NEW Water in Green Bay, Wisconsin, may be a mid-sized utility. But during our interview with executive director Tom Sigmund today, you'll hear about the remarkable things they are doing to prepare for the future.
NEW Water covers 15 municipalities and over 240,000 residents. Over the next 20 years, they will implement a $470 million dollar capital improvement plan. Like many utilities, Tom sees their top three challenges as this capital improvement plan, retaining quality employees, and replacing infrastructure.
They recently made changes on the solids handling side, and their next focus will be on the liquids handling side. This includes replacing equipment that is nearing 50 years old. Their direct customers are municipalities and a couple of large businesses, including a new paper mill that recently opened.
While NEW's primary role is public health, Sigmund also believes that it has a role in economic development - helping the area attract new business. This is all done within a $49 million annual budget - $27 million for operations and $22 million for capital. Looking ahead, they rely on 15% cash financing and 85% debt financing.
They've recently added anaerobic digestion, gas recovery, and electrical energy generation, with an eye on the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act to see what opportunities could be next. In the meantime, Wisconsin's Clean Water Fund has been very helpful.
To work toward the future, there may be a 5.5% to 7% increase in rates. One of Tom's challenges is explaining that to customers, and why the short-term investment is important for long term success. When he arrived, NEW Water was, as he puts it, "out of sight, out of mind." Now communication is key - with consumers and to help recruit new talent. He talks about some of the programs they are using for that.
In today's episode we also touch on climate change, resiliency, ESG, and circular economy. He's realized he needs to focus not on being a better engineer, but a better leader.
More:
New Water Green Bay Website: https://www.newwater.us/
Aquasight Website: https://aquasight.io/
Don: 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: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I'm excited to say that I'm here with Tom Sigmund, executive Director, New Water, Green Bay, Wisconsin. New Water is a regional wastewater system providing conveyance and treatment to 15 municipalities covering close to a quarter of a million residents.
Tom is a professional engineer in the state of Wisconsin and Ohio, and is also the president of National Association of Clean Water Agencies, an amazing entity that does world class work here in the US. Tom graduated with a master's in a Bachelor's in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Wisconsin. Welcome, Tom. Glad to have you.
Tom: Thank you Mahesh. Glad to be here.
Mahesh: Can you describe the New Water system and the top three challenges you are addressing today?
Tom: New Water, which is the brand of the Green Bay Metropolitan and Sewage District. That's our official name. We do go by the brand as much as we can. We're a wholesale provider of wastewater, conveyance, and treatment services to 15 municipalities.
They all reside in northeast Wisconsin. We have two advanced secondary treatment facilities that both discharge to the Fox River and eventually to the Bay of Green Bay, and then eventually to Lake Michigan. We own 78 miles of interceptors, and that serves a population base of 285 square miles within our service area at our treatment facilities.
In addition to that advanced secondary treatment, we use Anaerobic Digestion and fluid bed incineration, along with energy recovery to manage our biosolids. And we also have a hundred employees in both the facilities as well as our interceptor system. The top three challenges as I reflect on it. That we have is first off implementing a 470 million capital improvement plan over the next 20 years to replace aging infrastructure on our liquids treatment.
We did a very large program about five years ago on our solids handling side, and now we're coming to the liquid side and that is primarily replacing aging infrastructure. Most of that equipment was installed in 1975, so we've got a lot of use out of it, but it is wearing out.
Second challenge for us is and no different for most of the utilities that I talk to, is maintaining a highly skilled workforce in a very competitive labor market. We require very competent and motivated employees and everybody out there, and especially in our marketplace, is looking for the same. So it's a challenge to attract and retain that workforce. And then the third top challenge for us is keeping our rates to be able to do all that we have to do to stay in permit compliance and maintain this significant amount of infrastructure is keeping our rates affordable for our customers.
Mahesh: So sounds like capital plan, employees, and rates are top challenges. Sounds like any other utility, isn't it? Every utility faces the same stuff. So you serve a web of municipalities within your service area. You talked about 15. How does it work at an operational level, at a strategic level, at a financial level? The arrangement between your organization and the municipalities that you serve, and do you directly engage with end residents?
Tom: So each of the municipalities that are our customers, we have an agreement with them basically on capacity in the various interceptor pipes that serve them.
