Today, Mahesh Lunani talks to Kamuron Gurol, Director of the King County Wastewater Treatment Division, Washington State (including Seattle). Prior to taking on this role, Kamuron was a Corridor Development Director at a 116-mile rail system connecting greater Seattle area. Kamuron was also the City Manager at City of Burien, a community of 50,000 with hundreds of businesses.
In his current role, Gurol oversees 5 treatment plants, 400 miles of interceptor pipes, 48 pump stations, 39 CSO outfalls, and 25 regulator stations- an asset base worth billions.
In a wide ranging conversation we talk about the future of water, including how we treat everything to wastewater to hot water, to PFAS, medication residue in waste, and more. He believes the circular economy can be not cradle to grave, but rather cradle to cradle.
Kamuron looks at the job of building the third generation of King County infrastructure like fixing up an hold house. It may have good "bones," but it needs to be worked on.
We look at ESG - too long, loud or "smelly' plants have gone into poor neighborhoods. What can we do to work with our neighbors instead of dictating to them?
Today's guest as a perspective on recruiting the next generation of water workers that we haven't had before. If we are looking to find young people fresh out of school, we might be looking in the wrong place.
Use all of your senses, and not just your brain. Kamuron explains what that advice means.
More:
King County Wastewater Treatment Division Website: https://kingcounty.gov/depts/dnrp/wtd.aspx
Kamuron Bio: https://kingcounty.gov/depts/dnrp/wtd/about/agency/wtd-director.aspx
Aquasight Website: https://aquasight.io/
Mahesh: Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Depending on where you are and what time you're listening to this. I'm with Kamuron Gurol. He's the director of King County Wastewater Treatment Division in the state of Washington. King County actually serves close to 2 million residents and covers over three counties.
But prior to taking on this role, Kamuron was a corridor development director at the 116 mile rail system connecting the greater Seattle area. He was also a city manager at a city of Burien, a community with 50,000 residents and hundreds of businesses. He has a Master's in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School, and a bachelor's in geology from the University of Washington.
I actually look forward to this conversation, not just about challenges of running and preparing utility for the 21st century, but through the lens of a professional administrator. And not a professional engineer for a change. Welcome, Kamuron.
Kamuron: Well, thanks. Thanks Mahesh for having me here. It's a pleasure to talk with you.
Yeah, this is a very interesting job and I've been blessed with a series of interesting, primarily public sector opportunities. That's where my heart is, this serving in the public sector. But we have great working relationships with many, many companies, private sector entities, to help us be successful.
And I see those partnerships as growing over time. We need expertise, we need new technology. We need to stay abreast of where things are going because we have a pretty important duty to fulfill. Now I get a chance to make sure that water is clean, that resources are recovered, and that value is provided for the dollars that people pay into the system.
Other jobs have been different forms of the same kind of thing, but ultimately making quality of life better.
Mahesh: Right. Well, I really look forward to it. So I wanna get right into a question. You talked about the public sector. You were a city manager, became a regional transit director, and now at a county level as a director for the wastewater division. What are the similarities and differences just besides being just a public
Kamuron: sector? Yeah. Well, I mean, in a very broad sense, it's back to that sort of, we're here to make quality of life better in some way. That manifests itself right now with taking a waste product. Something that goes down the drain, cleaning it up and discharge it so that it doesn't harm and ultimately perhaps adds value to the environment it goes into. And more increasingly along the way, we're recognizing that that waste stream has value itself. That it has commodities, things of value that are in the wrong place and in the wrong form. But if we can get them in the right place, in the right form there's value to be captured there. One of the ones that we're on the more early edges are sewer, heat recovery.
You take a shower, you do laundry, that's warm water that's going down the drain. Can we capture the heat associated with that and then redirect that heat to some good purpose? In some ways, as city manager, we're trying to use the public's dollars, whether they're in the form of warm water going down the drain or tax dollars that we're collecting to provide something good in return for the public.
When I was with Burien, a relatively small city, but we did a lot of different things. So my day might be filled with maybe even a dozen subject matter permitting issue, a parks issue, a police issue. A lot of public works, a lot of things that start with their letter P, by the way. That made it interesting and complex and I liked the role because I had a chance to add some form of value, whether it's better strategy, better execution, better communication across an array of services that local people really depend on.
Some of them are very visible and they're tangible. They recognize 'em right away. I'm gonna call on the phone because I'm worried about something. Somebody stole mail out of my mailbox. I need a police officer to respond to this issue. Or the park has a problem in it..
