Water Foresight Podcast
Water Foresight Podcast
The Madison Declaration and the Future of Water (Part 2)
The Water Foresight Podcast continues its exploration of the Madison Declaration with a deep dive into the "regulatory treadmill" that keeps water utilities running hard without making progress on critical threats facing our water systems.
• The Safe Drinking Water Act created a valuable framework for regulating contaminants, but has it reached a point of diminishing returns?
• Water utilities face a "regulatory treadmill" where they chase increasingly smaller contaminant risks while neglecting bigger threats
• Cybersecurity represents a major underappreciated risk that requires resources increasingly diverted to contaminant treatment
• Legislative reform is necessary, but water leaders shouldn't wait for Congress to address critical challenges
• The Madison Declaration advocates for a more balanced approach that values reliability, affordability, and sustainability alongside safety
• Consolidated water systems with proper scale better address both regulatory compliance and emerging threats
• Success requires aligning incentives across federal regulators, state agencies, and local utilities
• Leaders need "cover" to pursue reforms without being portrayed as weakening water quality standards
Join us for future conversations about the Madison Declaration as we reimagine the Safe Drinking Water Act's next 50 years.
#water #WaterForesight #strategicforesight #foresight #futures @Aqualaurus
Aqualaris, where we engage part two of the Madison Declaration discussion. Manny, catherine and Chad, welcome back to the Water Foresight Podcast. It's great to have you back to talk about the Madison Declaration again For part two, I think we should focus on the notion of the regulatory treadmill and risks missing risks, underappreciated risks and really do a deeper dive on those issues that you highlight in the Madison Declaration. What does it mean for the future of water? Where have we been over the last 50 years and where will we be in the next 10, 20, or 50 years when it comes to the Safe Drinking Water Act? Manny, let me start with you. You use the metaphor of a regulatory treadmill. That could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Tell us broadly what you are concerned about when you talk about this idea of a regulatory treadmill.
Speaker 2:Sure Well, first, thanks, matt for having us back on to talk more about the Madison Declaration and all the important issues of the Safe Drinking Water Act. You know, by regulatory treadmill we really mean running harder and not getting anywhere, which is what happens with a treadmill. You know, when you think about the Safe Drinking Water Act, it's basically a framework. It's built around the idea of searching for contaminants that could be harmful to human health and then regulating those contaminants to reduce their presence in our drinking water.
Speaker 2:50 years ago, at the outset, those contaminants the first few contaminants that were regulated provided enormous benefits for human health. Reducing those contaminants provided enormous benefits. But the law of diminishing marginal returns everyone learns in microeconomics says that with every additional thing that you produce, or, in this case, every additional regulation that we create, we're getting less and less public health bang for our regulatory buck. And what we think has happened is we've reached a stage where we continue to search for new contaminants and regulate new contaminants, with ever smaller impacts on public health. That's what we mean by the treadmill. We're running harder in the sense that we're regulating more things, treating for more things, trying to reduce more and more contaminants, but we're not really making any progress.
Speaker 3:We're not making the progress that we should or could be, just like running, you know, maybe there's some new chemical on the horizon or some other substance that causes as much harm as you know E coli or Legionella or you know these other really harmful type of contaminants, what we're saying though is that we?
Speaker 3:ought to bring some reason to the conversation about how much new contaminants and regulating them really improve public health. Our concern is that you know we keep throwing money at new contaminants that maybe really don't improve public health as much as is necessary in the balance, considering the money.