So it's really a hydraulic capacity, and that is the extent of the formal agreements that we have with those customers. At that point, we, in communication with our customers, at least every year as we look at our budget and our future capital plans, we make sure that we have enough hydraulic capacity in those interceptors as well as our facilities.
And then we also make sure that we have the capacity to treat the organic waste that comes with that both municipal and industrial part. We do have a couple of special agreements with two very large industries as well as the municipality that they reside in. That dates back to the 1970s when we were created most of these facilities to treat a combination of paper mill waste and municipal waste Very unique in the country for that. So two very large paper mills. We have agreements that they have reserved capacity in our facilities and they pay for that capacity on a capital basis, whether they use it or not. And then they pay the operation charges. So that's very unique. The municipal customers we have a hydraulic agreement with.
And then we provide the flow metering sampling, as well as laboratory analysis when we collect samples to be able to bill our customers. We bill our customers on a monthly basis for the flows and loads that they give us. And then they take that information in a municipality and then distribute it to their residents and businesses within the municipalities.
We maintain the big pipe, so two or more municipalities, once they come together in a pipe, typically New Water owns that. And then the municipalities maintain their own collection system and then bill a residence and businesses that reside within their boundaries. So those, that's some of the relationships.
So in partnership with our customers, we create and implement facilities planning work that we do, some it on an every year basis, some of it maybe every five or 10 years to make sure we understand and can meet that customer. And then keep our facilities running and in permit compliance.
I see our primary role in this community as a public health role, but we are also an economic development. We have an economic development role to make sure that when our municipal customers want to attract businesses, that we have the capacity to be able to allow them to do that we can serve it. Our engagement with individual users, whether they're residences or businesses, other than if they're a significant industrial discharge where we do have a pre-treatment role, but let's say just a resident in one of the communities.
Our engagement on that is limited to, for the most part, informational meetings that we would do during facilities planning. Our customers engage with the residents. We engage with our municipalities. We do, however, provide those municipal customers some informational items that we've developed in terms of what we call un flushables, the fats, oil, and greases, the materials that shouldn't be flushed.
And we have partnered with our municipalities to prepare some information and then we delivered it to them so that they can get it out to their customers to try to avoid this material coming in. Another way that we get to the individual residents is when we have high flow events. We will put out information to our municipalities and they can deliver to their customers on terms of water conservation at that time to try to keep that down. And I guess the last thing, a typical household sewer bill in our area, including both our charges as well as the municipality charges, is about $550 a year.
Mahesh: That's only $50 a month. That's pretty reasonable. You know what I understand is in way your relationships are simplified. Because you're dealing with 15 municipalities and couple of large industrial customers, right? And it's about managing the flows and loads contract with the municipalities and the capacity contract with the industrial customers.
Then you can focus on treatment, public health instead of serving day-to-day residents. Basement backups and things like that.
Tom: Yeah. I look at, if we were drinking water utility, we would have direct connection with individual residents. And we don't, and you're right, it does allow us to focus on bigger picture things for our customers.
Mahesh: Yeah. I wanna move to this question. You talked about figuring out how to spend half a billion dollars efficiently, but what is your annual operating expenditure? And a CapEx that you mentioned 450 divided by the years you plan to invest, where do you see the potential? There's two parts to this question.
The potential for savings in OPEX and your investment focus of this half a billion dollars, which you partly mentioned you're gonna spend on the liquid side, but outside of that, are there other investment focuses you have.
Tom: Yeah, our annual budget is, about $49 million, $27 million of that is in operations and $22 million is devoted to capital.
So not quite a 50 50 split. We will see that capital component grow over the years as we take on more and more debt cuz we tend to debt finance a significant amount of our assets. And that is a belief and it comes through a lot of our larger industrial discharges who believe that the people that are going to benefit from the system should pay for it.
So that these systems are long lived systems and they say well, you can get a subsidized loan through the state of Wisconsin, you ought to and take on. We do finance typically about 15% of our capital each year through cash financing. The rest is debt financing. So in the short term for us, operations for savings are likely to be in the energy side.
We've achieved some of those savings through the solids Project with putting in Anaerobic Digestion, gas recovery electrical energy generation, and heat recovery from our solids handling system. But I think that electrical and natural gas are likely our biggest opportunities. We're very curious about the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed by Congress last year, and the ability for utilities to be able to participate in some type of rebate savings through either onsite electrical generation, whether it be solar or through our anaerobic digestion and gas recovery system. So those are probably the biggest areas. As mentioned that large capital investment over the next 20 years, we've done a very extensive facilities plan to try to identify what those are, to try to sequence 'em so it becomes affordable.