The lights are out, the kids can't play soccer. We need to get this thing. There's a tangible relationship to a service or a need that a community member has. In my current role, we have a little distance between us and the customer because we're a wholesale entity. We do the major conveyance and treatment, and the local city or sewer district collects the wastewater.
We just get it from them and then we treat it. But we are trying to keep that customer front of mind ourselves, cuz ultimately there is a customer. And that customer is paying a bill every month for that sewer service or that customer in a sense. Maybe they're not paying a bill, but they're fishing in a lake or they're swimming or boating or somehow benefiting from the water that we discharge into. So they're a recipient of our service, but indirectly their satisfaction depends on us doing a good job. So we're trying to keep that customer in mind.
Mahesh: Right. No, I like the fact that you discovered waste as a value in this role. And even though you're not directly impacting the customer with the first phone call, you have a massive regional impact on how the end residents ultimately feel about the watershed.
Kamuron: That's right. And it's getting to be more complex all the time. So we have both aspirational goals. We'd like to have that sense of you know, it gets called a circular economy. So seeing things not as cradle to grave, but cradle to cradle.
So there's a continuous stream and we're really talking about capturing value at all those different places. So keeping that mindset and looking at issues that are coming our way. We have contaminants in the wastewater stream. Pharmaceuticals for example, we take pharmaceuticals and when we use the toilet, those go through the system and they end up in the wastewater here.
So somebody might have, I have a family history of blood clots. People take Warfarin or other medications for those kinds of things to manage it. Well, it gets into the wastewater stream and then that, or a metabolite of that can be a problem in the water body in which we eventually discharge. We're only starting to recognize that now.
And sometimes those pharmaceuticals may be at levels that can cause some harm. So how do we deal with that? Cuz our wastewater systems were mostly built in the 1960s, way before anybody was managing for pharmaceuticals. And so we'll be looking at opportunities to better understand this and then better treat for those kinds of things.
So that's an impact. I mentioned the sewer heat recovery. We also recover a lot of biogas from our system where we can use it to heat our plants and heat buildings. That's a byproduct of the treatment process, is that you can get this and it, once you scrub it, it's just like natural gas you'd buy from your local utility, use it in the same fashion.
And in fact, King County sells back to our local utility, quite a lot of biogas that we've scrubbed and then put back into the regional system. And so there's value that we get out of that waste stream that brings money back in. It helps to moderate the rates that we charge because we're getting revenue back to help us pay for a cost.
So there's great opportunity, but the system is getting more complex all the time. Right?
Mahesh: No question. I mean, the cradle to cradle, sewer, heat recovery, biogas, the impact of pharmaceuticals, I mean, this is a never ending challenge and stretching the limits of what the wastewater treatment means.
So I wanna ask a question. You are relatively new to the wastewater sector. Obviously you don't sound in the last five minutes that you're new. What is one thing that surprised you about running a wastewater division?
Kamuron: Yeah. There's a lot of things that are new to me in this line of business. I think I didn't fully understand the complexity of this line of business.
That was a little surprising to me. I had a little, probably overly simplistic and a little out of date understanding of it, and it's actually been pretty unbalanced. More encouraging than discouraging to understand that complexity better. I do think the more complexity means we have more opportunity to optimize.
With a simple system, you have very few levers you can pull. And so you wanna pull those in the right direction and that kind of thing. Complex system has its challenges of understanding it and managing it, but you have many more levers that you can pull. And I'm using that as a metaphor here, but dials to turn, levers to pull to try to optimize value out of the system.
So as we recognize those opportunities, then we can start to focus our attention on how we optimize that. We actually have right now a biogas optimization program that we're initiating here at King County as we produce biogas, as I said, as a bio product of the wastewater treatment process. At all three of our regional treatment plants, one plant is able to capture and beneficially use north of 90 to 95% of that biogas.
The other plants don't have a way to beneficially use the gas they can capture. We use it to heat some of the plant system, but we flare some of it away. Not unlike you would see in an oil field where you have natural gas flaring off an oil field and like any sort of rational person, you look at that and you say, well, goodness, that flare's not doing any good.
It's not putting anything to use. The good news is we're burning the methane, so it's not a terrible greenhouse gas, but the heat that goes from that flare is not being put to beneficial use. We are looking to do more, and our two plants to do more of the flaring to capture that gas and put it to some kind of use.
