolk County Water Authority: https://www.scwa.com
Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA): https://www.amwa.net
00:00 - Introduction to 21st Century Water
00:33 - Jeffrey Szabo’s Background and Government Experience
03:15 - Transition to Suffolk County Water Authority
07:30 - Building and Implementing a Strategic Plan
10:40 - Culture Shift and Staff Empowerment
15:15 - Overview of Water Infrastructure and Scale
18:20 - Budget, O&M, and Capital Investments
21:00 - Innovation and Future Planning
24:00 - Addressing PFAS Proactively
27:25 - Leadership in AMWA
31:28 - Reflections on Legacy and Organizational Change
34:53 - Closing Remarks
21st Century Water - Jeffrey Szabo
[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 (00:33):
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I am with Jeff Szabo, CEO of Suffolk County Water Authority, and he runs an authority with over 1.2 million residents in Long Island, he also served as the president of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, which is a collection of an outstanding leadership group across the country.
And under his leadership at the county level, he has not only modernized the system, worked on some challenging issues such as PFAS and driving aquifer protection and earning national recognition for public health and innovation.
Welcome, Jeff.
Jeffrey Szabo (01:15):
Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here today.
Mahesh Lunani (01:17):
Well, I'm looking forward to it. So, I want to start with the discussion. You started at Suffolk County Government space and then migrated and moved to lead the water authority. Tell me a little bit about the journey. What got you attracted towards this sector?
Jeffrey Szabo (01:35):
Great question. So, I began my professional career after college, working in, at first local government at the county level, then New York State, and then back to Suffolk County.
Growing up, my intention was to work in government, believe it or not, somebody who believes in the power of government. I believe that you can impact people's lives and you can make a difference by doing the right thing for the people of the jurisdiction that you serve as a history major and a political science major.
So, when I graduated college, I was hoping to be in government, not sure what capacity, but to my good fortune, that worked out where I was working for an elected official at the local level. And we moved together from the county to the state, back to the county as he was elected county executive, and I served as a deputy county executive and Chief of Staff.
With those responsibilities, I was head of the transition team. It's the office of the county executive, which is a lot of the human services that fall under that; veterans, aging, different departments, the county executive staff itself, the county executive assistants and all that.
And then about half of the county departments, half of the county departments probation, civil service, parks, public works, you name it — that was split up between a couple of administrative deputies. But after about six or six and a half years, it was definitely time to look for new ventures and to move on.
I initially thought it would be in the private sector thinking I had spent at that point, 10 years or so, working for government and having a good understanding of the issues and things that worked and things that didn't work, thinking I could bring that perspective to the private sector. And during my sort of deliberations about my next move, I had conversations with two board members.
I have a five-member board here at the Water Authority and several of them, I had been friendly with for several years and discussing with them my sort of future, my thoughts about what's my next step, and they made it pretty clear that if I was going to actually leave government, that they were going to try to recruit me and bring me over to the water authority.
And my initial reaction was never even thought of that, that's not something I thought interest in or skill. I'm not an engineer, I'm not an attorney, I'm an administrator. I think I'm a very good, I hope, administrator. I make the trains run on time, I can project manage, I can make people accountable, I can be innovative, but not necessarily in the water sector.
And after several conversations with the board members, they convinced me that's exactly what they needed. They needed somebody who could sort of bring all of the departments within the agency together, give it a vision, give it a strategic plan.
We have experts, we have the engineering department, we have the folks in our laboratory who are the scientists or the IT professionals, but they didn't have somebody who they thought would be able to sort of take the agency to the next step. And when that hit me, that was like a ton of bricks thinking, this is kind of exciting, I could really get into this.
And I've been extremely fortunate. I've had, from the time I came on in late 2009 as CEO, in about maybe mid-2010, I've had the good fortune of having excellent board members that are engaged, that are focused on our mission, that support what we want to do here, what I want to do and the staff, what we're looking to do.
They're invested in it, they don't micromanage and they've given us the support that we need through their budgets and things like that to make us successful. So, that was my journey to get here.
16 years later and if somebody had said, “Would you be there 16 years?” You start thinking and scratching your head, “Oh, absolutely not.” But what I have seen, and again, I'm very fortunate, I still love my job. I get excited about it every single day.
What happened (and I think you'll see this with anyone who has been with an organization for a long period of time) you can almost break up the first couple of years into different categories of priorities.
