Report cards for 570 Wisconsin water utilities
strong marks for the Badger State’s capital city
Back in 2019 I did something quite foolish: thinking out loud while testifying in a public hearing. When a New Jersey Senate Committee asked me how I’d improve that state’s Water Quality Accountability Act, I suggested creating school-style report cards for water utilities. The idea has been gnawing at me ever since.
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I first blogged about the concept of utility report cards in early 2020, as I was contemplating an offer to join the University of Wisconsin faculty (which I accepted later that year). In fact, a big part of what drew me to Madison was the chance to work with the Wisconsin Public Service Commission’s magnificent water infrastructure and finance data.*
Combined with the Badger State’s Department of Natural Resources and vibrant professional utility community, Wisconsin offered the perfect opportunity to make water utility report cards a reality.
In 2021, a small grant from the Kohl Initiative helped me launch the Wisconsin Waterworks Excellence Project (WWEP). Over the next three years, I worked with dozens of industry experts, water leaders from Wisconsin and elsewhere, and a handful of La Follette School MPA students to gather data and craft rigorous rubrics. We released a Beta version of the report cards in 2022 and a “soft launch” draft late in 2024 aimed at the state’s drinking water community. At each stage we gathered feedback, recalculated, revised, and refined. It’s been a long journey with a skeleton crew and a shoestring budget.
This week, with pride and more than a little trepidation, I released the first WWEP public report cards for every regulated utility in the state. Check out the WWEP website, the full report and our first set of 570 report cards.
Prescott makes the honor roll!
Playing to win
WWEP report cards aren’t just about naming-and-shaming—they’re also about raising-and-praising. The WWEP will help identify at-risk and failing utilities, but our report cards also distinguish between adequate, good, and truly great performance. The men and women who run our water utilities amaze and inspire; the WWEP seeks to spotlight their work.
Instead of merely enduring rate increases and regulatory mandates, imagine leaders highlighting the improvements infrastructure investments bring. Public grades, built on rigorous rubrics and published by an independent authority, can empower utility leaders to pursue excellence: better health, a cleaner environment, and greater prosperity for our communities.
if you know, you know
The WWEP seeks nothing less than to transform the water sector’s management and governance paradigm. It’s an audacious project, to be sure.
But badgers are bold animals, and Wisconsinites are bold, innovative people. Social Security, the progressive income tax, workers’ compensation, and utility regulation all started as musings in Madison seminars and drawings on Wisconsin professors’ chalkboards. I’m so grateful to the Wisconsin water community that’s welcomed me so warmly, embraced our project’s vision, and helped make it real.
* Some come to Wisconsin for the cheese, some for the beer, some for the Great Lakes. I came for the water data. Really.
During the 30 years I have lived in Mesa, Arizona, the city has, twice a year, mailed a report of the water condition to my home. It lists all of the sources, the wells and river water supplies. The report indicates the Federal Standard and compliance with actual data on how the city has performed to those standards. The report lists every single metric for the hazardous and non hazard components of the water.