Episode 18: California Urban Water 101
“One of the big things we have to do for the 21st century is to transition away from our past views that did not link storm water, waste water and water supply— all effectively”
erik porse
A conversation with Dr. Erik Porse (Sacramento State University & UCLA Institute of the Environment) about urban water resources, energy, conservation, and engineering economics in California. Released April 30, 2021
guests on the show
Erik Porse
Dr. Erik Porse is a Research Engineer in the Office of Water Programs at California State University, Sacramento, an Adjunct Assistant Professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, and a Lecturer in Sacramento State’s Department of Environmental Studies. Dr. Porse studies cities and their effects on surrounding environmental systems. He is the principal architect for the Artes systems model, which is used to examine ways for Los Angeles County to significantly reduce its use of imported water of urban water resources management in Los Angeles County. Learn more about Dr. Porse’s work here.
TRANSCRIPT
Sam Sandoval
Bienvenidos a Water Talk. In today's episodes, we're talking about a urban water management with our guest, Dr. Erik Porse. He is a research engineer in the Office of Water Programs at Sacramento State University, and a visiting assistant researcher at the UCLA Institute of the Environment. Erik studies urban water and energy management. When I was thinking about inviting Erik, to me it was a little bit about changing the conversations that we had on Water Talk to take a look at urban water, how do you get water in your house? I think that was one of the things that I did want to bring to the attention to our audience. The second one is saying the elephant in the room — Southern California. So how can we bring a conversation and have an understanding on what's going on, how water is managed in Southern California, and some of the things that they've been doing for for a lot of time? What should our audience listen to in this conversation with Erik, Mallika, Faith?
Mallika Nocco
Yeah, I mean, I think that, for me, and for many people, I study agriculture, and I don't think very much about cities. I did do a little bit during my master's degree when I was focused on stormwater infrastructure and green infrastructure and cities, but then I kind of moved to more more rural agriculture and haven't been thinking about infrastructure and cities anymore as much professionally. And right now, water infrastructure is on the news. Right? So, when people are having debates and conversations about the nature of water infrastructure, and what water infrastructure is needed for cities, and how to improve that infrastructure, this will be for those of you who are listening a fantastic introduction to that infrastructure and to thinking about what all does it take, in terms of conveyance, in terms of planning for the future, in terms of recycling water? There's so many topics that Erik covers that are just going to give a wonderful introduction to urban water infrastructure, specifically, a lot of focus on Southern California, Los Angeles, which is super interesting, as well.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, I think one of the most interesting things about Southern California urban water management, Los Angeles, is that, you know, there is this stereotypical sense that that area is very arid, and uses much more water than the rest of the state, and in many ways is sort of, quote unquote, stealing water from the rest of the state. And there's also the the sort of high drama of Chinatown and all the various ways that water use in the southern part of the state has been mythologized. And I think the contribution that Erik and his colleagues are making is really interesting in that they're both documenting the ways that Los Angeles in particular has attempted to modernize and to focus a lot on water conservation.
I left California for a few years and left the water freshwater world for a few years. And I feel like in between that time, Los Angeles became actually known as an innovator of water conservation, things like permeable pavement and urban groundwater storage. And so all of that is this really interesting way of saying that we can have one idea of what's happening, but the reality seems to be, and I know this largely because again of Erik and his colleagues work, that there has been a constant evolution around water and water conservation, water management in Southern California. And in many ways, they are also laying out a roadmap of what else needs to happen over the next say 10 or 20 years, which is just a really hopeful and inspiring way of looking at how we can live in California with water constraints that we do have.
Sam Sandoval
I'm also considering that today is, once again, our second drought year as we are heading towards summer, and Southern California, Los Angeles is well positioned. That now it is managing this water well, in comparison with other places that may we may think have more abundant water resources. And Erik mentions that the 21st century is the century of urban water management. So with that, and without further ado, let's listen to Erik and our conversation.
It is our pleasure having you in our podcast. You know, let me get to the point. So, according to the Census Bureau in 2020, four out of five Americans live in an urban setting. Furthermore, in California, this difference is more dramatic 87% of the population live in urban areas. It seems that urban water is very important. And I know that you're one of the experts on this. So Erik, can you provide us an overview of urban water management, where the water that we use in our homes come from? What are the main uses and how it is disposed?