When I first got here initially, it was great organization at a local authority established by New York State, not part of county government. Vast responsibilities serving about 85% of the residents of Suffolk County. We're east of New York City on Long Island in Suffolk County.
So, looking at where we were then, what the initial game plan is to get the first couple of years to sort of move forward, and that evolves into sort of a discussion about setting goals and objectives that morph into our first strategic plan, the developing of our strategic plan. Then it morphed into how are we going to stay ahead of the game when it comes to treatment and being innovative, and continuing to sort of remove harmful compounds.
And as it evolves and you’re staying at the forefront of the industry, two years becomes five years, five years becomes seven years, now, all these years later, we're onto our second strategic plan, and I think still at the forefront of the industry.
So, before you know it, anyone that's listening because of the good work that we're doing and the challenges that we face before you know it, you'll be with your agency from 16 years like me.
Mahesh Lunani (06:57):
That to me is a wow story. That as an administrator that did not even think about water as a path forward for you to be able to, for 16 years or 15 years, play that CEO role, to me, that is a classic thing I like to double click on, but there's so many other topics I want to talk about.
So, you talked about Strat (Strategic) plan. Tell me a bit more about what your Strat plan includes, and more specifically, how you are implementing that and trying to achieve the goals in the Strat plan.
Jeffrey Szabo (07:31):
Love talking about this topic obviously. I think every successful organization has a blueprint. They need to know sort of what the future looks like and to challenge themselves and the organization to get from point A to point B.
When I first got here, they were just sort of developing, not even a plan, but almost an annual sort of checkup department by department. We have about 600 employees, have numerous departments, both management employees and union employees.
But initially, we wanted to challenge ourselves with some of the basic stuff. How long does it take our crews to roll from our construction yard when there's an emergency to get to the job site and then to repair a water main break yard, sort of simple metrics. More sort of driven in specifics for each of the different departments.
So, we would spend time collectively as a group coming up with the metrics for the year. Interesting, thought-provoking, but 101 type stuff.
After a couple years of that, I grew a little frustrated thinking there's only a couple of ways to crack an egg, we need a little bit more vision, we need to sort of be a little bit more forward thinking, and that was sort of the development of the first strategic plan.
That initial plan covered … there are some core principles of what we do. We're looking at how do we engage with our customers? That's a pillar. Our laboratory, what are we testing for? What are we doing from an innovative perspective when it comes to the results and things that we're detecting within our drinking water, how are we removing them?
So, if you look at sort of our core fundamental pillars of who we are, those things, they don't change, they're relatively consistent. There's about 10 of them and again, it could be from treatment to the laboratory to technology, construction maintenance, customer service.
What we did differently with the second strategic plan pillars- essentially stay the same but we focused a little bit more on the organization, the employee, and culture. And I think that was very eye-opening when we developed the first plan. Yes, it was part of the conversation and it was certainly a subcategory of some of the major pillars, but the second strategic plan, it was a fundamental core.
It's now a pillar of what we do and what's their experience like here? How do we retain employees? How do we keep them challenged? How do we show professional development, professional growth, giving them an opportunity to sort of move through the ranks, we made that more of a priority with the second strategic plan?
Mahesh Lunani (10:08):
You talked about a culture, and thanks for going so deep into the Strat plan, and I can see how invested you are in driving success for that topic. You brought up culture, and me as a CEO in my own organization, one culture I'm driving is you are all empowered to do QA/QC of the output you're generating, don't expect me to do the QA/QC. It's like you're making the food but taste your food before you feed me.
So, what does culture mean to you, and what's your North Star of the culture you want to have?
Jeffrey Szabo (10:43):
If I could back up just a minute. When I first came on board, I tell the story all the time where I had maybe 25 of my top executives in our boardroom and I forget which topic we were sort of discussing or I was trying to have a discussion about. And it's me, the new kid, coming in and learning of course, but wanting to hear from my experts, from the smart people that we have running these different departments.
And one of the first initial meetings, one person spoke. One of the senior, well-respected, tenured members of the organization, they did most of the talking. So, I left there, I said, “What the heck's going on here? I don't need people in a meeting if they're not going to contribute.” The culture here was keep your mouth shut, let the more senior, the most senior person sort of deliver the message, don't disagree in large part, of course.