Perhaps we can sell it back into the system the way we do at our south plant and our local utility can buy that. Perhaps we can find a third party to use that gas for an industrial process next door to our plant. I recently came back from a trip to Denmark and Danes are very good at this kind of thing, you call it industrial symbiosis, where they make deliberate decisions to co-locate uses that can benefit directly from each other.
And the proximity makes it easy. So we're looking for an opportunity at one of our plans to see if there's a nearby industrial use that could take our biogas and then put that to use. The third plant we might have uses onsite on that plant for uses of the biogas, where we can use it even more for our own processes on the plant.
So we'll have a tailored solution depending on the location. But all of it needs to try to maximize the capture, maximize the beneficial use, reduce greenhouse gas impacts, and ideally create even more revenue to help offset costs. It's a holistic frame that we're taking on this, and that's the kind of thing that is, I didn't know the opportunity was here, so that's kind of an example of the surprise.
Mahesh: Actually, it's fascinating. It's full of opportunities. That's what I read, what you took away from it. You talked about five treatment plants. I mean, you have a complex system just to highlight to the audience, 400 miles of interceptors, 48 pump stations, 39 outfalls. An asset base worth billions of dollars if you had to replace it today. And it's a system that's running live.
Kamuron: That's right.
Mahesh: In a rail system, it might sit from 12:00 AM to 4:00 AM. This stuff is running live. And at any point in time you have to make sure that the environment is clean, and public health is captured at every second, every minute. You cannot say that, okay, this hour we are not gonna have good public health in that situation.
That's right. And more importantly, you are serving the hottest tech market in the country, or at least one of the hottest. So you put all this together. What are the challenges that come with leading such a division?
Kamuron: Yeah, I will describe a handful because there are many challenges. But a handful right now is that we are working in a high cost environment. By definition, Seattle's a very high cost market, and costs are rising rapidly. We've had these impacts with the pandemic of course, and supply chain challenges. We need to attract talent here to this market too. I happen to be sitting in our West Point treatment plant today, which is out kind of on the very western edge of Seattle on Puget Sound.
It's right next to a large park, and the neighborhood that's here is called Magnolia. It is one of the higher cost neighborhoods in Seattle. So physically getting to this plant is not easy, number one. And even if you could live nearby, it's very hard to afford that. One of the challenges we have is attracting talent, and that's from the leadership to engineers.
And by the way, if you know any engineers, we need to hire them. And plant operators too. And so our plant operators, many have to commute long distances to get to a place where they can afford to live and then still work at our plant. So that's one. There's a whole talent pool challenge. And we are a growing system.
We're gonna need to attract talent across the board. That's one challenge. I mentioned affordability. As we look at our work program, we've got the highest capital program in King County today. King County is a very you know, I think our two year budget was around 16 billion or something like that.
It's a big enterprise now. A lot of that are expensive things like courts and jails. But wastewater treatment is one of the bigger entities that we have. We have the largest capital program for the county, so we do about $200 million per year of capital work. We have about that much in operational costs as well.
So that's the baseline and what's fascinating, Mahesh, is our projections are looking to our capital programs, not just doubling, possibly tripling or even quadrupling over these next roughly 10 to 15 years. And there are a number of drivers for that. We're in the process of trying to identify and characterize and then explain those drivers to our rate paying audience, our local elected officials and the others that we charge money to, to operate the system.
So those drivers are increasing the capacity in a growing area. Plants need to be able to accommodate the additional wastewater that's generated. And we've been, even through the pandemic, housing development in the Seattle area continues to proceed very strongly. We have increasing regulatory duties.
There, as I said, the regulations are getting more complex and for some of your audience, they'll probably know. Our most recent four letter word is PFAS. And that's a real challenge. We don't know exactly where that particular regulation is going yet, but it's gonna require more from us. And then we have an older system.
Our system, the core of it, was built in the 1960s. Here in Seattle. Voters approved at the time the creation of what was called the municipality of metropolitan Seattle. It's called Metro. And it handled sewage. Both of those lines of business have been taken into King County back in the nineties.
They were assumed by King County. So we do those businesses now, but the system that we built comes out of the sixties, by and large, was upgraded in the nineties with secondary treatment by and large. And we're gonna be looking at taking the system into a third generation looking ahead. So we've got all of the needs for what a system of the future needs to look like, and we've got legacy issues coming out of the past.
