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The Lone Star State and Water Finance: The 2012 Texas Municipal Water and...
David Tucker is a Project Director for the Environmental Finance Center. Texas, the Lone Star State, is the second largest state in the union, and the second most populous. That means a lot of thirsty...
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The Role of Economic Regulation in Influencing Financial Practices
Jeff Hughes is the Director of the Environmental Finance Center. Ask any utility manager to list the top business drivers and the “R-word”, Regulation, is likely to be near the top. Given the...
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Financial Health: Running Treatment at Capacity
Dayne Batten is a Research Assistant for the EFC and second year MPA student at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Government. Traditional engineering plans suggest that, when customer demand approaches the...
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WaterWise Dividend Model
Mary Tiger is the Chief Operating Officer of the Environmental Finance Center. How would you like to get a check from your water utility instead of sending them one? This blog has included a few...
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Effective Utility Management
Guest author Catherine Noyes is an Associate Consultant at Raftelis Financial Consultants. Through the 1960s, the utility business was all about protecting public health – making sure that technology...
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Tap dancing around impact fees: Residential connection fees for drinking...
David R. Tucker is a Project Director at the Environmental Finance Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Key: 1. Water Main; 2. Water Tap; 3. Water Meter; 4. Private Plumbing...
View ArticleRelease of Revenue Resiliency Review for Water Utilities
Mary Tiger is the Chief Operating Officer of the Environmental Finance Center at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The water industry, just like any other, suffers from a variety of...
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Even Total Water Demand is on the Decline at Many Utilities
Almost two years ago, we wrote a blog post revealing that average residential water use is declining in the State of North Carolina. Similar trends have also been identified in other states and across...
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Touching Down with Affordability of Water and Sewer Bills in Alabama
It’s college football season again, and thoughts among many in the South, and elsewhere, turn to tailgating and touchdowns, hot dogs and sodas, field goals and fun. (Here in Chapel Hill, we like to...
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The Business of Water: Capturing and Creating Value
Successful and long-lasting businesses are all about capturing and creating value. Value creation or value added can broadly be defined as taking an action where the benefits of the action exceed the...
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A New Fee: Why Develop a Stormwater Utility, Where does the Money Go?
Leigh DeForest is a graduate fellow in the 2019 Leaders in Environment and Finance (LEAF) program. As a part of the LEAF Fellowship, Leigh spent the summer of 2019 working at Triangle J Council of...
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Financial Implications of COVID-19 for Water and Wastewater Utilities
Water and wastewater utilities are adapting to the rapidly changing conditions imposed across the country and the world by the COVID-19 pandemic. With stay-at-home orders, closures of schools,...
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Visualizing the Value (of a State Revolving Fund Loan)
Imagine a town called “Smallville.” Smallville, as you might guess, is small. The town’s water utility needs a new water tank, and they need it now. Like most systems across the US, Smallville’s system...
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Measuring the Impact: An Evaluation of 379 ARC-Funded Water and Wastewater...
Funding programs that support drinking water and wastewater infrastructure projects generate benefits that exceed simply providing cost savings to the communities receiving subsidized loans and grants....
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How are North Carolina Utilities Faring During the Pandemic? Four Key...
With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, utilities across the nation continue to adapt to rapidly changing conditions through a number of measures, from suspending water shut-offs to implementing...
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Financial Resilience: Tools to test a utility’s ability to “weather the storm”
These are unprecedented times. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, social norms have changed and unemployment has risen sharply across the nation. As states have pushed residents to stay home, water...
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COVID-19 and North Carolina Utilities: Impact Assessment of the Coronavirus...
August has been a key transition month for local government utilities in North Carolina as EO 124/142 (which prohibited disconnections due to non-payment for residential utility accounts) has expired,...
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Yadkin Valley Sewer Authority: A Case Study of the Impact of COVID-19 on a...
The abrupt arrival of COVID-19 in the United States financially impacted businesses across all sectors, with water and wastewater utilities being no exception (see our previous blog post). Two major...
View ArticleDisconnections – Where’s the data?
On October 5th, two House Democrats, Harley Rouda and Rashida Tlaib, submitted this letter to ask the director of the CDC to give a nation-wide moratorium on water disconnections due to non-payment...
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