And one of the things that I found most difficult to change initially was empowering people to feel comfortable to express their opinion and have a sort of a healthy discussion on X topic. Just getting the culture to feel comfortable in who we are, and adding, contributing to the dialogue. I think hopefully, one of the things that I do well as an executive and CEO is learning from my staff.
To this day, I don't consider myself a water expert. I'm very proud of the work that we do here, I'm very proud of my affiliation and my presidency with AMWA and my tenure with AMWA and other water organizations that I've created and led, but I rely on my staff. I'm successful because of my staff.
So, changing that culture and having staff feel confident and comfortable that they could express themselves, that took a while, but it's proven extremely beneficial for us as an organization.
The other thing is I started this group initially that would sort of look at process improvement and ask a lot of questions. Ask why do we do this? Explain to me the process in our new service department, what happens when a customer or a developer or somebody comes in and they're looking to establish new service and have a dialogue with the agency, asking questions and then trying to see where we can possibly improve.
That also initially did really not go over well. Everyone thought, “What did I do wrong? Am I in trouble? Why are you asking these questions (chuckles)?” So, this is totally typical, it happens all the time.
But again, it took time for everyone to relax and to say, “There's nothing wrong with asking questions. We're looking to see if we can be helpful in making things and making process better.” So, that sort of evolved and that became freedom and the empowerment of the staff to contribute on those two fronts really helped.
The other thing is, and I say this to this day — it's okay to be wrong. It's okay. We want people to make decisions. My board pays me to make decisions and to make recommendations to them. And they're not all home runs. Most are doubles or triples I hope, and not strikeouts and singles. But overall, it's okay to make a decision and be wrong as long as you learn from that, that entire process, again, making staff feel comfortable.
Over time, now, it's evolved where I think, I hope that they feel like they can contribute and it's okay. We're not talking about investing millions of dollars and having a terrible project that's a waste of time and money. I'm talking about the decision-making process leading up to X project. Anyway, so I think those are sort of the three pillars. I want you to ask a question because I'll never stop.
Mahesh Lunani (14:35):
This is a quintessential leadership style that you have described where you are not the expert, but you are driving people engagement in your team and the culture change. So, they are contributors, not consumers, of direction. And that's a huge change, and I've seen this in our own company.
I want to switch the question. The scale of assets required, whether it's pipelines, treatment plants, pump stations to serve 1.2 million people got to be very significant. Can you describe the infrastructure you are running and managing, et cetera?
Jeffrey Szabo (15:14):
Right, right, right. It is vast. So, our service territory from one point to the furthest point is about 86 miles Long Island. Again, east of New York City, 86 miles long. We have 6,000 miles of water main. That's enough water main to get from downtown Manhattan to Moscow.
So, another line I've used for a long time, 6,000 miles of water main, we get all of our drinking water from a sole source aquifer right beneath our feet, one of the largest sole source aquifers in the nation.
All of our water comes from individual wells on well fields. So, at any given time, especially during say the summer months, which are typically the peak pumping months, we're generating and pumping a lot of water from the aquifer, on average, about 600 active drinking water wells.
We're constantly taking wells out of service, developing new wells, that type of stuff, but we don't have one large treatment plant and we can't move water many miles. It's all pretty regionalized, pretty close where the water that you typically drink from your home is from the well field around the corner within a quarter mile, half mile away.
On top of that, all of the wells are on well fields where we may have 2, 3, 4 wells. We have over 250 well fields, we own more property. We're bigger than Central Park, have a lot of acres, we have a lot of land, and we're spread out across the entire geographic area, we have almost 60 elevated storage tanks.
This is something else that over the last several years, we've changed our philosophy a little bit, where for many years, the organization has been in existence for just over 75 years. If there was need for additional supply as folks sort of migrated from the city, from New York City post-World War II to Long Island, and it developed first in our neighboring county, Nassau County, then Suffolk County, where we are, population through the 1940s, 50s, 60s, continued to sort of expand and to grow at an enormous rate.
When we needed additional supply, we would drill a new well, drill a well. Several years ago, our thought process was there may be a better way, why don't we look to build supply, to build storage tanks to hold more water. So, we've been on this sort of crusade to develop a supply instead of just drilling a new well.
Mahesh Lunani (17:44):
So, 250 well fields, 600 active valves, it kept 60 plus storage tanks, that's a lot of O&M budget and a lot of capital budget. So, tell me a little bit about what's the scale of your O&M budget, and what is the majority line items going towards?