And that's in our liquids handling and interceptor. There is an element of those projects trying to be more efficient. When we put in technology, the, I would say the biggest driver is aging infrastructure. There is some capacity components, but like we did with our solids, Why would we put in 40 year old technology when we replace it?
So when we replace it, it may be for an aging infrastructure, we will still build in some efficiency is whatever we can. We see some around our aeration system and our blowers, which are very large energy users at our facility. What we're going to look for is opportunity for savings. That project is probably about seven, eight years down the road for us.
So that's where the investment is primarily gonna be on that capital replacement with grabbing efficiency as we can.
Mahesh: Yeah. It sounds like you have a lot of checks to cut and take advantage also of the Inflation Reduction Act. In terms of driving efficiencies in your opex. I want to know. Every utility, and there's never enough money around to do everything that you'd like to achieve for building the next generation wastewater system? In your case, is there a funding gap between what it is that you want to achieve versus what it is that's available for you? You talked about the fact that you do 15% cash financing and 85% through debt financing. Is there a gap? And if there is one, how do you intend to close the gap?
Tom: New Water has done a pretty good job of trying to stay up with its assets as we need to replace them. We do have some very old ones and there's gonna be a big bill coming due. Part of the reason is we've been able to stretch that out over a 20-year period so that we can make it a little bit more affordable.
Our main financing source, which is the called in Wisconsin, the Clean Water Fund, which is the state SRF for wastewater. It loans out money at 55% of market. So a subsidy for that. Challenges have been recently in cost of capital has gone up with interest rates and just the cost of construction. So some of the projects that we had planned right now are going to be a little bit more expensive.
We feel that we've put together a financing plan for the next 20 years, and it's gonna be that combination of debt and cash financing. We do have some reserves that we're going to pull from to help out, but what we're looking at is about a increase annual increase in revenue to our customers, at about 5.5% to 7% per year, and that'll be over the next nine years.
We are working very closely to prioritize projects to keep it within that range, plan them over the years and be able to manage that financial impact. But we believe at this point that we have the ability to finance the projects within that 5.5% to 7% increase range.
Mahesh: Rate increases, includes that. Okay.
Tom: Yeah. And that's up per year. Yep.
Mahesh: Right. And the good news sounds like you're not looking for more money if everything comes to the plan in terms of the rate increases and no major escalation on your capital programs.
Tom: Those are a lot of ifs. Those are a lot of ifs and we face that all the time.
The state of Wisconsin, with their Clean Water Fund has really an incredibly well-run program. So historically, if you wanted to borrow, money was available. It wasn't cut out for small utilities or large utilities. So that financing should be, we expect it will be available to us in the future. And that's the primary source of finance that we're gonna use.
Mahesh: It's actually fascinating, and I was gonna bring it up later towards the end of the conversation. You are building the infrastructure to last next 50 years or a hundred years through all this money you're spending. And that's a great feeling as a professional engineer to say, I'm putting in place something that the next two generations can handle, or one at least one generation can handle.
Tom: It is satisfying, but it's also challenging because as we go out and we just had the public information meetings. This large capital project and our customers, and especially at their residential level, they're feeling the pinch of the inflation. And they're saying, can't you put this off? Why do you need to do this right now?
And truthfully, that is the comment that we will get with every large capital improvement program. And so we have to communicate very effectively to be able to say, we could put this off, but then it's going to lead to troubles down the road. So we believe it's better in your interest to do things now, but it's sometimes that short-term view is difficult to overcome.
Mahesh: Yeah, no, it is a hard one to convince the residents to pay 5%, 7% more. I'm curious, one question I have, the inflation, what impact did it have on the programs that you have on the ground today? Are they increasing your rates? Not customer rates, but your project expenses by five, seven, 10% more? Do you have a number?
Tom: Yeah. Some of our very early projects in this facilities plan, which we're working to roll out now we haven't yet bid them, but it was almost a 50% increase on one of the projects. Where we were in the early design with 30% design to 90% design, we increased the estimate by 50% to cover in increases.
We're due to bid that project probably in March or April. So we'll actually see how it comes out. So the capital, yes, we have seen that. We've also seen incredible delays in delivery. So we've had to be as flexible as we can in the contract documents because it may take a year or two years to actually get delivery of equipment once we award the contract.