It's like you bought an old house and it's got wonderful character and great bones. You open up every door and there's something to do in that room as well. And so that's where we find ourselves. Managing these assets is expensive. And so those are just a handful of the drivers for our system. So when I look at the future, it's helping ourselves and our rate paying constituents feel confident that we're using that dollar effectively to accomplish those.
Mahesh: Right. Well, it sounds like you have a lot of checks to cut in the next several years. But you have to make sure those checks are creating an incredible amount of value to overcome these challenges you talked about.
I love the fact that you are building the third generation wastewater systems in King County. That to me is fascinating. That includes creating value out of the waste. Making sure that every dollar of waste is converted into a revenue profile for your county. So there's many terrific aspects of this.
I wanna ask you a question. You've been in this role close to two years, what a year, nine months?
Kamuron: Yeah.
Mahesh: Any CEO that takes on, I mean, your role is a CEO of the division. You make changes. Sometimes they make changes immediately, like Elon Musk has done for Twitter.
Kamuron: It's not going well right now.
Mahesh: That's right. Or sometimes you absorb and you understand. . What are the changes you are driving and why?
Kamuron: Well, some of these things were underway when I joined, and my role is to make sure they happen and perhaps, and enhance them along the way. A good example of that would be our focus on better realizing equity goals in our system.
King County is a wonderful place and has a great economy, and we have people that are at the lower end of that economy, and we have parts of our community that are struggling financially. With our cost rising, we need to make sure that we do what we can to help mitigate that impact on especially the lowest 20% quintile of our are rate payer base.
We don't have very good tools for that right now, Mahesh, as a wholesaler. We don't have that direct customer interface, so we're trying to figure out how we can execute that. Is there a way that we can help mitigate that, so it's both a cost issue. And there's kind of a fairness issue. You're familiar that a lot of industrial types of uses have often been placed into places that aren't the high end of town. They're at the low end of town. That's where the smelly stuff goes. The loud stuff goes, and the people who live in those parts of the community have taken those impacts historically, and that's true here.
Like other places. We need to find a way, I think to, with our facilities, such that the assets that we either have or are going to create actually are seen and welcomed by the communities where they're going to go. Some of them have to go places because of engineering requirements. Water flows downhill.
I can't put a treatment plant back at the top of the mountain. That's not gonna work for anybody. But we can do a better job of having a lighter touch, a more graceful touch, a more engaged relationship with the communities that we service, especially the one where our facilities are directly relocated in those places, and we're gonna be building some new stuff.
We think in the coming years in some of those locations. I think we need to see that as an opportunity and as a duty to do that better than perhaps decisions made in the past where I'll pick on my former line of business transportation. It used to be that you'd just build a highway right through the poorest part of town, because that made it easy for the wealthy people to get in and out.
Many American cities suffer from that problem to some extent. Sewage treatment plants and other facilities were put in the poor part of town because nobody wanted them in other places. We need to have an equitable kind of approach to all of that so that if we have to put something somewhere for engineering reasons, we do it in the most fair way possible.
And ideally, we'd like to see that the communities, like I said, see it as a local asset. We are just putting into service and commissioning a new wet weather treatment station here in what we call the Sodo part of Seattle. So it's the south of downtown, or Sodo. This is a part of our community that has an industrial character.
They sort of embrace the industrial character, but we work with them such that the new facility we built there. FIt that character well ,would be seen as fitting in nicely in that neighborhood, and it could create some amenities for the people that live there. So we've got a community room that people can utilize for meetings.
We'll be using it for training, for recruitment for our staff positions could be used for community education and those kinds of things. We're not just putting a piece of pop art, a statue out front. We're trying to create opportunities for storm water on that site to be cleaned on site and then people can be educated about how that process works and see that process in action on the site.
And so we've involved a lot of community members in that project design, and that's a 250 plus million dollar facility. So a pretty big asset, pretty big investment. We're looking at probably something that's in a $1 to $2 billion range. It's gonna be up the street for it in the coming 10 to 15 years.
Might be a bigger version of what we've done here, might be something else, but we'll need to take that same kind of approach to build an asset that's welcome, that adds value to that community. So that's one of the interesting things that I have the good fortune of being here at the time where I can help to make sure that occurs.
Mahesh: Good. Now you convert what is presumably a dirty asset in a poor neighborhood into a high value asset that the neighborhood feels that it can engage with, interact with, or even enjoy portions of it in terms of community rooms and just parks. You can also create probably valuable parks out of it.
