Examining One Water: Panels discuss benefits, challenges of the approach
The One Water approach to managing water resources can mean different things to different people and take various forms in different organizations. The separate stages of developing, implementing, and managing One Water programs present their own challenges, which also can vary across entities.
Two panels separately discussed some of the main issues concerning a One Water approach on March 8 at the 2022 WateReuse Symposium, which was held by the WateReuse Association in San Antonio from March 6 through 9. Exactly what constitutes a One Water approach, motivations for utilities to adopt it, and challenges to implementing it all were discussed.
Defining One Water
As part of a panel discussion titled “One Water: What Does It Mean to You?,” participants offered various definitions of the One Water approach and highlighted some of its benefits.
“One Water is a shared set of values around water planning and water management that involves water in all of its forms and the people that are involved in using that water,” said Kevin Critendon, the assistant director of Environmental Planning and Development Services at Austin Water. The concept provides a “framework to integrate water and all of its sources, all of its uses,” he said.
In Texas, where droughts and floods are chronic conditions, the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) relies on a holistic approach to water management to ensure that the state “can withstand both of those extremes,” said Sam Marie Hermitte, the assistant deputy executive administrator of the Office of Water Science and Conservation at the TWDB. “We need every tool in the toolbox to address the state’s water needs.” More broadly, “One Water is a way of looking collectively at all of the pieces of the puzzle that are going to impact you and your children in the years to come,” she said.
A One Water approach requires that utilities focus on more than just their narrow concerns, said Paula Paciorek, the water programs manager for Houston Water, a service line of Houston Public Works. “One Water is thinking about everyone,” she said. “Not just the utility. Not just us. To do that, we need to think big. We need to think holistically.”
At the same time, the One Water concept offers utilities a “way to integrate our management so that we can leverage our resources and make them actually more affordable and more impactful in a better way,” Paciorek said. In the case of Houston, such an approach might involve the use of green stormwater infrastructure and nature-based solutions that will improve local neighborhoods while achieving water management goals. In the flood-prone city, the goal is to “see how we can build smart, to adapt in the future, and not just build to recover,” she noted.
Subverting silos
Unlike the holistic management method recommended by One Water advocates, many municipalities and utilities often handle their drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater duties in isolation from each other. This divided approach stems, in part, from the siloed nature of the regulatory systems set up to oversee such operations, said Peter Grevatt, the chief executive officer of the Water Research Foundation. A longtime employee of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Grevatt served as the director of the agency’s Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water from 2013 to 2019.
“Certainly we had at the federal regulatory level strong silos between the drinking water program, which had responsibility for implementing the Safe Drinking Water Act, versus my friends who were responsible for implementing the Clean Drinking Water Act,” Grevatt said. These regulatory drivers are “very important,” he said, “and that’s part of what has produced these managing silos within organizations.”
Similarly at the utility level, silos “formed for a reason,” Paciorek said. “It helped the utility specialize in their own particular areas.” Silos are even more likely to exist in large organizations. “We have 1,500 employees just in Houston Water,” she said. “It’s easy to get siloed.”
Therefore, organizations looking to implement a One Water approach must find ways to subvert existing silos and bring together individuals with different backgrounds, requirements, and experiences. For Houston, which plans to begin formulating a One Water master plan soon, the recent development of an internal water-loss task force was a step in the right direction. “Bringing everybody to the table, having conversations about different goals and activities has been a great initiative for us,” Paciorek said. “We’re hoping that we’re warming up for the One Water master plan through these exercises that we are currently doing in the utility.”
For Wichita Falls, Texas, as it implemented first a direct potable reuse system and then transitioned to its existing indirect potable reuse system, the relatively small size of the city’s utility operations helped to facilitate discussions between drinking water staff and wastewater treatment staff, said Daniel Nix, the utility operations manager for the City of Wichita Falls. “At the municipal level, we had the benefit that both water and wastewater divisions were in the same building,” Nix said. “So it was easy to break those silos down.”
Ensuring equity
To succeed, efforts to implement One Water approaches increasingly must examine and incorporate considerations regarding equity, the panelists agreed. For Austin Water, as it developed its 100-year integrated water resource plan titled Water Forward, ensuring equity took the form of open communication, Critendon said. “One of our goals included a lot of outreach,” he said.
This outreach will continue in an expanded form as Austin Water works to update Water Forward. “We’re going to introduce a community advisory group that will actually reach out to provide a similar framework format for folks whose voices haven’t traditionally been included in water resources planning,” Critendon said. “It’s very important to try to build that into our planning process, to hear those voices and to understand their lived experiences.”
As Houston Water develops its One Water master plan, the “equity piece is going to be central” to the effort, Paciorek said. “Equity is about fairness,” she said, and that entails listening to the needs of individual communities. In Houston, that means paying particular attention to those areas and neighborhoods that have been disproportionately affected by extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Harvey in 2017 or Winter Storm Uri in 2021, Paciorek said.
“When we go to these communities and talk about equity, we’re going to be very sensitive about the communities and what are the issues that are emerging at each community level,” Paciorek said. “That will be very important to the One Water master plan for us, because we want to have this meaningful conversation.”
On another level, equity is “also about access,” Hermitte said. “Access to information, access to the data about your local circumstances, access to funding programs, access to the resources that will enable different water resources management decisions.” With this in mind, water professionals must ensure that “outreach and communication are effective and are widespread and provide communities with information that they can use to make informed decisions,” Hermitte said.
In some cases, equity means carefully considering how one’s actions will be interpreted by a given community, particularly in light of concerns regarding environmental justice, Nix said. He illustrated this point with an anecdote about Wichita Falls shortly after it had begun examining the option of potable reuse. Early on, the city realized that the simplest solution involved sending treated wastewater to the closest drinking water treatment plant.