We did see this past year some very significant increases in some of our consumables on our operations. Energy went up quite a bit. Chemicals, whether it be sodium hydrochloride for disinfection. Polymer um, para chloride, a lot of our consumable chemicals went up a lot. Some of it is supply chain, some of it's just availability in the marketplace right now.
Mahesh: It's a real challenge to manage public health and at the same time manage the cost. Simultaneously. I wanna talk about, you and I were last week at a conference and we were discussing many major themes, one of which is tighter regulations, especially like PFAS. Erin Brockovich was in that final session.
We listened. Climate change resiliency, ESG, circular economy, which you do some extent where you are actually biogas and energy recovery, heat recovery, water reuse. What are all these themes mean? Like when you started in this sector, they probably were not the major topics. Now they are on the top of every director, every CEO, right?
What does this mean to you and how are you embracing them? How are you preparing this kind of new lines of think. For the wastewater sector,
Tom: I'll go through the five items that you'd talked about. Tougher regulation. I've been in practicing in this field for over 40 years, and the one constant has been that regulations continue to tighten for clean water utilities. We have found that we can measure pollutants at lower levels, and so we have decided and felt compelled to regulate them at lower levels. And so that continues to be just an ever tightening of the noose around our necks. One of the bright spots we saw with regulation in state of Wisconsin, New Water especially, was what's called adaptive management program, where we have, as part of our permit compliance strategy, the ability to work with. agriculture to reduce pollutants off of the agriculture side at a lower cost than building gray infrastructure at our facilities to remove those same pollutants. So it is a permit compliance approach that state has agreed to. We started with a pilot program about seven years ago. And in April of 2021, we started on a 20-year program with agriculture to reduce specifically phosphorus and sediment coming off of their fields into the waterways.
The benefit of this approach is that in addition to a lower cost for our customers, the entire area gets significantly more benefits for the environment as well as the recreation in the community, yet the tougher regulation. But then there has been some flexibility as well. Climate change. Our issues on climate change in this area has been that we're not necessarily seeing on the average, more or less precipitation.
It's tended to be similar. Some years it's crazy. Some crazy high, crazy low. But we do see intense and it's sometimes extended periods of drought and then intense periods of precipitation. And oftentimes that precipitation comes in a different form than it did. We'll have rain, hard rain in the middle of January.
That's not a time you get hard rain in Wisconsin, but it has become that way. And then for us it has become more of managing higher quantities of water that enter the sewer system. We have a separate sewer system, but we can get a lot of clear water in. And especially on the private property side.
And that's a big challenge that we are working with our customers to address, cuz up to 50 to 70% of the clear water that makes it to the sewer system is coming off of private property. And that's a challenge politically and we're working with our customers to deal with it. As far as the ESG, the environment, social governance, we have been evaluating our opportunities using triple bottom line for the last 15 years.
And so that's not a new thing for us to try. We use a evaluation process that does weighting of the factors and helps us make decisions on that as the best way to use our resources in accordance with the values that we have, which do change in terms of that circular economy. We took the approach on our solids handling program when we started it 12 years ago, started the planning for it that we would look at the material that we receive coming into our facilities as a resource to be recovered rather than a waste to be disposed of at the lowest cost.
Our customers, when they are done with the material, they put it into the sewer system. But there is a significant amount of value. Some things we can recover, some things we can't yet recover. So energy and nutrients have been the biggest thing that we built into that system to be able to recover.
One of the things that people find interesting about five years ago, our staff as a demonstration of testing of some equipment, decided to measure the amount of gold that comes into our facilities. And, in general, about $3 million a year of gold enters our two treatment facilities. And I wish that the technology was out there to be able to recover it, that someday we will have likely through some type of an electrode that can bring it out.
$3 million of gold. And it's not gold nuggets. It's all dissolved in the water. Every time you wash your hands a little, if you have a ring on, a little bit of that goes down the drain.
In terms of water reuse, we reside at the mouth of the largest freshwater estuary in the world, right? The Bay of Green Bay, which goes into Lake Michigan. It gives us this abundance of clean, fresh water. That's been a blessing and curse for us in terms of the ability to conserve. Three years ago, one of our industries built a brand new paper mill, probably the first new paper mill in this area in 50 years.
