In this episode of 21st Century Water, we sit down with Matthew Wirtz, Deputy Director and Chief Engineer at Fort Wayne City Utilities. With over 25 years of experience, Matt has played a crucial role in shaping the city’s water infrastructure, addressing challenges like flood prevention, stormwater management, and sustainability. Coming from a farming background, Matt’s early exposure to water management laid the foundation for his career in civil engineering.
We explore Fort Wayne’s ambitious efforts to modernize its water systems while balancing economic growth and environmental responsibility. Matt discusses the city’s 18-year-long control plan to separate sewer and stormwater systems, a major initiative aimed at reducing overflows by over 95%. Now in its final year, this project marks a significant milestone in Fort Wayne’s water management history. The city has also been investing heavily—up to $135 million annually—in infrastructure improvements, including lead pipe replacement, asset management, and innovative energy solutions.
One of Fort Wayne’s standout achievements is its microgrid system, which integrates solar power, battery storage, and methane-powered engines to enhance power resiliency at its water and wastewater treatment facilities. This setup provides 40-80% of the city’s energy needs daily while ensuring backup power during critical events. Matt emphasizes how this model not only supports sustainability but also enhances operational reliability.
We also discuss how Fort Wayne is leveraging technology and innovation to optimize utility operations. The city is adopting machine learning for sewer inspections, implementing advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) to improve water management, and exploring AI-driven tools for asset management and customer service. Additionally, Fort Wayne is addressing workforce challenges by growing its in-house engineering team, recruiting interns, and investing in professional development to build a strong talent pipeline.
Looking ahead, sustainability remains a key focus. Fort Wayne is developing large-scale green infrastructure projects, such as converting a 140-acre former golf course into a wetland for flood mitigation and water quality improvement. The city is also working toward a more integrated approach by breaking down traditional utility silos, fostering collaboration between engineering and operations teams.
Matt shares his leadership philosophy, emphasizing work-life balance, mental well-being, and a people-first approach to management. His goal is to leave behind a utility that is not only technologically advanced but also a great place to work.
This conversation highlights Fort Wayne’s forward-thinking strategies in water management, blending innovation, sustainability, and resilience to create a model for the future.
Fort Wayne Public Works Website: https://www.cityoffortwayne.org/public-works-departments/board-of-public-works.html
[00:00:00] VO: 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.
[00:00:33] Mahesh: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Today I'm really excited to welcome Matthew Wirtz, Deputy Director and Chief Engineer at Fort Wayne City Utilities. With over 25 years’ experience, Matt leads major infrastructure projects but is also deeply ensuring Fort Wayne's Systems remain efficient and resilient.
He's shaping the flood prevention and drainage solutions and bringing his technical expertise and real-world innovation together with a civil engineering degree from Iowa state. I'm excited to discuss with Matt, the future of Fort Wayne's water systems, sustainability efforts, and the role of technology. Welcome Matt.
[00:01:18] Matthew: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:20] Mahesh: Real pleasure. What experiences shaped your journey to who you are today in your role?
[00:01:27] Matthew: Yeah. A little background. I'm in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is Northeast Indiana, but I actually grew up a little farm kid in Northwest Iowa. So that meant working on the farm. Water was important for the agriculture and the farming that we did.
I was blessed growing up in a property that we had actually a creek and a river. And so lots of water grew up around water. And then from the farming side of things, the environmental, the sustainability farming was going through. And farming's changed a ton since I was even there, but it was starting to go through the, hey, let's use less chemicals, a lot of those kinds of things because of the water quality impacts.
And actually now my family farm is, it's all organic. It's a hundred percent organic. Grew up, worked in construction, grew up in the summers and then went to civil engineering and then my first job after internships was actually for HNTB in Kansas City before I ended up coming here to Fort Wayne and then been in the water program and with Fort Wayne ever since.
That's my journey.
[00:02:29] Mahesh: Yeah, no, it's the farm, your childhood influenced water. And your construction influence, civil engineering, construction experience, and you are here both building systems and infrastructure for water. I can see how they can get together. Now, what are the biggest challenges and priorities in the role you play today?
[00:02:49] Matthew: So yeah, my current role is part of the leadership team for the utility. I'm one of a few. I'm not alone and nobody ever is. But we're trying to build infrastructure to address a long-term control plan. We're one of the several hundred communities in the United States where we had sewer systems that were combined.
