Pathways to Resilient Wastewater Management

A Practical Toolkit to Strengthen Service Providers

Willamette Partnership has published Pathways to Resilient Wastewater Management for Oregon wastewater providers to help improve the resilience and sustainability of their services. The Toolkit outlines ten potential governance solutions to help struggling service providers find stability. Because every community is different, we haven’t ranked or selected preferences between the options; rather, we developed a rubric that providers can use to identify which options might work best for specific circumstances.

In general, the options are presented from the simplest, lowest lifts to implement and get progressively more complex and/or challenging to implement.

Background

Clean water is one of the foundational needs of any community, from large urban centers to rural places. People need access to safe, healthy water to drink, bathe, cook, irrigate, and more. Without clean water, people can’t live.

A major component of protecting the health and safety of water is finding ways to treat and discharge wastewater. Before the Oregon State Sanitary Authority was created by ballot initiative in 1938, there was little to no statewide regulation on how communities dealt with that waste. Many large communities simply discharged directly into the state’s rivers, leading to disastrous health impacts for downstream communities and habitats. The State Sanitary Authority—now the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ)—was charged with creating and enforcing clean water rules that regulated how communities and individuals protect themselves and their environment while providing the essential services of wastewater treatment.

It was within that regulatory context that most of Oregon’s wastewater systems were built. Massive investments from the federal government in the 1960s and 1970s were used to develop or upgrade many, if not most, of Oregon’s sanitary infrastructure. But, of course, infrastructure doesn’t last forever. Even with routine maintenance, many systems installed in the last century are at or passed their expected lifespan. Technology has led to significant improvements in system efficiency and efficacy, but these upgrades are expensive. For many small wastewater service providers in our state, there’s simply not the right combination of available capital, infrastructure health, and local capacity to continue providing services that are affordable and meet regulatory compliance.

Willamette Partnership, through funding provided by the US Environmental Protection Agency, developed this Toolkit for the operators, elected officials, boards, and communities in Oregon who find themselves facing this challenge: how to provide essential sanitary services when the current model no longer works for their community.