Kamuron: Exactly. And I'll tell you the trip to Denmark, the Danes are very good at this kind of stuff and I'm sure other countries are out the ahead of us in some ways. They can build infrastructure that has it. If you ever get a chance to go to Copenhagen and see Copen Hil, they built a ski facility on top of a waste energy plant.
So you got this big thing that burns garbage. But, it's clean and it's quiet and you can go up and ski down the top of it. I mean, that's not what I'm trying to build here, but it's a great example of building something that is an asset to the public and benefit.
Mahesh: Right. You already actually touched on this very early on in the conversation, the resiliency, ESG, circular economy, water reuse.
I mean, these are emerging themes and the way you discuss it isn't emerging for you. You are actually deep into it, right? Just building on some of the comments you made, what does each of these mean to you, and how are you preparing organizations to embrace? As you move forward in the next five, 10 years?
Kamuron: Yeah, and I think we've got a story to tell to ourselves and to our public across all of those things. You mentioned several of those different kinds of topic areas, that's why this is a complex business. We can't just say, we'll do this better here because there may be a downside to doing it better.
We need to optimize across several different criteria to be fully successful in this. So to me it means making sure that we have really good information to inform the decisions that we make and the recommendations that we make. Ultimately a county council for example,sets our sewer rate, that's our main source of revenue.
For them to set that rate and look, rates typically go up every year. They have to have confidence that what we're doing makes good sense. You use the term adding value. I think that's exactly right. They need confidence that the dollar is going to that value. And there's healthy debate in a democracy about where that dollar should really go.
Is it more important for climate or for equity, for water quality? Where are we trying to maximize and we have things that are pushing us from the outside? We have our own goals from the inside that we're trying to realize as well. That's the context. And so we need good information looking ahead to that sort of third generation, I think like any old house, I'd like us to keep the bones of the house.
It was well built. There's no reason to tear it down. We can continue to use this same house. But we need to upgrade the operations of that house, the outfitting of that house better. I live in a house that was built in 1930. We just had the good fortune to redo the kitchen. So we're upgrading some of the technology that we have in that kitchen so that it serves us better.
It's more energy efficient. It's gonna do a better job faster. It's safer. A lot of different things that you can do as you go through that process. And frankly, thinking about your line of business, it needs to be smarter in terms of how it manages as well. So as we go forward, we're looking at technology and software and integrated systems across a very complex system.
We need access to information that's accurate and in a form that's easy to use. And we need to do it often quickly both for our engineering work, but also to respond to day-to-day challenges. And so that house that we have needs to function and perform better. It still does about the same job in a sense. The house accommodates people, but we're gonna ask it to do more.
So yeah, it was built to treat wastewater. Largely has to take pathogens out of the wastewater. That was really what it was all about. Get the bad bugs so that people don't get sick from drinking or bathing in that swimming in that water. Well, now we've got, yes, keep doing, dealing with the bad bugs. We also gotta deal with the pharmaceuticals and the PFAS, and we gotta deal with all of the positive goals of resource recovery and we gotta make sure that we have a lighter touch on the climate.
It's a much more complex job and we'll need both the technical skill and the human resource, but we'll also need the technology to run this house, run this system going into the future. So that's also exciting to me.
Mahesh: Everything you described, and I mentioned this I think when I was talking to New York City, DEP, Pam Elardo at that time. It almost seems like your role, you are the wastewater treatment division director.
You really are a circular economy director within the county that you serve because you're touching gas, you're cleaning up PFAS, you're touching, cleaning up watersheds, and you're producing valuable nutrients that you can put back into the ag or. The role fundamentally. Is redefined, through everything you talked about.
Kamuron: Yeah, I think you're right, and I think it's partially true for a lot of people in the public sector is that there's been a better realization that we can't just keep the silo that we got trained in or grew up in professionally. We need to take those blinders off and look at how our role is, in fact part of a larger whole.
And that we have a duty, a responsibility and an opportunity to recognize that better. And I'll say too, I think people in the private sector can help us with that because they can often see things that we can't. Whether it's opportunity or change. We need that private sector point of view to help inform our decision making.
And we're also gonna need the horsepower cuz we don't have it all. We don't have all the knowledge we have and we can't attract the knowledge, talent we're gonna need. So we're gonna have to bring in, and we do this all the time, people to help us sort of see that landscape more fully and absolutely accurately.
And what's interesting, Mahesh, is I'm enough of a nerd, and I grew up watching Star Trek, right? And the nice thing about that, it was a combination of a show that talked about technology and what people can achieve with their brain power. A lot of it was about relationships and dealing with things that are at the core of what it means to be a human being.