They were originally not a separate stormwater and a sanitary system in the center of our city. So we've been working on that for 18 years. This is actually our last year of our long-term control plan to get into a point where we're reducing well over 90, 95, I think is 96 percent something. Significant reduction in our overflows and doing that while being a growing community.
One of the more growing communities in Indiana and in the Midwest. And so trying to balance that with promoting what's good for our region and for our customers. We want to do all that way, keeping our rates affordable and sustainable. So that's been one of our largest challenges and then probably dealing with, we're not alone in the change in workforce, retirement, and losing a lot of valuable veterans of our utility and bringing in new people and attracting them and retaining them.
And then probably I'd maybe add one more: that's figuring out new ways to connect with our customers, because it definitely is people are more, I think, I don't know exactly how to describe- more digital. They, instead of talking to us, sometimes they just want to throw something out there on the internet.
Typically that's a complaint and not a praise and figuring out how to reconnect with our customers or do a better job of developing our customer connections.
[00:04:27] Mahesh: Yeah. I don't know. It sounds like a lot, and it looks to me like you're going to stop using the four-letter word LPCC from here on, right?
[00:04:36] Matthew: Yeah. Long term control plan. We will always keep investing in our sewer system, but it will be about different things.
[00:04:42] Mahesh: Oh my God, thank God, right? After 18 years, he's going to the graveyard, finally. Now, your system is fairly expansive. In terms of water, sewers, stormwater, can you describe your system if you have to give two minutes the scale and size of your system?
[00:04:58] Matthew: Yeah, so we're a regional utility in northeast Indiana. We have a few thousand miles of pipe between the three utilities. We have about 110, 000 water customers, about 100, 000 or just under 100, 000 sewer, and then about 90, 000 stormwater customers. In terms of population, 300,000, 400, 000 in our metro area, I think it's closer to 500, 000, but not all of them would be connected to our utilities.
Growing a lot of communities. It's been a good last several years in both residential, but also we're blessed with northeast nano, our water supply. On the drinking water side is the St. Joe River. We're part of the Great Lakes Basin, so we have a semi abundant supply of water, and so we're getting more and more interest from industry that is looking for water to be a big part of what they need to do their work, and so that's been helpful for us for the last, you know, several years.
[00:05:56] Mahesh: A couple of things you mentioned, a couple of times you mentioned, is you're growing. I assume the area is growing. What's driving the growth?
[00:06:05] Matthew: I think it's certainly Indiana as a state. Certain areas of the state have been able to grow. I think the tax environment and I think Fort Wayne; we moved here and I think it has a pretty good reputation.
It's actually one of the best. We get really high ratings, WalletHubs and all the different, like number one, number two, as far as most economical. So we're a very cost affordable place to live, a good education system. So the things that a lot of times attract a family, we are working on our downtown significant investments over the last decade to really revitalize the downtown and our riverfront.
We kind of, Kumar Menon, our director would say, we used to think of our rivers as our sewers when we were just discharging during wet weather, and now we've been cleaned them up a lot, working to do that and revitalizing. We used to- they used to be hidden behind trees. And now we're opening that up and buildings are going along.
And so a lot of that has brought a lot of energy to the communities and to our region. It's not just Fort Wayne itself, but our region.
[00:07:06] Mahesh: Yeah. Excellent. When I researched, for the discussion of ours, I saw you're making nine figure investments, $135 million. What are the big programs you have going?
[00:07:20] Matthew: Yeah. So for the last handful of years, the hundred plus million dollar a year capital investment have been related to our long-term control plan and that reduction in overflows. But we're now transitioning out of that into: we as a utility are, we've been working on our asset management and investments in aging infrastructure for years now and over a decade, but really ramping it up, but for decades prior to the early 2000s, there wasn't as much, probably investment, as we should have been doing.
And so catching up on aging infrastructure and working in neighborhoods to improve reductions in water main breaks and basement backups and. Anything that impacts the quality of life of our customers and neighborhoods is a big focus now. So we have millions of dollars a year in sewer rehab, water main replacement.
Fort Wayne's also a community where of our $100,000 customers, we have 12, 000 range with lead services. So we've got work to do to eliminate lead services. That will be a focus here for the coming next decade or so. But we're also doing innovative things, where one of our large projects coming up:
This year is, we're already using our methane at the wastewater plant to generate power for both its economic benefits as well as the environmental benefits of doing that. But we're actually going to work to convert that methane now to renewable natural gas so that we can use it in more facilities and actually even put it back into the pipeline and work with our local gas provider.