Speaker 2:I want to follow up on that really quickly, because Catherine just raised sort of the central way to think about any public policy decision, which is the world is full of bad problems and the world is full of potentially good regulations. The key public policy question is always compared to what? How bad is this problem compared to what other problems that we're trying to deal with? How good is this regulation relative to some other regulation that we could pursue? That's the key public policy question. It's not to say that you know, oh, we shouldn't bother with contaminants. It's to say it's always to say compared to what?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Is it the relative risk issue? Maybe we're busy inspecting the building for fire extinguishers and yet we fail to realize that the whole first floor is on fire.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:That's a terrific example, Matt, because I'll jump in with just the overview, because you pointed to earlier. We regulate contaminants that haven't been previously regulated, but what we don't address is the ability to continue to maintain and sustain water supply. So our efforts to advance how pure the water is coming out of the tap is coming at an expense of being able to maintain that we have water coming out of the tap at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the things you're discussing make me realize and I'm willing to be wrong but you're talking about how society viewed this world of drinking water 50 years ago. No one thought about you know, we need safe drinking water. It's not called the Abundant Drinking Water Act, right? Yeah, exactly, it's called the Safe Drinking Water Act. You know, we have stories of the Cuyahoga River on fire, we have unregulated air, all these issues that needed attention by society.
Speaker 1:And here we are today, 50 years later, and I don't want to get ahead of the issue, but we'll talk about cybersecurity, right? Computers in 1974 filled an entire basement, right. And now we have smartphones and new risks. And, as Manny pointed out, well, what's the real important risk that we need to identify today, or begin to talk about today? To make sure in 10, 20 years we have safe and abundant supplies of drinking water?
Speaker 1:And maybe I don't want to put words in anybody's mouth, but we're talking about one particular issue within the world of drinking water, that being what to regulate. What contaminants should we be concerned about as a society? And if I hear you guys correctly, we can spend a lot of time in the weeds about this contaminant, but not only this contaminant, as opposed to that contaminant, but we can spend endless amounts of time and money figuring out. Do we regulate it at one part per trillion? Two parts per trillion? Meanwhile and we'll talk about this we've been hacked and now Chad's running out trying to help his clients because their SCADA system is malfunctioning and we don't know if thousands of people have been exposed to contaminated drinking water. Am I on the right track?
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, indeed. So what do you think is, or are the solutions to discuss today to come back, if we were to come back in 10 years and talk about this again, what are some of the things that you think we need to do today to begin addressing the regulatory treadmill, so we get off this treadmill and maybe get out in the real world, climb, you know, run up a mountain or run the marathon on the real road? Do we need to consider legislative changes, regulatory changes, policy changes? Are there things and I believe we talked about this on the last episode, but I think I raised the issue of are there CEOs, general managers, leaders in the world of water that can do things without government involvement? They just have to make better leadership decisions and take the initiative on things. Start to help me understand where we go from here on this regulatory treadmill issue.
Speaker 3:You know, I for one think that legislative reform is necessary because it's never been productive to tell federal bureaucrats look, could you just bring some reason to these regulations.
Speaker 3:And it's not because they're bad people. They are well-meaning, intelligent, hardworking people, but their job is to look for additional contaminants and to regulate them, and the only way they fail in their job is if they don't regulate enough of them or at the right levels, and so the risk that they perceive is risk of not doing their job well or getting fired or something like that. But the risk at the utility is completely different. The risk at the utility is hey, we might fall apart because we don't have enough money to address our aging infrastructure, because we're chasing the marginal returns of the latest contaminant. So I for one thing, that legislative reform is necessary, but that's really difficult to achieve, and anytime you open up federal legislation, you don't know what you're going to get right. It can be full of surprises. So I don't say that lightly, but I think the crisis that we as an industry face more and more is becoming worth that risk.
Speaker 1:Chad. How do your clients feel about some of these issues? Are they kind of agnostic about some of these changes proposed? Are they coming to you with things that they think need to happen?
Speaker 4:Well, water utilities are in a tough spot because they want to be able to clearly convey to their communities that they're doing what's expected to provide safe water you referenced before. We just call it the Safe Drinking Water Act. We don't call it the Reliable or Affordable or Sustainable Drinking Water Act. And that's where I think those water utilities are living in the real world of having to balance not just safe but also reliable, sustainable and affordable, and those priorities are never getting to the front of the line with respect to how they can fund those priorities. Because the safe and Water Act puts safe ahead of everything else, because it doesn't consider those other attributes. So there is a growing level of concern amongst mayors, city managers, water utility directors that are proclaiming to EPA and Congress stating this isn't going to continue to work.