“As we drilled down into that quick, easy option, we realized that that plant was the primary source of drinking water for the socio-economically depressed area of Wichita Falls,” Nix said. “We didn't want the perception that we were only going to provide potable reuse to people who couldn’t afford another supply. So we gave up on that option very quickly, just as quickly as we found it. And we moved to how do we get the water distributed to everyone, independent of their status? You have to definitely evaluate those environmental justice issues in some of the One Water source projects.”
Rationales for One Water
During the second panel, titled “One Water–One Bright Future,” the panelists started by discussing the reasons why their organizations have implemented or are in the process of implementing a One Water approach.
A pioneer in integrated water management, the City of Los Angeles began adopting a One Water approach in the 1990s, said Hubertus Cox, the division manager of water recycling implementation for Los Angeles Sanitation and Environment (LASAN). “Everybody acknowledged the need for making better use of the local water resources that we have,” he noted.
Also located in arid Southern California, the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District (LVMWD) relies entirely on water imported from California’s State Water Project. “Water scarcity is one of the primary challenges that we face,” said David Pedersen, the general manager of the district. “During times of drought, we’re very, very vulnerable to shortages.” Therefore, the LVMWD, which provides drinking water and wastewater treatment services, began conducting water recycling in the 1970s.
Wastewater discharged by the LVMWD must comply with increasingly stringent regulatory standards, including extremely low levels of nitrogen and phosphorus. “There’s not a way to meet those standards without advanced treatment,” Pedersen said. But it makes little sense to send such highly treated water to nearby Malibu Creek and then the Pacific Ocean, he noted. “We really should be looking at drinking the water.” In fact, the district has partnered with a neighboring agency to pilot test an indirect potable reuse project, which Pedersen referred to as “our second phase of One Water.”
Across the country, in southeastern Virginia, the Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD) also must comply with stringent nutrient limits for its wastewater discharges. To do so, the HRSD is adopting a water reuse scheme, known as the Sustainable Water Initiative for Tomorrow (SWIFT) Program, that will inject highly treated wastewater into the ground rather than discharging it to surface water bodies.
The ambitious effort will enable the HRSD “to get ahead of the game” so it does not have to continually invest in major wastewater treatment upgrades every five years, said Germano Salazar-Benites, the SWIFT Project manager for the district. Along with improving water quality in the nearby Chesapeake Bay, the SWIFT Program aims to reverse land subsidence, prevent saltwater intrusion of local aquifers, and increase groundwater supplies for the future, Salazar-Benites said.
As noted earlier, Houston Water intends to develop a One Water master plan in the near future. Multiple concerns are driving this effort, said Sharon Citino, the planning director for Houston Water. Uncertainty regarding future population growth, a federal consent decree to address sanitary sewer overflows, land subsidence, the need to switch from groundwater to surface water supplies, and the effects of climate change are all motivating factors. Ultimately, Houston is “looking for resiliency of our structures and our people to ensure Houston’s future going forward,” Citino said.
‘On the hunt for wastewater’
Asked about the major impediments to conducting a One Water approach, Pedersen cited the ongoing trend of wastewater flows “declining at a steep rate” in California since 2007. In particular, indoor water conservation “has really pinched the availability of supply,” Pedersen said. “What we’re seeing is that a lot of the projections that we have done for a long, long time are evaporating. We are short on source water to recycle and also for our potable reuse project.”
In response to the declining wastewater flows, the LVMWD is “completely [throwing] out the old playbook for how we’re managing our wastewater operations,” Pedersen said. “We’ve spent decades trying to keep water out of the wastewater system.” However, this is no longer the case. “We’re on the hunt for wastewater,” he said.
Funding was another challenge cited by Pedersen. “These are expensive projects,” he said. ‘In fact, most of us who are working on One Water projects are working on the biggest projects in the history of our organizations.” Limiting the impacts to ratepayers is difficult, “especially at a time like now where we’re seeing inflationary effects already putting pressure on water rates,” he said.
Fortunately, One Water projects stand to benefit from newly available sources of grant funding and low-interest loans, Pedersen said. “I have never seen the funding environment better for water recycling and One Water projects,” he said. Moreover, such projects “score really, really well” when they are under consideration for funding from such sources, he noted. “There is a lot of funding available to help offset your local costs.”
Planning, advocacy needed
Ultimately, successful One Water programs require long-term planning and strong advocacy. For Los Angeles, such planning took the form of an integrated water resources plan that was finalized in 2006, which led to the development of the One Water L.A. 2040 Plan, Cox said. “Those planning documents feed into our facility master plans,” he said. “Then our facility master plans, they feed into our capital improvement plans for our stormwater program as well as for our wastewater program. That is essentially our mechanism of implementing the One Water concept.”
As for advocacy, “you need One Water champions within your organization,” Cox said. Of course, such champions are needed at the executive level in order to provide the resources necessary to implement and conduct a One Water program, he said. “But I also think you need champions at the staff level, because One Water ultimately has to become part of the organizational DNA.”
Beyond one’s own organization, One Water advocates also are needed within the broader community, particularly because of turnover involving elected officials or policy leaders within a utility, Citino said. “If we aren’t engaging the community in a deep and meaningful way, there is going to be nobody at the helm leading,” she said. “The community is here to stay. So the community absolutely has to be invested in the project and the outcome.”
Once involved, a community is more likely to hold policymakers accountable for delivering on promises related to One Water programs, Citino noted. In this way, she said, organizations can avoid the “nightmare scenario” of taking the time and effort to develop a One Water program, only to put a “binder on the shelf.”