That's another large project we'll be doing this year.
[00:08:54] Mahesh: Excellent. Excellent. So a lot of not only aging infrastructure, but new age technology enhancements in terms of what I call circular economy. Looking ahead, you talked about aging infrastructure. You talked about your long-term control plan now resilient for climate events.
So you prevent sewer overflows. But what else are you trying to build resiliency in your system? What are the areas you're targeting?
[00:09:23] Matthew: One of the largest challenges we had for resiliency was power is a really critical part of a utility's performance, electricity. We have a good local power company.
They're regional, but we've had emergency facilities at our drinking water plant or emergency generators, but we did not have that level at the wastewater plant. And so we created a microgrid, basically an electrical network that tied the power supplies of our two plants together and kind of the largest pump station that we need to protect our community during wet weather events.
And we added solar. So we have about five megawatts of solar and we put a battery storage system in. We added some more natural gas engines and are now our methane powered engines so that we have basically a very high, a resilient power supply to keep those pumps running, both pushing water out, clean water to our community and then dewatering the sewers, whether it's just a normal day or especially during those wet weather events.
That's one of the big areas we've been working on. And just obviously the aging infrastructure, renewing that, all of those are big parts of what we're doing. Just off the cuff. Yep.
[00:10:34] Mahesh: This resilient or backup, is it a main power system or the backup power system?
[00:10:39] Matthew: It's in parallel. So we're using it every day and it's providing, depending on the day, 40 to 80 percent of our power needs.
We're still, we're not, we don't ever want to completely disconnect from the grid. They're in the power providing business, but we'll try to supplement as economical and as we need. So every day it's in use, but we're still definitely using the power company as well.
[00:11:03] Mahesh: And sounds like it's primarily for pumping side, both in the drinking water and the wastewater.
[00:11:08] Matthew: Yep, both the treatment plants. Yep.
[00:11:10] Mahesh: It is definitely very unique because I don't see that a whole lot that's being done across the country. Like the way you've accomplished anyway with the solar backup power, natural gas, et cetera, and the battery system. Now I want to talk about innovation. Obviously, a few things you already mentioned are innovative in nature, but what are you most excited about? As far as innovation is concerned, whether specific to Fort Wayne or in the water utility as a whole.
[00:11:37] Matthew: Sure. Probably here locally first, we're a big believer in having good people on the team. With good people, we can do incredible things and we can be more innovative. And here in the engineering group, when I started with the utility, there was probably, I think it might've been 10. 10 of us in the engineering group, and now we're closing in on 90 and it's because we think we have good people help us run the utility better instead of outsourcing that. There's obviously a balance and our outside vendors are huge part of what we do, but having good people on the team.
And so we've built our engineering group to, we can program, we can design, we can do property acquisition. We can do all these different things. We can work with our economic development and we can do IT, all the different stuff, construction manage. Now we're wanting to, with the markets being so high for contractors and the price of materials and things, we've started buying our own materials and then providing them to contractors.
We're trying to book by, and now we're trying to start to leverage our field crews. We have 10 plus construction crews on the utility. A lot of those focuses have been more on maintenance and we're trying to transition to more proactive, provide better customer service by using our own crews, do it more economically on the right types of projects.
So combining the talents of our engineering and field operations cruises, it's a utility of the future focus of ours that we're super excited about. So that's one of the things that definitely we enjoy and feel innovative, but on the. Technology side of things, we are just dabbling in machine learning as we learn how to use it on our asset management systems and those things to help us collect data and not just have data, but turn it into information, turn it into things where we can make better decisions and do better customer service.
I think those opportunities over the next few years are going to be incredible.
[00:13:28] Mahesh: Yeah. Congratulations for building not only a massive team very, real quickly, because it's a rare thing for utilities across the country to have such a large in house engineering group that is self-sufficient for the most part.
But then also the fact that you are not only buying materials, but perhaps bringing in with your few crews some construction work as well. That's insourcing a lot of the activity. It's a way to perhaps combat this rising price of constructions and outside workers and so on.
[00:14:05] Matthew: Absolutely.