Erik Porse
Sure, happy to. So, the 21st century has been labeled the urbanized century, it was the first time that we crossed the threshold, that majority of humans across the planet are living in these more urbanized areas. And it's an important marker, because it corresponded also with transitioning into the millennium. And so a lot of people will tailor this now as the coming century, the time when cities are the places where humans are — it’s our dominant location for living and working and so forth. But because of that, they have a special importance, then in their role of promoting 21st century goals for sustainability, climate resilience, and adapting to the future that we hold. And so anything from resource constraints to rethinking how cities are created, transitioning to future technologies, everybody sort of wraps this all up into cities. And the result is that they're seen as this place of great hope and opportunity, but also a place where you have a lot of work to do.
I think the urban water is really important component of that, because it's one of the lifeline critical infrastructures. And so within urban water management, you have some core sectors that have been around for a long time, but are taking on renewed importance everywhere, because of this growth. And so drinking water supply, how we bring drinking water into cities and make sure it's treated. Wastewater is collected after we use water, it flows through the collection systems to the treatment plants, and then we treat it there to standards that we can discharge it into the environment, or increasingly try to reuse it in our in cities for other purposes. Stormwater management is the third sector and takes in all the water that's falling during precipitation events, and making sure it doesn't flood our streets. This is one of the original functions of urban water management — to ensure that the flooding didn't happen. There are ancient examples from Rome and earlier have stormwater management systems. And that's closely related to flood control. We need to manage small scales, smaller storms, you know, or regular precipitation events. But then also sometimes we get really big storms. And so those two sectors need to work together. And then finally, water is an integral part of recreational opportunities that are in cities and around cities. And so how do we keep watersheds and aquatic habitat and recreational opportunities for the folks who live in cities are all important.
So, as we in the US managed urban water through the 20th century, we had some pretty huge milestones. And so we implemented what was called the Clean Water Act in mid century and it's been built upon, but the Clean Water Act was actually part of a broader push since the late 19th century and into the early 20th century to create water that's more drinkable, to create water that we discharge into the environment that doesn't pollute. And so we have an entire centuries worth of legislation investments, first by the federal government, or first by local, local large cities, and then by the federal government, which essentially culminated by the end of the century in a regulatory system that tries to ensure that we manage water effectively provided for safe drinking water within cities.
And then also make sure that we're managing all of the contaminants that we put into that water in the course of daily urban lives, anything from oils and greases, and stormwater to sewage down the pipe. So as wework from this framework in the US moving forward, the 21st century is about figuring out how to use the Clean Water Act effectively, but also transition to the new technological opportunities we have. And one of the big things we have to do for the 21st century is really a transition away from our past views that did not link up stormwater and wastewater and water supply all that effectively. And that's what's broadly termed sort of the “one water movement” within cities.
We want to think about how to manage these things all holistically. It's a excellent goal. It's very important, but we haven't quite figured out how to do it yet. And so that's really the challenge moving forward for the 21st century. How do we manage these things effectively? How do we pay for them? How do we integrate new technologies? And how do we update our regulatory systems and our institutions to all this?
Sam Sandoval
Yeah, thanks. I reckon, you know, I think others have also talked about this “one water,” which is, as we were designing some of the cities, we left that piece out in which one we can recycle, reuse, reintegrate water supply. This actually reminds me, I think, a couple of years ago, you wrote an article related to the water supply of the Metropolitan Los Angeles area. And there were resources, challenges, governance structures, and so on. So I mean, I know that there is a lot of history there. But um, can you explain to us about the water management of Los Angeles and some of your key findings?
Erik Porse
Sure. So after I graduated from UC Davis, actually, and went on to do research with UCLA, I had the opportunity to join a large team of researchers across multiple campuses, and we had a series of grants and projects that were sort of interesting, because we were thinking about what's the future of water management in Los Angeles, how do these systems evolve, what needs to happen for in terms of institutional changes, as well as investments in new technologies to really meet some of the goals that are being outlined. And while we had the concept of the research focus, we were also working directly with a lot of utilities there. And one thing that you benefit from and in working in LA is a lot of utilities are very, very open and willing to share with you, trade ideas, even, you know, provide data or insights based on the work that they're doing.
So we had this opportunity to think about what the future of water management in LA is, even as folks on the ground were actually charting that path. And so the role of the university in this context was really to bring together a potentially holistic perspective on this, which water agencies and water utilities are busy doing all sorts of things all day long, and they don't necessarily have the time or resources to put together a large integrated effort. And so that's what we did. And so working under several of the project leads at the time, Mark Gold, at UCLA at the time and Stephanie Pincetl at UCLA, as well as Terri Hogue at the Colorado School Of Mines and Diane Pataki, at the University of Utah, we set out to figure out what's the potential for a local water supply in Los Angeles.