Speaker 4:We, 50 years ago, had the objective to address SAFE at a time when SAFE was the primary priority because there were concerns, as you described before, about significant environmental pollution, really obvious front and center issues with respect to drinking water quality. But we've now gone another 50 years and in those 50 years water systems are 50 years older, and so those pipes and pumps and concrete basins at water treatment plants, steel pressure vessels. All those pieces of equipment have continued to age and, by and large, haven't been maintained to the point where they'll be able to sustain themselves for another 50 years, and so that's what we're advocating for is that the regulatory paradigm for just the Safe Shrinking Water Act would also consider what it means to be reliable, affordable and sustainable in the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, matt, I agree entirely with Catherine and Chad on the need for some legislative improvements, but I do want to say that there is absolutely a place for leadership at the utility level, community level, state level.
Speaker 2:We do not need to wait for Congress to solve or address some of these challenges. I think one of the challenges with leadership, one of the unintended consequences of the Safe Drink Water Act, clean Water Act, was that it created a kind of a compliance mentality around leadership in the water sector, where we started defining our goal as meeting regulations as opposed to pursuing excellence, as opposed to achieving all of the things that aren't regulated that Chad was just talking about. Regulatory compliance is only one small aspect of performance. We care about things like financial performance and sustainability and safety and lots and lots of other things, so we can address some of these other challenges at the local level, but I agree entirely with Catherine that we're not going to get comprehensive nationwide solutions without some legislative changes. I just don't want to accidentally send the signal that people can sit on their hands or have to sit on their hands and wait for Congress to ride to the rescue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think last time we spoke in part one, we may have discussed that. The Safe Drinking Water Act it's a box, if you will. Well, achieving compliance with that has become maybe the floor and no longer the ceiling. And, as you point out, manny, there's all kinds of new issues where leaders have stepped up to address ideas of sustainability, of affordability, even the cybersecurity issue. People have raised that issue and they're working diligently to identify ways to prevent those challenges from impairing water utilities. So I think you're onto something there with the leadership issue.
Speaker 1:Let's not wait for things to happen. Maybe let's make things happen. Is that fair Completely? Yeah Well, let's talk about the missing risks, the underappreciated risks. Let's talk about it, maybe through cybersecurity or even other things. But how does this somewhat novel but maybe not novel issue of become a real big missing risk? The longer we wait for it, the stories keep creeping up about how systems are being probed or attacked. It's no longer just the fence around the reservoir, it's now my computer system, people getting access to computers, things like that. So how do we look at cybersecurity as a vehicle for this discussion?
Speaker 3:You know, cybersecurity is such an excellent example, not only because, yes, we need to devote additional resources to cybersecurity so that we don't get hacked and don't leave these systems vulnerable and yet, you know, have difficulty doing so because we have to spend so much money chasing the latest contaminant but also because it's a great example of how inflexible the Safe Drinking Water Act is.
Speaker 3:Note that all the cybersecurity regulations did not come through the Safe Drinking Water Act right. It required separate legislation to even acknowledge much less, you know, begin to address this risk, and so it's a great example of, you know, the regulatory treadmill and the problems with it and the problems with relative risk. Cybersecurity is really scary. I think that we've been fortunate in this country that we haven't seen additional problems with large-scale incursions and large-scale impacts, but it's a matter of time and I don't think that's something that we should be rolling the dice on. I'm not so much worried about nation state type of actors, but more cyber criminals and others who could literally even hold entire systems hostage, and that's really scary to think about. That, to me, is right up there with aging infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I would point out as we're recording this, we are seeing some challenges in a few locations with our aging air traffic control systems. Does that provide any sort of parallel to your concerns about the future of drinking water systems?