And I think that's actually true for all of our work, whether you're in the public or private sector. Ultimately you're doing something that helps us all succeed a little bit better. Maybe it's more safely, maybe it's more cheaply, maybe it's with better outcomes. And if we do our partnerships right, then we can each add to that equation and really leverage the strengths that we have across those different disciplines and those different sectors.
But I'm really looking forward to even more robust work with private sector partners. I should mention our big capital program. We are looking at, I think the term now is called collaborative delivery. As opposed to alternative delivery. Because it's really become much more of a standard.
It's now the standard as opposed to the alternative. And so we're looking to expand our use of those techniques and we're out right now to recruit for an owner advisor for that big project that we were talking about also in our Sodo area to help us navigate that complexity of a big project that will take somewhere in between 10 and 15 years to design and build and then commission.
Mahesh: No, it is really refreshing. A really fascinating, Kamuron, to hear. Just several thoughts here, including how you need that expertise, because things are getting complex right, and you cannot have everything in house and are you gonna leverage a good partner? To deliver on the promise you are making to the communities that you serve.
Kamuron: That's right.
Mahesh: And by the way, the point you made about partnerships and people, at the end of the day, if those two words are not in the mix, what are we doing this for, if it's not for human relationships?
Kamuron: That's exactly right. And we have all of a role to play and perhaps a portion of the success that we can help define and execute. But it's really part of a larger whole. And I would agree. I think if we can all think that we're the circular economy director in our role if we kind of keep a little portion of that job description in our head, Then the role that we do play, I think will be a little bit better because we'll be syncing more holistically as we approach.
Mahesh: So being a founder and CEO of a tech company, I had to ask this question. What is the role of technology in the wastewater infrastructure and what are you most excited about?
Kamuron: We're absolutely dependent on good technology to help us do our jobs. It is an existential thing for it. If it's not here, we can't do our job.
And it is a continuously changing landscape where the capabilities of technology continue to expand and we need, because we have a lot of it deployed today, and it's a combination of new and old, kinda like that old house, right? You just look at the technology, the software, and the hardware that goes along with it.
We have the old and the new, and we're asking them to kind of work together. And some of the old stuff will come to the end of its life and get swapped out. But we still have a lot of things that are standard. Pumps, right? I need good pumps. I need pumps that are built like back in the sixties, they were built better than, they're not built well, these days. I wish they were, but they're not. And we need really good operational management systems to help us cuz we don't have enough people to run around in trucks and fix everything. So it's incredibly important and we have a pretty robust work program, and it is continuously challenged with the change.
I know some of our folks have been talking with members of your team in the AI realm, for example, it is comparatively new to us and we're trying to understand it, how it could work with our system to help us manage it better. I'm excited for that part of our future and I wanna try to help us to advance in that realm.
And you can choose almost any form of technology where we need to do that. I will say too, one of the challenges that we have in our system, I don't know if you find this in your work with others across the country, but we depend on a lot of electric power for our system to work well. That's another part of, unfortunately, in the United States, our electric power grid or systems also suffer from lack of investment, and we've had sewage overflows because we've lost power.
Because we've had power pops. And a lot of our work in the last handful of years has been to work with our local utilities to reduce the likelihood and severity of those. So better power is coming in. And then when they do come in, cuz they're still gonna come in, how do we manage it better? And so we've been working with our manufacturers, and the equipment that we use to better ride through some of those kinds of problems.
So our system is more robust and resilient, right? It's not unlike what you would do for earthquake resiliency. You wanna be able to roll with the punches a bit because the punches probably are not gonna stop. So that's a contextual problem. If I could wave a wand, I'd have a lot more money spent on the electrical grid cuz it would help me deliver waste water better.
Mahesh: Right. Because you use power. There's no other way to move the water and treat the water without power. It's not magical.
Kamuron: We are the biggest electric power user in King County government.
Mahesh: Right. You should be concerned, right? Make sure the quality of the power is good. So you've been a public administrator on many different levels. You know, I moved into this industry seven years ago. I was serving Fortune 500 executives. And CEOs around the world. I came from a B2B world to a B2G world., And this industry taught me patience. But I have a question for you though. How would you change, so the B two G adoption? The business to government adoption of new things is just about as fast as B2B adoption. It will never be equal. We cannot say an F-150 will run like a Ferrari. I mean, just not gonna happen. But how do you drive the adoption faster if there is a way you can make it happen?