Because every time I think about well systems, it's about pumping, it's about how deep the wells are, and capital is all about how you build the pipelines, reinvesting in the well fields for maintenance, et cetera, or upgrading pumps. Where is the money going and how much is the money going?
Jeffrey Szabo (18:17):
Great question. So, we have any given year, our capital budget is about $110 million, our operating budget is about $175 million, and debt service is about 40 million. So, if I do the math, that's about 33, 40 in that neighborhood, is that right? So, that's our entire budget.
A lot of the driving factors similar to many agencies across the country, whether they're drinking water suppliers or government agencies, the driving factors often are pension costs, healthcare costs, salaries. It's on the employee front that are factors that continue to push O&M budget, certainly electricity.
For us, we use a lot of electricity. We work with the local power supplier in trying to do what we can to determine what's best for them when we can use the electricity, so there aren’t issues with other hospitals and regular customers and things like that especially the summer months. But those are sort of operating expense driving factors on the capital side.
Again, we have 6,000 miles of main. Many of that, main is very old. We have a replacement plan, but we probably replace about 20 miles a year. There's one way to look at it, which would be, have that budget line item as zero, and as issues come up throughout the course of the year, then you would invest in it, but you only do what you have to do.
We don't look at it that way, we think you need to sort of do maintenance, you need to be proactive. Considering all the infrastructure that we have, we have engineering staff, we have a general services staff, we have folks who are out there every day maintaining the infrastructure that we have. We also spend quite a bit of money on treatment, we have significant issues that we're dealing with.
I don't believe I mentioned this when we started the conversation, but we have our own laboratory made up of about 45 different scientists and folks who run literally thousands and thousands of tests a year. All of them available, all of them you can get on our website with specific information about what we tested for and the results that we got. We test for more than we're required to.
I always say this, I wish I could take credit for that. The EPA requires us to test for 200 or so compounds, we test for 520 or 530. And when we do that, one, it's the right thing to do, but two, we like to be at the forefront of the industry.
We want to know what's in the aquifer, what we're sort of detecting because if it is something that is regulated, of course, or may be regulated, we want to try to be at the forefront to develop the technology, to make sure that it's removed before you open your tap and possibly drink it. That's sort of a snapshot of the driving factors with our budget.
Mahesh Lunani (21:03):
You got to be able to be careful how much checks you can cut because it ultimately impacts the rates. I want to talk about innovation. What does innovation mean to you, and where are you investing in innovation at the company?
Jeffrey Szabo (21:16):
Great question. You get excited just thinking about it. So, what I think we weave, and I'm sure many other agencies are similar, but we struggle with, you're so focused on the day-to-day. The day-to-day of putting out fires, making sure that we have adequate supply, all this stuff you do that sometimes we need to sort of sit back, brainstorm, and kick around ideas to think about not only what do we doing today, but what do we want to do in two years or five years and down the road to have the ability to actually feed off of each other in an environment that … some of it is inspiring, some of the thoughts are out there a little bit.
But to be innovative and to hear from peers across the country and regionally to see what are they doing, and what best practices can we bring here, we try to do that. We try to set aside time through our strategic plan to actually have these types of conversations, because I think you're always looking to the future.
When I got here, just had kicked off an AMR project to read meters where we were changing out and doing a drive-by system. 15, 16 years later, we're now piloting a couple of different options for the future to determine what works best for us, we haven't made a decision but we began those conversations. We have small scale pilots using a fixed base network and cell networks and things like that but it doesn’t just stop there.
If you look at other things that we're looking to do with paperless work order systems, and just how many times … when I first got here, there would be a work order that would be touched, I think it was 8 or 10 times by different employees before you actually got a result. And then if the customer called, we wouldn't be able to tell the customer what happened, what was the update on that work order for several days later.
So, you look at this stuff and you say, this has got to change because even though we're in authority and we don't have competition, we have never sort of sat and said that doesn't mean we don't need to provide excellent customer service; we're successful because of the people we serve and we want to make sure that we're thinking about them and how to make their knowledge of it, water they use and the service that we provide is as sort of forthcoming and as transparent as it possibly can be.