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, keep in mind that there are utilities that have relatively sophisticated IT infrastructure you know relatively sophisticated cybersecurity protections infrastructure, you know relatively sophisticated cybersecurity protections but utilities run the gamut. And you have utilities that operate on IT systems that are decades old and are completely vulnerable. So, yeah, I think there's very much a parallel with what's happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it seems to me that we have a lot of aging infrastructure discussions across America, whether it be bridges or water systems or aviation-related systems, but if it's happening in one sector, it might be happening in another sector and perhaps, when other sectors have challenges, it may provide fuel for the discussions that we're having on cybersecurity, let alone physical security and things like that. Is that fair?
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely yeah, and you could really view it as the canary in the coal mine, right? Yeah, you know the very tragic plane accident that we saw and you know some of the scary things that we've seen out of airport systems back east, you know, are finally moving us to acknowledge and start to address those problems. I worry that something similar will happen in water utilities as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and these issues don't just crop up overnight. It's a longstanding issue. And these issues don't just crop up overnight. It's a longstanding issue. You know aging infrastructure Chad mentions it. You know you put a pipe in and it takes. You know it may last, you know, 30, 40, 60, 100 years. It doesn't just deteriorate overnight. But how else can we identify and address not just cybersecurity but other risks? Is it simply let's just go to the government and look for solutions? Or, again, are we talking about leadership opportunities, manny? I know that we can talk about getting funding for security issues, but a leader can just go out, talk to the board and find money in the budget or raise rates to address cyber or other issues without waiting for any sort of government directive or regulatory standard. Is that fair? Is that something that we might see in the future of water?
Speaker 2:Well, I certainly hope so. We have evolved a water sector in this country that is principally locally governed and locally funded, and in our view, that's appropriate, I think. When we talk about trying to identify these other risks, yeah, we need some legislative changes, as we were discussing earlier, but a lot of this stuff really is just about identifying the most serious risks and identifying effective solutions to them and then deploying those solutions and giving our local utility leaders the incentives and the capacity to address those challenges. I think where the Safe Drinking Water Act comes in is the way that this regulatory treadmill I'm going to mix the metaphors, I apologize, but the regulatory treadmill sort of traps or handcuffs our leaders because they are stuck on this treadmill, trying to meet the latest regulatory standard, whether or not it provides meaningful risk reduction Meanwhile. That makes it harder for those leaders to make the case for other kinds of investments. If I have to go to my city council and ask for millions of dollars worth of treatment plant upgrades to address contaminant du jour, it's going to be harder. The reality is it's going to be harder for me then to say, oh, and I also need $3 million for cybersecurity. Oh, I also need to hire new operators because we don't have enough of them and our training is insufficient. So I need to pay people more and I need to invest in training. Oh, and I also, you know, I've got premise plumbing problems and now I'm on the hook to change out lead service lines and all the rest of it.
Speaker 2:We pretend as if these don't create pressures on utility leaders, but they really do. Even though they operate natural monopolies, they have to. They rely on their funding. For funding, they rely on these local political processes. You know this is this is a process that Catherine knows very, very well. Catherine knows very, very well, and the reality is that pursuing one of these things does come at the cost of pursuing the rest of them. Nobody can do everything all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so here's a question. Back to one of the themes of this episode regulatory treadmill. I want to offer this idea Do we have a regulatory treadmill or a leadership treadmill? Your thoughts, chad. What do you think? Am I off base there?
Speaker 4:I think there's something to that because, as you stated before, it's the question of how should leadership respond? In this way? And I think, if we think about the way that we address drinking water in this country, we have the federal oversight from US EPA, we have the federalist approach of states addressing the implementation of the Safe Drinking Water Act and maintaining expectations of compliance for water systems, and then we have the water systems themselves systems, and then we have the water systems themselves, and at every one of those levels there are disparate objectives. Federal level EPA staff are primarily judged on their success of regulating more contaminants and achieving high degrees of compliance. State regulators are judged on their ability to achieve high levels of compliance and mostly how they can distribute dollars both from the federal government and states.