This was an idea that has been sort of gestating for some amount of time. There are several agencies that have outlined long term goals for reducing imported water supply in the region as a way to promote long term stability and long term resilience of all those systems. We wanted to really examine what's the opportunity for this? How does this play out in an integrated fashion across all the different water systems? And we started uncovering this hugely complex urban water management regime and in Los Angeles, and it was a fascinating case study and also sort of boggled the mind about how complex it is, and all of the intricacy that goes into managing all these systems.
LA was one of the first places in the state of California to organize around managing groundwater and outlining agreements to have that take place. LA was one of the largest examples of the solution of going outside of your urban boundaries to collect water and that really forms the basis of a lot of what people understand that the typical tales of Los Angeles water management, right? William Mulholland, the engineer building pipelines into the hinterlands to the Colorado River, the Arizona/California border and up into the mountains. But really that whole process was an evolution of an idea that came from other places in the US. New York City, Philadelphia thought about moving outside of their urban areas to get clean water, because the technologies were just not there to be able to ensure clean water at the time they were developing it.
So fast forward and all that infrastructure, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, and then the 1980s occur. And they're sort of a reconsideration of all of how these systems work. And you saw this typified through several court cases in California. Mono Lake was a was a monumental decision, whereby the lake had to be managed for levels to maintain some environmental balance there within that body of water and could not simply be drained. And so that, for me, at least, I sort of described that as the outset of a different viewpoint.
As the agencies have looked to improve their maintain their reliable systems, and chart the future of water management in LA, this idea has emerged about reducing reliance on that important supply. And it comes from a whole number of reasons, but especially continued population growth, and strains on statewide water management systems in California, coupled with projected variability in precipitation in the future, so likely, further drought, more extreme droughts. And so we took on the academic task of putting this all together and assembling this into large scale analysis and modeling effort for for LA.
Sam Sandoval
You know, Erik, and I think that this is a for the audience, this is super interesting, because, I mean, it's been more than 100 years that LA is been thinking about urban water management and how to apply water resources. And I do also think that it is as you're saying, that they have been ahead of many of the other areas in terms of saving water, organizing groundwater management, reuse, recycle of water. So I think those those are important things to highlight. So I do have a question here. I've seen that in Los Angeles, we have way too many agencies down south. And I know that some of them relate to each other. But I haven't actually figured out how they relate to each other. So we have the Metropolitan Water District, Los Angeles Water and Power. And then we have all the San Diego water districts and so could you explain us how they relate to each other and, and so on?
Erik Porse
Absolutely. Southern California and Los Angeles are a microcosm of California itself. We have a hugely complex system of large and small agencies. And so as the Southern California region was developing, the city of Los Angeles was emerging as a metropolitan center. And it realized the importance of having reliable water supply for its continued growth. And so it began investing in this idea of acquiring water that would allow the entire metropolitan area to continue to grow. At the same time, San Diego was also growing. And there's all sorts of historical anecdotes about how the cities were both growing at the same time and occasionally competing in the way that cities at that time did, in the late 19th century. So in 1913, the Los Angeles aqueduct was completed and that brought in water supply from the Sierra Nevada to the city of Los Angeles, which is the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, LADWP, and that was the beginning of the need to bring together an our regional strategy.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California was eventually formed to provide a regional water security solution by building a series of pipelines to more distant centers that would bring water into the entire southern California region and provide reliable supplies to to facilitate the continued growth. And so MWD is really a State contractor. But it's also a large regional agency that was approved by voters and received affirmation the through the California legislature. And its duty is to provide water supply, provide water. And they operate several of the large pipelines to the Colorado River and also north, tying into the state water project.
Then there’s a series of member agencies within this system that become a hierarchical system. And some of the larger cities or more prominent cities, older cities, such as city of Los Angeles, such as city of Santa Monica, are direct contractors with MWD, they receive water from MWD. But then there's also a series of what we in our studies term wholesaler agencies that serve as regional hubs to be able to distribute water from MWD down to what are called the retailer agencies who actually sell water to end users, right.