Kamuron: Yeah, I think it's a great question. I'm not sure I have a perfect answer here, but I do know. Government entities are by tradition, probably more risk averse, generally speaking, and some of that comes out of statutes and other things that are driving those.
It's not in our direct control. And when things go wrong in a public entity, they are shared by definition, in the spotlight. So you tend to attract and have a culture of risk aversion. So it's really asking how do you get over some of the humps that are caused by that. So I would say there's to some extent, a built in, a bit of reluctance and hesitancy.
The other thing that's a hurdle is the, you know what? I finally got funding for the last technology that I've been trying to get here, and I'm gonna deploy that. I need two years, five years, whatever it is to get that done. Then I'll come talk to you about your new technology. I'm frustrated by that too, but that answer is out there and in my agency, it's in a lot of my peers, and it's not an unreasonable or a wrongheaded thing.
It's just that sort of human nature. I think talking that there's, I've only got so much bandwidth and you're asking me to make 17 changes and I just can't keep up with all of them. And I have an old house and I'm still trying to get the power to this room . So it's a fair perspective. My job is to find opportunities where we can comparatively, safely test, drive, and deploy these new technologies.
And demonstrate that they're going to work well, work with our system, identify whether there's hiccups or bugs or something like that. And so if there's a business case to expand, then it's easier to do so cuz we have familiarity with it. But it probably does take people like me to get over that internal hump.
We need some leadership and some visionary. I start to see the opportunity. And I have to work with my own internal kind of inertia, if you will. Not myself, but my organization has some of them. So that's probably what you're seeing. If I was in your shoes, I could see that would be a bit frustrating. And so I'm here to say, yeah, you're right about your frame on this.
There is that hesitancy and there's opportunity. We just need to find that right place to go. So that's what I'm learning, our line of business and trying to get a sense of where those opportunities are. And I'm optimistic that within this next probably 6 to 18 months, we will find those opportunities here in my agency.
And then the other thing that happens is that we're very good. One advantage with the public sector is it's all open source technology. When somebody does something, we talk about it and it is free for others to learn. And there's a gravitational pull that you get cuz I've solved a problem, I do this better, and people run.
And then because they see their partner agency or their peer do it, it's a lot easier to then see it now go forward. So that's the other piece that I think is part of all of this, is to see these kinds of things successfully deployed and then they can go and expand from there across peer agencies.
Mahesh: Right? I call it a fraternity. If you make it work, the fraternity will speak, right? You know, I was part of the Water 2050 Team Golf Gathering of American Water Works Association last week, and one of the topics I raised as part of the 2050 was how do you make the water sector the top 10 sectors for incoming graduates?
And it's impossible. My two sons graduated from computer science working for tech firms. I mean people go on to tech, financial consulting, et cetera. Any quick thoughts on what is that intrinsic? And you talked about how difficult it is for you to recruit.
Kamuron: Yeah, I think we have a great story to tell and I'm not sure we're telling it effectively enough at the college and graduate school levels.
And I do think those kinds of graduates will have different motivations. Oftentimes, they're, especially these days, people gravitate towards something that looks hot, that look like it's going to be financially very rewarding, and they're much more risk loving at that stage. I'm willing to try the startup, or the this. Because I'm young enough that if it doesn't work out, I can go to the next, so we may not attract people right out of the gate, but we may have an opportunity after somebody's had some of that experience.
Sometimes that hot thing ends up not really being so hot and we see that a lot like the news in the last two weeks. It's even something as robust as we thought some of our social media systems are. They can go down or suffer great injury very, very quickly. The advantage, I would say, of work that's either for the public sector directly or serving the public sector as your business.
We're not going anywhere. We're not going out of business anytime soon. And we have a really important mission and I think that's the part that we miss in school, is to talk about that mission. Cuz if you can feel engaged with an organization because what you do is really helping to make the world a better place.
I know it makes a difference for me. Maybe it doesn't make a difference for everybody, but I think it does have traction with some of our students out. They would feel that sense that, oh, I may not get a big bonus but there's still a pension plan here and a robust one in Washington state.
It's not on thin ice. It's actually in good shape. So I've got my future here. That's not something you find very often. And while I'm working here, I'm involved in a mission that in a sense could not be more important, whether it's water quality or just pick a topic area here. All of us depend on these things, whether we see it tangibly in a day or not.
If we don't do a good job, then you know it and then you'll know it pretty quickly. So there's a mission piece that I think we can do more at. I think that's true for engineering firms. We work with a lot of firms that do work for us, design work, that kind of thing, and we trade the employees back and forth.
