Water and Sewer Services Comprehensive Business Process Review
The City of Baltimore and Baltimore County have interconnected water and sewerage systems. Pursuant to a 1972 intergovernmental water agreement, the City provides water services to County customers, including distribution, treatment, metering, billing, collections, and customer service. Pursuant to a 1974 intergovernmental sewerage agreement, the City provides sewerage (treatment and conveyance) services to the County through the operations of “jointly used facilities”. The County maintains its own sanitary sewer collection system in what is known as the Metropolitan District.
The two agreements are central to the overall governance and coordination of the business, technical, and financial aspects between the City and the County. The City and County must continuously coordinate and collaborate on various business processes including infrastructure planning and expansion, maintenance and repair, information and data exchange, customer service, and financial transactions.
The City and County hired PEER Consultants as subcontractors - to provide a comprehensive review of their water and sewerage services business processes.
The goal is to perform a comprehensive and integrated review of the existing City and County business processes that are critical to the delivery of water and sewerage services. The team is developing documentation of the existing business processes, policies, and pertinent aspects to enhance the understanding of the current inter-governmental governance aspects, business processes, organization, and financial frameworks. The idea is to create a benchmark to assess the alignment of the existing business processes with industry best practices and provide objective observations.
PEER Consultants was responsible for tasks 4 and 6. For Task 4, we are reviewing and summarizing the processes involved in the overall capitals program, water loss management program, drought response planning, safety & risk mitigation programs, source water protection, and land use management planning, and performance management, and continuous improvement. The office tracks various performance data and they are in the process of streamlining the data capture and tracking. The team also reviewed inter-jurisdiction communication, IT systems review and disaster recovery, and sewer capacity planning processes. For task 6, the PEER team is responsible for reviewing the field operations coordination between the County and the City and also handling evaluating the protocols regarding customer complaints.
Ultimately, the City and County envision creating the “Utility of the Future”, with intergovernmental coordination of processes and policies to ensure effective delivery of high quality and sustainable water and sewerage services and deliver service excellence to City and County customers.