And so you have this hierarchical system that creates all sorts of wonderfully enjoyable opportunities for studying complex governance. But you kind of wonder how it runs, it's quite fantastic. And so folks across the agencies are always talking and always managing across supplies. And as the hierarchical system developed, it actually offered opportunities for different retailer agencies to be able to access water from some areas, but also access water from other areas. So some retailers might have groundwater pumping rights for local basins. Others might rely solely on imported water from Metropolitan, some are investing in recycled water supply, some of those intermediary agencies end up taking on new duties for providing water, recycled water. So it's a really intricate system that it's continued to evolve and will continue to evolve going forward.
Sam Sandoval
Say I am a person in Los Angeles and I want to know where my water comes from. And so basically, you mentioned three different important sources. So those are:
Erik Porse
Those resources are the LA aqueduct completed in 1913 that serves water to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power solely. The second pipeline that was completed in 1939 is the Colorado River aqueduct. And that serves water to the entire southern California area for Metropolitan Water District taking supplies from the Colorado River. And then the third source, which is completed in 1972, is tying up to the overall state water project, which is the California statewide effort. So those three major sources of important supply provide water to all the areas.
Sam Sandoval
And to me, this is super interesting because some of them rely on what are important supplies from MWD, but also have their own resources. And I've seen that many of them, they are increasing what is called the water portfolio, which is basically all the different sources that they've been using as a water supply source, and so on. I am wondering in your studies, you also investigate the governance among all of them, and their power structure, who has a little bit more power over the other ones or may exert certain power? Could you explain to us a little bit about that?
Erik Porse
Absolutely. So there are a number of really fantastic resources out there that think about the development and the governance and the politics of water management in Southern California. And there's fascinating stories about the interactions of the agencies as they worked to figure out how to fund these very large systems. So now fast forward to the 21st century, we have these legacy systems, they provide reliable supply, but also the assumptions on which they were built and operate seem to be changing. So what's the reliability of imported water? Going forward with what the scientific research is saying about more extreme drought? These sorts of changes, along with generally, as you were mentioning, Sam, the idea of building out more diverse portfolio supplies, diversify your sources, are leading some of the local agencies in the region to invest in alternative sources.
So, it's worth noting that a lot of places in Los Angeles for instance, and a lot of places throughout Southern California, Orange County, they've been investing in alternative sources for a long time. So the Orange County Water District, throughout that area is a fantastic example of early investments in recycled water for groundwater recharge and what they call indirect potable reuse. And while it's not going to your directly to drinking water supplies, Los Angeles, in that in the metropolitan area that consists of Los Angeles County, about 10 million people, there's been a lot of investments in recycled water for many years as well.
Another thing that Los Angeles in particular did was investe in large scale stormwater capture facilities. So over the past decades, Los Angeles has captured on average about 200,000 acre feet annually and significant amounts also in Orange County through what's called stormwater capture. And this serves to recharge the groundwater basins that are underneath, which serve as a key water supply, one of the original water supplies, for that region. And what you end up seeing across the entire southern California Coastal area is that regions have advantages and disadvantages. And so they capitalize on those advantages and disadvantages in order to create these kind of diverse portfolios.
So, for instance, the city of San Diego or the San Diego metropolitan region does not have as large of groundwater basins underneath. And so they've been investing in a lot of alternative supplies, pilot projects for direct potable reuse, as well desalination. And, so every city, every retailer, every water supply agency has to sort of craft this long term, medium and long term strategy, for supply, making sure they don't run out of money and water. They look at the local service area that they have and the dynamics that they have and make decisions accordingly.
Sam Sandoval
And related to that you know, so they expand their portfolio, how are you seeing the reliance in imported water supply? Is that related with climate change or other things? Do you think that is, in the future, a good strategy? What's going on there?
Erik Porse
There are several agencies in the Los Angeles metropolitan area that have stated goals to basically wean themselves off of imported water. But that's not all of the agencies by any means. And there's also some nuance in there as well as to imported purchased water from another wholesaler agency or their own internal imported water as well. So for the coming decades, the policy goals are outlined, and for some of these entities, they're very strong, to be able to significantly reduce the amount of water that comes from imported water supply. But, reasonably speaking, these are legacy systems and areas throughout Southern California, Los Angeles or Orange County or San Diego, we'll be utilizing those investments for a long time.
For example in Los Angeles across all the agencies, depending upon the year and the availability and the precipitation trends, 50 to 60% of the water might come from imported water sources, and approximately maybe 35 to 40% might come from groundwater supplies. In the past, there was a much closer linkage between groundwater supplies and recharge from excess imported water. Most of those opportunities have gone away, very little recharge water is available from imported supplies. And so the agencies have had to adapt to this kind of changing availability landscape to be able to figure out how to maintain these groundwater basins with the water for the cities who rely on them, and the agencies who rely on them. Given the fact that they have to identify other sources for recharge water, there's subtle ways then there are overt ways that imported water supplies become less of a centerpiece of where places in Southern California get their water from.
