How utility people—and everybody else—think about water issues

Each year the American Water Works Association (AWWA) conducts a survey of its members on the State of the Water Industry (SOTWI). The survey seeks to “identify and track significant challenges facing the water industry.” Among other things, the SOTWI survey asks respondents about their perceptions of various water issues, and so broadly gauges attitudes within the water sector.

It’s common for water sector folks to lament that the public doesn’t understand water issues. After several years of responding to SOTWI and reading the results, I wondered: How does the public perceive water issues?  How closely do attitudes within the industry align with those of the general public?

Measuring attitudes

Organizations like Texas A&M’s Institute for Science, Technology & Public Policy (ISTPP) offer a way to answer those questions scientifically. In the summer of 2015 I worked with ISTPP colleagues to deploy a nationally representative mass public survey of attitudes toward energy, agriculture, and environmental issues in the United States. The ISTPP survey yielded nearly 2,000 respondents. As part of the ISTPP survey, we included several items about water policy taken directly from the SOTWI survey. Identical wording and question structure provides an extraordinary opportunity to compare attitudes within the water sector (the “pros”) against attitudes in the general public (the “Joes”).

The SOTWI questionnaire included 34 items; from among these we selected 11 items that directly ask the respondents’ perceptions of water issues such as water resources, capital, and affordability for low-income households. All 11 attitudinal questions are based on a five-point scale: unimportant (1), slightly important (2), important (3), very important (4), and critical (5).

Convergence & divergence

Some interesting patterns emerged. Average values ranged between 3.2 and 4.6 among the Pros, with infrastructure replacement emerging as a clear #1 priority. The general public averaged 3.10-4.11, with long-term supply availability as the top value. Ordinal rankings—that is, which issues were more or less important relative to each other—were fairly consistent between Pros and Joes.

But the really interesting picture emerges when we look at the disparities in average scores across the eleven issue area. This graph shows the difference in average score for Pros minus average for Joes:

The most striking disparities are at the top and bottom of the graph. Water sector respondents perceive infrastructure replacement, regulatory compliance, and source water protection as much more important than does the public. Meanwhile, the public evidently views low-income affordability as significantly more important than does the water sector.

Together, these results offer clues about the areas of relative harmony and dissonance between the American water sector and the American public. Water organizations and utility communications staff should perhaps concentrate on developing effective ways to convey the significance of infrastructure replacement, regulatory compliance, and source water protection.

By the same token, these findings suggest that low-income affordability matters much more to the public Joes than to water sector Pros. It stands to reason that taking affordability seriously can help utility leaders legitimize their own priorities to the public.