Speaker 4:Water utilities are judged based upon whether or not water comes out of the tap or not, and, as we've been talking through the course of this conversation, hopefully listeners can recognize those things are at odds with one another, and so when a new leader steps into any one of those positions at a water utility, state regulator or federal agency, they're trying to perform well based upon those guidelines and those don't always align well, and so then we have changes with those, and then the new person comes in and is also not aligned, doesn't have an appreciation for what it takes, and so you know, the Madison Declaration is pretty clear about some simple things we need to implement Simple to say, difficult to do. First, hold ourselves accountable to actually comply with the current expectations. We can't let underperforming water utilities continue to underperform. Underperforming water utilities continue to underperform. And then, in order to address problems like that, we need to really limit the number of water systems in this country by agglomerating them, whether it's in physical or virtual ways, so we can simplify the leadership needs at the utility level, the state level and the federal level.
Speaker 4:And only by aligning those objectives of what really is success, which I think we're trying to advocate, is not just safe water, but affordable and reliable and sustainable into the future, will we be able to get off that leadership treadmill of somebody's not able to perform, gets out, next person up, doesn't know what they're doing and has to take a few years before they can get in a position to actually make a meaningful change. We got to achieve some more stability in those ways.
Speaker 1:Catherine, your thoughts. Regulatory treadmill, leadership treadmill your thoughts on.
Speaker 3:You know both and Chad's correct there is no alignment of risks and rewards at these different levels, and in some cases that's appropriate, right, like regulators do need to regulate, because there are at times either bad or incompetent actors. But that misalignment, really it falls mostly on the local utility right, mostly on the local utility right in terms of the regulatory treadmill. It's great to want to invest in all of the things that make a utility an excellent performer, but if you are just handcuffed by the Safe Drinking Water Act and the latest contaminant, it is extraordinarily difficult to do so. And you know, across the board, elected officials, be they city council members that you know oversee a municipal water utility, be they district board members that oversee a district utility, be they corporation commission members that oversee private water utilities none of them want to increase water rates, right, like that is not a path to reelection, and so it just it puts utilities in this box that is really, really difficult to get out of. So I think it's a combination of the two.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Manny your thoughts, it's a combination of the two. Yeah, manny your thoughts. That is so important and it is instructive that both Chad and Catherine have talked about incentives. What are the rewards? What are the constraints on leaders at each of these levels?
Speaker 2:For regulators at both the federal and the state levels, when it comes to drinking water, they have very strong incentives to create regulations.
Speaker 2:There are few incentives to enforce those regulations and, as we discussed last time, a regulation without enforcement is just a suggestion.
Speaker 2:What we see over and over and over again is just this push to add regulation, very little action on enforcing those regulations, especially with failing public drinking water systems. When we get to the regulation, very little action on enforcing those regulations, especially with failing public drinking water systems. When we get to the leadership you know, catherine just mentioned it, it's so important what we see when you boil it all down is most people trying to weigh two different things regulatory compliance and rates. We want these other things, these other risks, to be important to cybersecurity, workforce, premise, plumbing, access problems. We care about all of those things, but for the leaders at the local level, it boils down to rates versus regulatory compliance. So one of the things we need to think about from a leadership standpoint is how do we change those incentives, and there are ways to do that. We don't discuss them so much in the Madison Declaration, but this is where the leadership does matter. I mean, the people matter here, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Everybody wants clean water. People have different ideas perhaps about what that means, but at what cost, and a lot of people have sometimes short memories when they support new programs or policies and then eventually, many years later, when it comes time to pay for that new system upgrade that Chad will be more than willing to build for us, people get a little upset about the rate increase that goes with that new technology, those new pipes, the new treatment plants. So one of the things I will gratuitously foreshadow that if there is a second meeting on the Madison Declaration in the future, perhaps would it focus on not the what but maybe the how. Is that a fair observation, Manny?