[00:14:06] Mahesh: So I want to talk about sustainability. A lot of what we discussed are sustainability topics. But is there anything else on sustainability that is important to Fort Wayne that we haven't covered yet, that is worthwhile in terms of the audience to know or for us to chat about?
[00:14:25] Matthew: Yeah, I think we're always looking to look at sustainability as a journey.
Every year we're trying to incorporate the way we look at projects using something, the Envision scoring system and trying to, how do we, look at the sources of our materials and those things, but we'll always balance it with economics, not just the short-term economics, but the long term economics. Look at it.
That's something that's important to our community, but green infrastructure with water being as important to all phases of life, not just economic development but our challenges with here. A lot of Fort Wayne actually used to be a swamp. It was called the black swamp. And so they tiled it and drained it and our soils aren't super good for absorbing.
So some of the types of green infrastructure, we're trying to absorb it. It's harder to do here in Fort Wayne, but nature's amazing. It's wherever you can use that. And we try to do that because, so we have wetland facilities and we're actually, that's one of the big projects I didn't mention is we're creating a, we bought a golf course, 140 some acres, and we're going to convert it into wetlands and floodplain mitigation and a couple of different types of mitigation, forested wetland and different aspects to, for water quality and flooding purposes, flood absorption or prevention.
So those kinds of things weave together in our sustainability approach.
[00:15:47] Mahesh: So I want to ask you in your engineering role, obviously operations and engineering go hand in hand many places. How do you interact? How do you work when it comes to your collection side or distribution side and the treatment side? How do you work together?
[00:16:02] Matthew: Yeah, so that is our utility of the future concept. One of our focuses of our current strategic planning and acting of that is to engineering, water, sewer, stormwater, all these different groups are in one group, and on our operations side, they were siloed. It was water maintenance and sewer maintenance and the water plant and the sewer plant.
We've combined both the treatment facilities and the field crew sides under kind of one umbrella. And that is now allowing us to not have, we're working towards these changing cultures takes time so that it's, we're not just a water person or a sewer or storm water person and the utility of future of us working together to design and build and construct projects and solve customer problems is changing our interaction.
And we're trying to lead that maybe by example at the top and the way that our operations leader and myself, while I work together and try to make sure that all of our decisions in our next levels are. Making that with the other people's and best values and best results for everybody, not just our team.
So I got a little long winded there, but yeah, that's, that is one of our exciting things we're working on.
[00:17:15] Mahesh: Yeah, in many places they're split, but if you truly integrate together these, co mingle, these teams, there's tremendous value to be achieved. I want to shift the topic to technology innovation.
Things I hear a lot these days by talking to many utilities is optimization. Optimizing the way you do your work, optimizing your processes, optimizing your treatment plans, etc. What does this mean to you? A, is this important? And what role technology can play? In this space?
[00:17:48] Matthew: To me, and I think as you told you as well, it's very important.
I think we believe in that if you're not growing, if you're not getting better, you're dying. And we should have a desire to always not just do things because we're doing it or have been doing it. What's best? And every software or change that we make, we try to do it with a change management view that allows us to try to look for new opportunities from, we just moved to an AMI system on our, on the water side.
So instead of having basically just monthly reads for our water use by our customers, we now can have hourly information and being able to better align that with our sewer systems performance and our water systems performance. It was going to help us optimize or really leverage that information to make better decisions on how to design and build and even take advantage of capacity that is either there now that we didn't know of, or maybe we had something missing.
So we're going to learn from that as one example and same with our control systems as we move to better technology and controlling our chemical feeds and reducing our power use and just trying to do all those kinds of things. We have projects in motion in lots of different areas, GPS on our vehicles to help us making sure routes and analyzing, maybe if we had a staging area here, instead of taking everything back clear there all the time, all those kind of evaluations with this technology, we can make better decisions once we have that information.
[00:19:21] Mahesh: And no doubt about it, AI is being talked a lot. Of course, it's part of our lives, whether we like it or not. And it has a lot more advantages than disadvantages for every technology. There's always a bad actor trying to use it. But what do you think is gaining traction for you? And where do you see the opportunities for you?
[00:19:41] Matthew: Yeah. Sometimes it's a matter of horsepower, availability of resources to try new things. Sometimes we're finishing up some of those big efforts and now we're transitioning to a more, but we're using and piloting AI and things like our televising program for our sewer system right now. We run a camera through our pipes to do condition assessments and operators, manually scoring that crack and that root and that grease.