It's a family-owned business and they made as part of their focus very sustainable operations as much as they could get, and we became part of that vision. So we now supply up to 2 million gallons a day of our effluent from our Green Bay facility to that mill for their use in making paper. They take that effluent and then they treat it fit for their use, but it is a significant operational savings to their facility compared to using potable water from the public water utility. And then after the utility does pre-treatment, cuz it is very strong wastewater. After they do the pre-treatment, the water comes back to us and it just keeps going around in a circle. We treat it and that cycle continues. So those are the areas that we've seen that focus in.
Mahesh: What I really liked about this discussion is you are already, since the last 10 years, on the path, in each one of these themes. How you are curtailing the ag disposal into your waterways, to putting this circular economy of recovering heat working for reuse, putting out 2 million gallons per day back into this paper mill when all of these things. You are already further down the road in terms of deploying strategies and deploying technologies, which is part of your DNA, almost.
Tom: As you and I know, and especially what we saw last week at the meeting out in California, there are some utilities that are well ahead of us. So some of our work is modest, but it's what we can do at the scale that we have in our community.
Mahesh: Yeah. But I do like this. $3 million of gold you can recover because you'd a mid-size utility. I would assume 50, 60 million gallons approximately. Give or take.
Tom: Yeah. About 40 million gallons a day on the average.
Mahesh: 40 million gallons. If you can recover 3 million, there are billions of gallons in the United States that are being treated. And we just have to find the technology to recover gold. You could be in the gold minting business, so to speak.
Tom: Right, we will all be there someday. But the technology, as with a lot of things as we look at phosphorus recovery if you looked 10, 15 years ago, The thought of recovering phosphorus out of wastewater cost effectively was maybe it'll happen. Then it did. And someday some researcher will figure out how to do it cost effectively.
Mahesh: Yeah, that's brilliance of our science. I wanna talk about technology. You talked a lot about it, but I wanna talk about digital technologies or sensor technologies, not so much the treatment technologies. What is the role of those things in wastewater infrastructure? And what are you most excited about?
Tom: We've got just a ton of information that we generate today and we've got a lot of competing objectives. Trying to manage certain things. And so we see harnessing some of these digital technologies as a way of being able to provide our team with the information to be able to make better decisions.
The ability to make that better decision is buried in just a ton of data that we have. And historical information, and so we've gotta figure out how to capture that. We are not on the forefront of that technology today, but we are wanting to figure that out. We've had some contacts with your team about how we might be able to better harvest that information and then use it for us.
Technology at this point is not gonna replace human judgment. We're not talking about saying we're gonna turn it over to a complete artificial intelligence system that's gonna make decisions for us. But rather that data will then help us, inform us to make better decisions. And that's gonna be very critical. It is critical to our overall long-term operating strategy.
Mahesh: It goes like anything in our personal lives, right? When you make financial decisions, now all your personal financials are available at your fingertips. You can make a decision whether you wanna buy a house or invest and so on, and it's no different.
Utilities are creating terabytes of information every day. Every day. And there's no human that can possibly go through this bit by bit, bite by bite. So I definitely see a progress there. I wanna talk about talent. You mentioned that you're fighting for talent. Where is your talent gap and how are you gonna fill this gap? Because the consulting engineering firms are pretty much grabbing every talent that's out there.
Tom: You know, so far, we have been quite successful in attracting and retaining a highly qualified work staff. That doesn't mean that we're not on the edge of problems. Some of that comes down to culture and competitive compensation.
But where I see the biggest concerns long-term for us are going to be in the areas of treatment, operators, mechanics, and electricians. Some of the trades. And part of that challenge that we see is that fewer and fewer people are going into those sectors. So we're gonna be competing for a shrinking base.
And so that's we're looking to make sure that we can have that staff available. I think with engineers, it and automation staff, there is certainly a big need for that. We finding that more people are going into school and training for that is just, we're competing for those similar objectives.
Some of the things we've done are working with technical schools, local technical colleges. We've worked with high schools. We are trying to encourage people into the study, especially around the trades We have participated in a program through our Chamber of Commerce. In high school apprentice programs.
So someone going to high school is getting some college credit for working with our facilities as well. And through the local technical colleges as well. One of the things we do is we benchmark our salaries with other utilities as well as other sectors to try to make sure that we're offering competitive salaries.
We do that on an annual basis, and then about every three years we do a pretty deep dive in that. And again, we're just trying to say we're keeping our salaries competitive in the marketplace.