But another interesting dynamic is that the Metropolitan Water system, Metropolitan Water District and its system, is actually rethinking things on a big scale as well. One of the largest potential projects for water reuse right now is in planning. And there's a pilot plant where that links up Metropolitan Water District with the LA County Sanitation District, which runs an enormous wastewater treatment plant that's downstream. And they have been working with Metropolitan to implement large scale plans for reuse that would essentially move water up through the basin and introduce recycled water for indirect uses. And at some point in the future, when direct potable reuse is available as an option, from a regulatory standpoint, be able to use it for direct potable reuse.
It's a really fascinating example of how institutions will evolve. You know, institutions base it on recognized scientific information and recognized forecasting and see how management plans unfold in a complex system, reach out beyond their typical boundaries to be able to ensure that their set of core missions are met. And so this has been quite a neat story to continue to see evolve within the basin. I mean, there are multiple agencies, they're all investing in recycled water within Southern California. So it's really kind of a broad based effort towards transition. In a moderate pace, I'd say.
Mallika Nocco
Erik, actually, this question touched on something I'd made a note of which is that I feel like there's an aspirational hopefulness about when we will be getting to direct potable water use for recycled water. And it sounds like there are a variety of challenges and roadblocks to getting there. And I was curious, how many of them are scientific and like engineering based? Like, how do we do it? And how many of them are around policy and infrastructure? How far away are we from recycling our water to drink it?
Erik Porse
Well, you're already drinking recycled water, more than likely, unless you live in Sierra Nevada and it falls from the sky if you don't consider that to be recycled. So that's just always helpful to know, right? You know, here in Sacramento, for instance, where we have two pipelines in the rivers and some mix of that water may have already gone through some uses for agriculture and been discharged. And then as you move down through the system, certainly the city of Sacramento discharges a little bit less than 50% of the water thatit uses back into the river and local watersheds. So we already have a system of highly indirect potable reuse through what they call environmental buffers.
Now moving a little bit more towards direct, what you see in several utilities in the Los Angeles area is planning for projects for reuse that can meet the criteria for indirect potable reuse, it'll take water to stormwater capture, basins for recharge, maybe they'll use it to insert it into existing purple pipelines and purple pipes indicate recycled water use, right? But they have the idea that somewhere on the horizon, we'll get standards and criteria that put all the pieces in place for them to be able to use that more directly. So it's not as if they're going to take that line and directly link it or pump it into the water supply line, it first would likely go to some sort of water treatment facility or at least be in some sort of buffer in a lot of these instances, but the technologies are becoming robust enough and people are becoming more secure in the how highly treated that water is — advanced treated water meets the criteria for use in public systems. That requires, as you mentioned, a wholesale rethinking of our infrastructure.
Sam Sandoval
I assume that you will need a lot of energy for doing all of that. I mean, what you're telling me is this, I mean, it takes a lot of energy to bring all the imported water and then reuse it again and not a lot of our listeners may know but you have done quite a lot of studies a related to water and energy. For instance. I think it was some years ago, there was a report that mentions that 20% of statewide electricity is used in water. And I know that you have done some of those studies [1, 2, 3] in the LA metropolitan area. And can you talk with us about this?
Erik Porse
Sure, California has been interested in this question of energy and water for some time. And researchers love this topic. That energy and water, there's so many intricacies of it, you have to understand nuts and bolts of two different systems. There's so many ways to slice this pie that it becomes a very a wonderful research question, right. But I think the key is taking all that research and making it actionable for what utilities can actually implement and do. So, when we were putting together this systems modeling approach and thinking about the future of water supply, after we did a number of other studies, we always wanted to dig into the energy question, but we needed to figure out a way to standardize this across 100 different agencies in Los Angeles, and identify what happens if you say, reduce imported water but maintain current water demand levels and transition to recycled water, versus if you keep the imported water supply and just reduce demand levels? How does that all sort of play out?
