Method for Comparative Performance Assessment and Evaluation of Consolidating Community Water Systems as a Regional Water System

Abstract

Community water systems (CWS) are facing significant external forces for change from decreasing water-resource availability, stricter water-quality regulations, decreasing levels of federal subsidy, increasing public scrutiny, decreasing financial health, and increasing infrastructure replacement costs. (The Environment Protection Agency defines a community water system as a public water supply service that serves at least 25 people or 15 connections year round.) The combination of these external forces necessitate increasing consolidation responses by small CWS. The results of the consolidation response are significant economy of scale benefits such as the elimination of service duplication and greater buying power through bulk-rate purchasing. However, the consolidation and subsequence operations of small CWS as a regional water system (RWS) requires the development of a method for comparative performance assessment and evaluation that facilitates open and transparent decision making. (A regional water system is defined as a collection of similar CWS that operate under a single governing authority.) The goal of this paper is to propose such a method for comparative PAE for consolidating CWS that operate as a RWS. The objectives of the paper are: (1) to propose a standard efficiency metric (SEM) parameter for the performance assessment of CWS; (2) to propose a standard efficiency comparison metric (SECM) parameter for the summative evaluation of performance that permits benchmarked comparison among CWS; and (3) to demonstrate how the proposed SEM and SECM parameters promote open and transparent decision making within the RWS.