Whereas there are systems now you just run the camera through is don't have to stop and score. You just run it through and then the program scores it. And we definitely are now integrating working towards like asset management, which pipes are the priority to go rehab? Which ones are the ones that go fix or replace? That will help us be better at predicting or keeping the neighborhood performance and customer service better by getting at the worst infrastructure first, as we're tackling our replacement and renewing efforts.
All those things are in motion for us, a call center, the chatbots. The definition of AI, I'm not quite as sure what's machine learning or this, but those kinds of things, just internal knowledge bases, AI, and those kinds of things are very valuable to just be able to ask it a question and it'll go search all your documentation and things.
[00:20:55] Mahesh: Yeah. And are you already trying all of these?
[00:20:57] Matthew: We are in the process of the televising, the asset management in motion, and some of these other ones this year. Next year, we'll be queuing up to get started. Chat GPT the basics of writing letters or communication. Those kinds of things are, staff are using every day.
It's very helpful to have the system take a first draft at something, editing is always better than creating. So if we can have something to start with, people seem to, our team seems to do a lot better with working off something one of those systems creates.
[00:21:30] Mahesh: Definitely is way of life. I want to ask, retaining, recruiting talent, you've all obviously been very successful at it.
Others still is a growing pain for them. Not a growing pain, but it is existential pain to some extent. What is the recipe for success here?
[00:21:45] Matthew: Yeah, for us, we've been blessed. To speak first at the engineering side of things, we made a decision a long time ago, probably 15 years ago when we started first building the engineering team that we're a municipal utility. We're owned, we're part of government structure that we have really good benefits and we'll always try to leverage that, but pay can sometimes be less competitive than private sector equivalents for consulting firms or whatever.
We've always worked to grow talent where we now have almost 30 interns in our engineering group. Lot of those are the summer wave, but we have multiple, 10 plus, that stay on year-round and work while they're in school. But getting people to, we work with high schools, we work with the colleges everywhere, attract people to the engineering field.
To the utility field and then an internship is also the greatest interview we believe too. You really get to interact with the person, get to see them. And so we've built our team a lot with interns that are growing and then working their way up in the organization. So that's been a huge part of our ability to combat, which right now is a good thing, good markets.
We lose people to other opportunities and pay, but we have a great bench. And so we're just able to promote people and build from within.
[00:23:04] Mahesh: 25 years’ experience. I'm sure you've got a long, still a long career ahead of you, but we always think in where we are in our lives. What do we want to leave behind? What's our legacy, et cetera. What is it you want to leave behind?
[00:23:18] Matthew: That's a good question. Probably just that we work to make our community better. And I personally would be that I also help coach football. I love working with teams. I love working with people. And I feel our next level of engineering management, the part of my leadership team, they've flourished and had good work life balances.
They've been able to raise families and be involved in other things. We promote that. Part of everybody's personal goals is to give back and to understand that we appreciate and think people that are happy at home are also happy at work. And supporting that kind of work culture would definitely be part of.
My instant reaction to that question would be more about the people that I've been able to work with and hopefully that I've invested in them.
[00:24:03] Mahesh: Yeah. So your legacy is leaving work life balance, strong mental health.
[00:24:07] Matthew: Yeah. I think that's huge. When we have people that aren't performing well at work, if we ask enough questions, we find out that there's probably something going on in other parts of their life that we can hopefully do something about.
[00:24:21] Mahesh: As I wrap up this conversation, just to sum up, being a farm boy. Getting into the water business, putting the end to long term control plan this year, basically essentially sending it to the graveyard. I'm sure there's going to be a plaque on it and the amazing stuff you're trying to do on power resiliency. Applying technology where you can with now shifting your focus to aging infrastructure and the fact that you not only have you grown your team significantly, but also promoting work life balance as a way to a healthy utility.
These are some amazing learnings any utility leader or young personnel who is listening to this conversation can get out of it. I want to thank you for being part of this discussion. I want to thank you for sharing your experiences. And, I wish you all the best.
[00:25:14] Matthew: Wow. I appreciate it. Thank you for just the opportunity to share what we're doing here.
[00:25:19] VO: Join host and Aquasight founder and CEO Mahesh Lunani for another episode of 21st Century Water. Produced by Jag and Detroit Podcasts.