Mahesh Lunani (23:33):
Got it. Got it. So, it sounds like you got a couple of good innovation paths on the way. Whenever I think about groundwater well systems; one, four letter word comes to my mind, PFAS, and it's an issue throughout the country. You have some past experiences, you guys did an amazing job on several fronts. What is your guidance about this topic as a leader that's going through this? What's the guidance for your peers?
Jeffrey Szabo (24:00):
The guidance would be to act, to not be afraid of acting and doing what you can to get treatment in place as quickly as you can. So, we do have a PFAS issue here, Long Island in our service territory, and we went from New York state initially through their drinking water council.
Governor Cuomo, I think back in 2017, established the New York State Drinking Water Quality Council, which was a group of folks who were committed to establishing guidelines and MCLs for contaminants like PFAS. We were at the forefront of trying to make sure that one, our voice was heard.
Our voice was heard and since there were significant detections that we would be in a place to not only contribute to the dialogue (which we've done) but also, to act. We did not wait for New York state to set the standard, we did not wait for the federal government to set the standard of four parts, we started rolling out treatment as quickly as we could knowing that a regulation was coming, and we use granular activated carbon.
So, it's systems that we're very familiar with here from an engineering and design perspective. Don't be afraid to act because the regulators may not make a final decision for X period of time, and we've been successful doing that.
At the federal level, we complied with the federal regulation of four parts, which I believe takes effect in 2031, and we comply today. Something I'm very proud of, staff worked very hard to ensure that I'm able to sit here today and to share that information.
What was an interesting thing, and now this is an important fact, we were so focused on rolling out treatment to comply with the regulations, we need to also make sure that we're doing the normal standard maintenance of our capital and our infrastructure and our assets.
So, with all of the assets that we just discussed, elevated storage tanks, ground storage tanks, booster stations, water main, wells, we need to make sure that work was not being neglected. So, you're trying to balance your normal infrastructure while you also are devoting staff and significant resources for this oncoming sort of new regulations from the state of the federal government.
Mahesh Lunani (26:22):
No, there's no open checkbook, so you have to balance as a leader.
Jeffrey Szabo (26:25):
Absolutely, absolutely, and we did. I'll try to keep this short but knowing that we needed an infusion of revenues in order to develop those systems.
So, we, the board here, very supportive, of course, they instituted a water quality treatment charge of $20 per quarter on all accounts, and that generated about top of my head, I think it was about 33, $34 million a year. That's about four, four or five years ago, that's given us the funds that we need in order to pay for this treatment.
And we wanted, again, to be as transparent with our customers. We didn't lump it into our consumption charge or our quarterly service charge, this was a separate line item, so they knew that this was going to these unregulated at that time compounds.
Mahesh Lunani (27:10):
And hopefully, it goes away at some point once the investment is fully made.
I want to talk about AMWA presidency. Tell me a little bit more about it, and what did you learn through that role.
Jeffrey Szabo (27:23):
So yeah, AMWA, for those that don't know, it's a national organization trade association of the largest municipal drinking water suppliers in the country. In order to be a member, you need to serve a population of over 100,000.
There are a couple of hundred members. I have served on the board for many years. I was head of the legislative committee for a few years, and then on the executive committee, and I just started my second year as president.
So, AMWA is a fantastic organization because unlike some of the others, you're dealing with the top folks. You're dealing with the CEOs, the general managers, CFOs, and it's in a couple of hundred. You're not talking about 3000 water professionals at a conference running from session to session to learn the latest about X, Y, and Z, it's the same group in the same sessions during a conference or during a webinar, so you get to learn from each other and you get to know each other. You get to know the issues that they're dealing with.
AMWA has several pillars, knowledge sharing, advocacy, that's our sort of foundation and some of those things don't change. They also have a strategic plan that they did a president or two ago, but we're looking at revising that organization's strategic plan.
I think this year, we were certainly challenged with the Trump administration coming in and there being significant risk of changes at the EPA. Some of the funding sources that exist were also threatened to be significantly reduced or eliminated in their entirety, so that took up a lot of time initially.
And that will continue. That's sort of the ebb and flow of what are we dealing with from a regulatory and from a legislative perspective, they have a fantastic staff. I get to say, I'm the president of AMWA, but they have a CEO, and they have about 15 staffers that are just top-notch in the industry that keep all of us, all of the members at the forefront learning new things and abreast of best practices.