We'll find a personnel thing, Hey, I used to work with you over at the city of so-and-so, and now they're with a designer, engineering firm, remote environmental firm. So I think there's an opportunity there and I think we need to do a better job of reaching out to those graduates. Let me tell you a very quick thing, Mahesh here, which is on the retail end of this, we have to find operators for our plants.
We don't necessarily need a four year degree or even a two year degree to do this, but this is not easy work. This is complex work or you're operating machinery that's expensive. It's complex. There's a lot of electronics that you're responsible for, a very big system, and if you don't do it right, we have a big problem. It's a line of business that doesn't attract everybody and the schools don't train for it. There's not an operator school.
Mahesh: No. I a hundred percent agree with you, Kamuron. And in fact, I came from the manufacturing sector and we had lost a huge manufacturing base in the last 30 years because of globalization.
I feel like there needs to be mass mobilization of retraining, whoever just left of that, into operator. And kind of ITT Tech graduates that would come out.
Kamuron: Technical mechanic. Electrician, instrument techs and all these kinds of things. We've got an operator and training program here where we're paying people to come into the system that gets everybody from a high school graduate kid, 18, 19 years old.
To an army veteran might have spent a few years in the service, right? We've got moms that are done with kids that are coming back into the system. We need more women and we're expanding that to now, to the electricians and the mechanics, and we're gonna be competing for those as well.
Mahesh: Listen, the middle class was created, in the eighties and nineties through manufacturing jobs and I believe this is the new middle class through the public sector jobs.Cause there is no shortage toward the country. I wanna get a little personal, two questions I have. O one is, what is the one leadership lesson you learned and what would your guidance be to anybody that wants to be a leader in the public sector?
Kamuron: I would say a leadership lesson would be to use all of your senses and not just your brain. Especially use your ears and your eyes. You can learn a lot about the nature of the problem by making sure you have a well-rounded kind of perspective on things and that you use your kind of full array of senses to make sure you've got a fully informed sense of what that opportunity or that challenge is.
And we get so tempted to look at a chart or hear an anecdote or something else, and I'm guilty of it too, and make a decision based on incomplete information. And so take the time to get yourself the information you need and use your full array of your skills. Sometimes that's using your talent, your own brain trust to make.
I was doing it this afternoon. I had one sense of something and I think I needed to get better informed, so I test drove an idea. My idea is probably not the right one, but the problem statement is still there. We need to figure out a better solution for it. So that's a leadership lesson is to use your whole self.
Mahesh: I'm gonna internalize that leadership lesson myself because sometimes you have to also add the heart to it. That's true when you make a decision. The second part of that question, You've been around for a long time in various roles. What do you want your one legacy to be?
Kamuron: I do come back to that. It's probably a simplistic understanding, but I'd like to think that when I'm done in my professional career, people will look upon that to say that he played an important role, he added value in the challenges, in the opportunity that he had. And he helped people be successful in their roles.
That is, I used my position, my voice to help others be successful, whether that's the community at large, whether that's the team that works with me. I'm a people-centered person. We;re doing this over electronic means, and a lot of my meetings these days are over electronic. But I wanted to be down here at West Point today because we had an employee recognition and we had a lot of people in person talking with each other in real life.
I need that type of energy to be successful. And there's a phrase that I've heard. I forget to do it. It's attributed to, but it does resonate to me. That sounds, they may not remember what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel. And it's a wise phrase. And if your legacy that you leave behind is that people felt better because you were part of that, that you played an effective role and they felt that in their heart, then I think you've probably done it right.
Mahesh: It sounds very simple, but it's probably very complex too. So, Kamuron, I'll tell you, it's been a fascinating 50 minutes. You are building the third generation wastewater system and impacting the Greater Seattle area. Thinking waste to value. You're looking at applying all this that you talked about applying all the senses, handling one of the biggest budgets in King County, talking about the circular economy.
I mean, there are so many things that we discussed in this that I'm fascinated and I wanna actually listen to this story again once it gets produced, because I haven't internalized every comment you made. But I wanna thank you for your valuable time. Thank you for sharing this with everyone. I look forward to seeing you soon.
Kamuron: That sounds great. Mahesh, thanks so much for the opportunity, your thoughtful questions and appreciate the value that you and your company are providing as well. We look forward to continuing our conversation and I'll see you down the road, I'm sure at a conference very soon.