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know that we have any meetings lined up right now and I don't know that Jad or Catherine and I plan to be around for the 100th anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act. However yeah, I mean clearly the next steps here are to think about the specific actions that we take pursuant to this vision. I mean a mission statement. A vision statement is not an action plan, it is not a blueprint, and we could certainly get into the details of both the problems and the solutions here. But, yeah, that's what we want to do. We want this declaration to drive future conversations around the decisions we make at every level.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So if the Madison Declaration last year said here's a list of challenges that we see, Good news, the Safe Drinking Water Act has been successful, but it has been so successful that it has raised some issues, and if you are looking out to the future of water and you see these challenges and maybe where these scenarios might take us whether it be cybersecurity or other issues and you backcast today to some strategies to think about that water leaders can adopt, Maybe that second meeting that I'm sort of, you know, winking at you about, maybe that second meeting could be. You know, these are the strategies, this is the how. We have affordability issues. We want the right contaminants regulated at the right level at the right cost.
Speaker 1:We have other challenges, but how do we do this in the right way? Instead of focusing on poor risks, how do we focus on the most significant risks? And maybe, Manny Catherine Chad, you can convene leaders in the future to say, okay, how do we do this? What are the strategies that we can think about today, whether they be legislative or policy or just leadership opportunities that will take us to the next 10, 20, 50 years, so that the Safe Drinking Water Act, in your view, is more successful going forward?
Speaker 4:Your reactions I'd love to say fortunately we have some good examples in a few places in the drinking water community that already point to ways to achieve what we're talking about safe, affordable and reliable water for everybody, everywhere all the time. And goes back to one of the things you were asking about before. You know how state regulatory agencies are defined as being successful is increasing their rates of compliance. Are defined as being successful is increasing their rates of compliance, but unfortunately they're in a tough spot. But the good examples are states or others that will actually shine a light on the problems of water systems not meeting those expectations and being willing to take the black eye of showcasing the reality that there are dozens or hundreds in states of water systems that are either completely failed or on the verge of failing, and there are more and more each and every day. We see them in the water utility community all the time we see the headlines, but generally those headlines don't go national until they hit the level of a Jackson Mississippi or sometimes other examples that are raised. But if states and others are willing to legitimately shine a light on the real problems, that black eye then leads to a tension that leads to an objective to solve those problems, and then an understanding that we can't solve those problems by doing the same things in the same way we have before, with lots and lots of small systems that just can't deal with the technical and managerial and financial needs there. Which then leads to what we also advocate in the declaration we need further consolidation of water systems, and so we've got good examples of that happening.
Speaker 4:There's several of those types of case studies across the country. Some of them were accomplished decades ago and we didn't sustain what it would take to do more of that. There's more recent examples. Manny's got a great example about how he's given out report cards to water systems in the state of Wisconsin. That shines a light on both good and bad examples. So I think the more that we can do that, the better off everybody will be to garner the attention that's necessary and really the support of what it takes. There are some communities that can't afford it. They just haven't prioritized it. Unfortunately, there's a lot of communities that can't afford it and are going to need more consolidation to garner the rates across a broader sector to be able to do what's necessary.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that consolidation issue is just a whole other podcast the cultural, political, financial issues involved in that. But you raise a good issue for discussion, manny Catherine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, matt, I want to take up your question about the next conversations. You know the Madison Declaration. We don't. This isn't a program like. We're not going to have a series of formal events where we're going to advance and articulate all of these things. It's really a movement. It's a set of ideas that we want to inspire people, and I was very excited.