What we did is actually capitalize on all the work that has been done in California to date. So studies going back funded by the California Energy Commission work from UC Santa Barbara, Bob Wilkinson, a whole host of documentation, you know, reports. And we pulled all this together and aggregated it in this huge data integration exercise to estimate what how much energy is used for water management by utilities and households in Los Angeles [1, 2, 3]. At UC Davis, Edward Spanks, at USC, Kelly Sanders, Jen Stokes at UC Berkeley, Alvar Escriva-Bou at PPIC, all contributed time, in addition to our folks at UCLA with my colleagues, Eric Fournier, and Stephanie Pincetl and Mark Gold, and Kathryn Mika, who are all there. And we essentially figured out how to pull all this data together to be able to evaluate what's the energy used for each of these sectors for water management.
That included understanding how much water is used for treating drinking water and conveying drinking water than to the homes and businesses, how much water is used for treating wastewater, and how much additional might be used for indirect potable reuse for recycled water, either current or future amounts. And then importantly, how much water do utilities use in comparison to the all the residences, and this is something that we oftentimes forget is that large agencies are using energy to manage water and move water all over the state, but households also use a lot of energy for water, especially in the form of heating hot water. And this in magnitude considering how many people we have in California often ends up dwarfing the amount of energy that's used for water management by utilities.
So, we tried to put this all together. And what we did is we first modeled all of these effects. And we looked at the relative contribution of utilities versus households. It does play true that households end up using more energy to heat water. And a lot of this is through natural gas heating and our water heaters, which is the predominant in home energy source for water heating in California. But when you started to run some scenarios, some interesting things played out. So if the water utilities take some long term steps to reduce their imported water, and they try to keep current levels of demand within supply for all the different end uses - indoor and outdoor - that folks use water for, you need to supplant that imported water with something. And so what ends up happening is you invest in recycled water. And by the time you get through all the steps of treating recycled water for disinfection and some environmental buffer or putting it into the drinking water systems, it's pretty energy intensive itself. And so it almost ends up being a little bit of a one to one. And so these really important, very energy intensive, imported water sources can almost be offset.
Now, if it's all run on renewable energy and solar, that's one thing to consider, but at the time, those sort of assumptions weren't able to be made. But on the other hand, if you reduced imported water, and also invest in those alternative sources, but then also invest in demand reduction, more low water and drought tolerant landscaping that reduces outdoor demand, continue to improve fixtures indoors, then you can actually reduce the overall energy intensity of the utility system. And so you have to look at these things all together. And that's sort of one of the opportunities that you get through some systems modeling, and that emerges when we throw everything in the mix and figure out how to standardize and put it together; you can come up with some overall insights.
Sam Sandoval
Erik, it's been an excellent conversation. You have brought a lot of good information to our listeners. And the other thing that I do want to mention is that you've been working in the interface between engineers, water resources managers, and also some of the social scientists and water governance. And I think that is very important working on that multidisciplinary space. So what would you like, our listeners to know about what you do? And how can we support your work?
Erik Porse
So I have a few different roles. As you know, I work at Sacramento State and the Office of Water Programs, and we work with a lot of utilities, and we are the EPA Region Nine Environmental Finance Center. And through that role, we work with a lot of utilities directly on funding and financing and so forth. But OWP is kind of a hybrid organization, because we're self funded entity. And so we ended up working with lots of different types of folks, public and private sectors, researchers, practitioners, and folks across lots of different disciplines. And so what we do bridge the UC and CSU gaps, work across sectors, and so forth. And that's all really fun, and it keeps you on your toes. So if you're, you know, interested in, in building out opportunities in that I'm quite happy to collaborate and figure out how we do get to do more of this. So that'll be great.
But I also have to say, because we we work with a lot of these agencies in the public space, there are a lot of really dedicated managers in these entities, and they work hard, and they're thoughtful, and they're charting the path. And they have a whole set of responsibilities that researchers or folks in the private sector don't necessarily recognize, so huge portions of their job duties are liaisoning and working with the public and building stakeholder constituencies. And these are really important missions for public agencies. And a lot of times they're trying to they're trying to do this without adequate funding. And just in the water sector, there's plenty of studies you can point to that say we need to reinvest in the systems.
There's been great work in California demonstrating the need for that from UC colleagues at Berkeley and Stanford. And I think that going forward, the biggest thing folks can do in this regard is really just recognize the need to renew this infrastructure and pay taxes. It is kind of straightforward. It seems rather potentially a letdown, to say that's really one of the best things you can do. But having well resourced agencies that have access to experts that also have time and staff to engage in in tackling these problems is one of the key tasks of the 21st century if we're going to figure out how to tie this all together in a new way.