Steve Wilson posted on November 07, 2011 06:42
Last week, I gave a talk at an operator meeting about how to make the internet work for you. One of the things I brought up is that you can use the web and social media to connect with customers. It generated quite a bit of discussion, from "no one looks at that stuff" to how the open meeting act laws have made it too time consuming for most small towns to have webpages (in Illinois).
Anyway, my point was that in many rural communities, both the residents and the town boards take their water for granted and don’t value water or their operator the way they should. I believe that the operator is the best person to try and change that attitude, we’ve seen a number of national campaigns about the value of water, but nothing on the rural community, or small community level seems to change from those efforts. Some of the operators looked at me like I was crazy, to make a long story short.
Afterward, several people came up to talk to me about SmallWaterSupply.org and were grateful to have it available as a resource. This is always great to hear, it really helps motivate both me and my staff when we know there are small system operators getting real benefit from our efforts. But, I wanted to share something that was said during that small group discussion. We were talking about small town politics, how things have changed in small towns and how boards really don’t function they way they used to.
He said that 40 years ago, small town “fathers” were businessmen. They ran the grocery store and hardware store, they understood business and cared about making the town a thriving place because they had a vested interest in it. Today, none or very few of those businesses even exist and being on the board is something residents typically do reluctantly or because they have a particular issue they want the town to address, very seldom water or wastewater.
As I thought about that, it hit me how true that is. When I was a kid, I grew up on a farm near my hometown of 600 people. We had a hardware store, a barber shop, a grocery store, a bank, a electronics repair shop, a restaurant, a gas station, and a tavern. We also had a railroad track and an elevator. Today, there are two taverns and a bank. The elevator is still there, but the tracks have been gone for 25 years or more. Everything else has closed.
The people who live there are mostly older and have always lived there, or are their kids and they all have jobs outside of the town. Many stay because they still have a grade school and junior high, and it’s a great place to raise your kids. But its not a thriving community anymore, it’s a barely-maintaining-itself community.
My point is that this is a typical small town today. In order to make any change in perception of the value of water and water service, we have to convince the boards and residents that it’s worth maintaining properly and has more value than they realize. The more I work in this field, the more it becomes clear that its going to have to be done at the community level. And operators, whether they like it or not, are going to have to step up and put in the legwork to change public perception.
How To Run Your System Like A Business is a series at SmallWaterSupply.org, appearing on Mondays.