Mahesh: The fight for talent exists. And it sounds like you, you have several approaches by which you're trying to fill that gap within Green Bay Area.
You've been at New Water for 16 years. I was reading up in preparation for this podcast. What is it that you learned through the 16 years of being in one organization?
Tom: Yeah, I had a career 25 years as a consultant prior to that, so that helped inform my mostly work with municipalities as part of that work.
But I would say at New Water, what I would call the top three things, high levels of regular communication with employees, customers, regulators, and all the other stakeholders that we have is absolutely critical to our success as a utility. When I came here, there was certainly a desire to be outta sight, outta mind. Stay off the radar.
We charge reasonable rates. They don't have to worry about us. No more. We can't exist that way. Second thing was the culture in our organization, how we define it, how we practice it, is very important. And that includes both developing, nurturing and maintaining that desired culture. We have been very intentional over the past eight years working on culture and it does take work every day.
And then you've got new people that are coming into the organization that we've got to help them understand the culture. It's also working with our team down through every employee to make sure that they both accept and practice that culture on a daily basis. So building and sustaining a great team with a great culture takes a lot of work.
And I found that it must be done with as little ego on my part as possible. It's not about me, it's about New Water and it's about the work that we are expected to do. I guess the last thing is the practice of leadership. I found when I came here that I have spent almost all of my professional development in that time on expanding my leadership capabilities.
My commission's been very supportive in allowing me to go to some very good training. And I've learned a lot. So I've devoted that to leadership and improving those practices and being a better leader, I found it's a journey. And it's a long journey and it must be continually updated.
Mahesh: No, I a hundred percent agree with you, Tom, being a CEO myself and having founded the company, you have to be really humble.
And you have to evolve every year as an individual. And we are not born with all these leadership skills. We have to learn, pick up things and trial and error, what works, what doesn't work. And it is a bit more of an art than a science. So we all grew up with our engineering degrees.
Tom: Absolutely. I realized when I came here, I didn't need to be a better engineer.
I needed to be a better leader.
Mahesh: Yeah. No, me too. And I try to learn from everyone, including yourself as we are learning in this podcast myself. If you have a crystal ball, where do you see the wastewater sector in the next 10 years?
Tom: We're gonna be continuing to maintain these very expensive and aging infrastructure.
That's gonna be a continual issue for us, and we're gonna have to do that at the same time as maintaining affordability for all of our users. For these systems, we're seeing a lot of discussion, appropriately so, on affordability and some of the marginalized people in our system, and we need to focus more on that as opposed just to the average.
I see higher levels of automation. It is going to be necessary and needed to maintain these systems that are coming more and more complex without having to get more and more labor. And allow us to make better decisions. Those decisions hopefully will reduce some of our cost. And then I see continued pressure on workforce availability. Especially in treatment, maintenance skills we talked about, and then the ongoing need to be able to invest in that workforce.
We're not just going to hire someone and then 35 years later they retire. We're going to have to spend a lot of our time investing in that workforce to keep them updated.
Mahesh: You had decades of experience, I'm sure you think about legacy. What do you want your one legacy to be?
Tom: I'd like my legacy to be that I led a team that very effectively protected the water environment in Northeast Wisconsin and that I was able to grow a very solid team at New Water that will continue this mission long after I've retired.
Mahesh: Very wise thoughts there, Tom. You run a mid-size utility. Just wrapping this conversation up, you're a very humble man, I can tell through this dialogue, and you've achieved quite a bit in terms of these major themes in terms of reuse of water, in terms of energy resource recovery, and probably aspirations to recover gold at some point in the future.
For being a mid-size utility with the kind of older infrastructure you have, you are piece by piece trying to modernize it. I appreciated how in a systematic way you've been doing this while keeping your eyes on the ground in terms of what it takes to deliver. And we don't hear about Green Bay all the time in all these papers, but you're doing the job, stellar job.
I admire that for that leadership.
Tom: Thank you.
Mahesh: So I wanna wrap it up. It's a great conversation. It's great for any mid-size utility to learn, know on how to deliver on a great promise for public health environmental stewardship. So I wanna thank you, Tom, for being part of this call and hopefully see you soon.
Thank you, Mahesh. I look forward to seeing you very soon.
Don: Join host an Aqua site founder and CEO Mahesh Lunani again next month for another episode of 21st Century Water. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or Stitcher. Produced by JAG in Detroit Podcasts.