Speaker 2:Recently Robert Weil from Decatur Illinois directs public works there created a delegation at the US Water Alliance's One Water Summit, built around the Madison Declaration. It's called the Progressive Utility Management Delegation. I encourage anyone who's going to be attending the One Water Summit in Pittsburgh in July join us. Join us in that conversation, because that's really what it is. He's a utility leader. That's going to be a conference full of folks in the water sector to drive these conversations. There are some elements of the Madison Declaration that are provocative, but we want them to inspire. We want them to help people reimagine what the future of drinking water can be, and so we expect these conversations to be diffuse, to happen in lots and lots of places with lots and lots of people and in this kind of organic way. I think that's quite inspiring and I hope other folks will join.
Speaker 3:Me too, but I want to say I think it's really important that we find a way to provide cover, because fear is real and valid, and you can just see some of the headlines of you know such and such congressperson who desperately wants to improve the provision of safe, clean water in his community and is willing to undertake some of these reforms to achieve it. You know such and such congressperson advocating to diminish water quality standards. Right, I mean, you can just see how the media might portray some of these efforts. And so I think it's really important that, as we hopefully build this groundswell of support, that we find ways to provide cover so that people do feel as though they can act and that they can achieve what needs to be done.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a great objective, you know. I think about the late great Pankaj Parekh, who led water quality at Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. I was fortunate to have him as an advisor to my PhD research a couple of decades ago and at that time he was asking the question, not within a regulatory context but while meeting regulatory compliance, how could Los Angeles improve upon public health protection? Where are the opportunities to identify those public health concerns and to better address them? And so in the analysis that we worked on a couple decades ago, it pointed to some regulated contaminants could be further addressed. You know they could do more to limit arsenic concentrations with existing means that they had in place, but also they could do more to be protective of infrastructure failures, pipelines breaking, for example, and at a utility the size of Los Angeles they've got leadership that can do that.
Speaker 4:And I also think about other examples where there were small water systems failing in the general vicinity of places like that, and in the last decade there have been great examples of those small communities becoming a part of larger water utility organizations and those larger organizations being able to overcome some of those challenges. And so I think if we can give those leaders that insight about the real risks that are being faced and how they can overcome those. We're going to continue to see an increase in understanding about not only the objectives but how to actually accomplish them. And, like Manny says, we're not going to be around for the 100th anniversary of the Safe Drink Water Act, but I certainly expect that between now and then what we do get to see is a turning of the tide of how we identify and address and really make meaningful progress towards meeting those objectives.
Speaker 1:Manny, I'll give you the last word as we wrap up here your concluding thoughts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want to echo something that Catherine just raised, which is that our leaders at the local level, at the state level, at the federal level, they need cover. That's part of what we're trying to do here is provide that. We also need to find ways to raise and praise those who are doing the kind of great work that Chad described. The Madison Declaration, we hope, is a way to articulate both of those things both to provide the cover for folks, to empower them, but also to celebrate the people who are helping a better drinking water future. That's really what the Madison Declaration is about and the movement that we hope we're creating.
Speaker 2:Look, I'm very proud. Chad and Catherine both know that my daughter is working in the water sector now. She's out, just started her PhD after working in industry for a little bit, and I really hope that she is around for the 50, excuse me, for the 100th anniversary, and that they've got entirely different problems to deal with because we've solved all of these. You know that that would be, uh, that would be the celebration and the hope that that, uh, that we've got for the future well, we hope she's listening.
Speaker 1:And uh uh, you have a dear old dad has thrown down the gauntlet for his daughter, so no pressure. I I remain, um intrigued by the future of water and how the ideas, concepts and challenges raised by the Madison Declaration will convene leaders in the world of water to discuss what the next 50 years of the Safe Drinking Water Act or the Affordable Water Act or the Sustainable Water Act will bring for our society. And so I want to thank you, manny Catherine Chad, for coming back for part two, and I look forward to part three of this conversation, and I would ask you, the listener, to join us again on the Water Foresight Podcast as we continue to talk about the Madison Declaration. And thanks again, manny Catherine Chad, for being guests today, and we look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Have a wonderful day.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much Great to be with you, Matt.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Water Force Site podcast powered by the Aqualaris Group. For more information, please visit us at Aqualariscom or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