One of the things I'm really proud of, sort of during my tenure has been to look at how the organization communicates. How do we spend time together? First, there's webinars and there's weekly briefings and newsletters and things that go out, and there's conversations, several different committees that meet periodically.
But when we do get together as a group, one of the things that we find sort of most beneficial is the time we spend together. So, the conversations that we have, the shared experiences, learning and feeding off of each other, those conversations happen and most of the time it's over a dinner or it's at the lunch and during the course of a day or so, we're listening to panel discussions and experts brief us on a particular issue that X agency dealt with.
This past conference that we just came back from in Austin, Texas, one of the things that we did was to have a breakout session where we had myself and the executive committee sort of moderate these really sort of intimate, informal conversations about particular topics, infrastructure funding, PFAS, threats from a cyber perspective in small groups.
I think I had about 12 or 15 in my group, and we spent an hour throwing up a scenario and then just learning from each other and sharing experiences. And as strange as it sounds, those are some of the best conversations that you can have.
So, I'm really glad that we've sort of instituted that as something new that we're doing and we plan to expand upon that and do that at our meetings upcoming in 2026 and beyond. But it's things like that, it is trying to continue to share best practices and to learn from each other.
Mahesh Lunani (31:00):
It was a good session in Austin. I really enjoyed it, Jeff, and congratulations.
Jeffrey Szabo (31:03):
We're glad you were there.
Mahesh Lunani (31:05):
Congratulations. So, I want to wrap this conversation up with a question I always ask: what do you want your legacy to be? What do you want to be known for? And I'm not saying you're going to retire tomorrow, Jeff, that's not what my intent is. But you always think, 15 years into this role, I'm sure it comes across your mind, what would that be?
Jeffrey Szabo (31:28):
When I leave this agency, I will feel very, very proud of the work that we were able to do here. It's a different organization, it's changed completely. We are sort of, I hope, I believe, universally respected for being leaders in the industry, and that hasn't changed, that will continue.
But I think internally changing the culture and changing how we operate, changing our transparency, being creative, being innovative. I think sharing information, I think that's something that's changed where if we know something, and it could be something on the inside, a sale of a building or a lease of a new space or something like that — instead of dealing with gossip and the employees and who's going where and what's to what, share that. Don't be afraid to share what you know.
The perfect example was during COVID where I was doing daily updates. This is what's happening in COVID, this is what we know, this is what we're hearing from the health department. That changed. And some of the people say, “Oh, you guys were wrong. You gave us information that …” And I said, I'm not a health expert, but we're relying on health experts to pass along information and just be as transparent as you can.
So, I think if there's a lasting legacy, it would be making decisions, pushing the really smart people here, the great staff to be creative, to be innovative, and then backing them up with resources to continue to be at the forefront.
And then also just the culture here, it's a different place. It's not your father, grandfather's water authority. This is a place where I want people to (and I think many of them do) be proud of where they work and to think that they're contributing to the lives of the residents here in a very positive way.
Mahesh Lunani (33:19):
Well, it's outstanding, Jeff. I mean, just to sum up our discussion, you’re a quintessential administrator with a political science background history, but running a highly technical department in a county, and really focused on the Strat plan, culture change, running a massive infrastructure with over 600 well fields, 6,000 miles of pipeline, a decent budget of $230, $240 million.
Your message is about act on hard stuff like PFAS, act on it, don't wait, and driving innovation and more importantly, you want to be known for someone where the people are contributing, not taking directions, not consuming, but actually actively contributing.
I love that story, and I had in this podcast, heavy technical engineers, heavy legal folks. We had one or two administrators, but they’re very few far and between. This is the 46th or 47th episode, and I love what you're bringing to this sector, and how you could be for future water administrators that may not have technical background, but can still lead successfully. That to me is a great story.
Jeffrey Szabo (34:34):
I appreciate that. Yeah, I appreciate that very much. And even that, it's okay. I'm very proud that I'm an administrator, I'm not a technical person. And again, we're doing some really great stuff here. I really appreciate your comments, it's been a great conversation. I hope your listeners enjoy it, and I hope to talk to you again.
[Music Playing]
Mahesh Lunani (34:52):
Thank you, Jeff.
Voiceover (34:53):
Join host and Aquasight founder and CEO Mahesh Lunani for another episode of 21st Century Water, produced by JAG in Detroit Podcasts.