Capacity Development & Project Planning

Planning Documents

The Water Office, LLC will work with you to optimize and improve your system's operations through preparation and planning. Don't let a small budget dissuade you from planning for your next big upgrade, enhancing security, or preparing for an emergency. Funding is available...for most of your capacity development activities and project planning documents. The Water Office, LLC can help by applying for funding assistance and begin planning to meet your needs. These planning documents are essential to succession planning. EMAIL US today!

Environmental Reviews

Environmental reviews are a necessary part of the process of reviewing a project and its potential environmental impacts to determine whether it complies with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and related laws and authorities. Federal and State funded projects are required to undergo an environmental review to evaluate environmental impacts. The analysis includes both how the project can affect the environment and how the environment can affect the project, site, and end users.

An environmental review must be performed before funds, regardless of source, are committed to a project.

GIS Mapping

The passage of The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) is a once in a lifetime national investment into our nation's infrastructure. To access this money, towns and communities must first be able to scope out an eligible project. GIS data collection is one of the quickest and most efficient ways to understand the needs of your system. GIS mapping is an ideal way to start to conducting a condition assessment, prioritizing needs, developing an asset inventory, or estimating upgrade costs.

Operation and Maintenance Manuals

For an Operation and Maintenance (O&M) manual to be useful it must have a simple structure. Vital information must be easy to find, quickly and efficiently. When the Water Office develops a manual, we take into consideration who will be using the manual. Is the user familiar with technical manuals? Do they have a high school, trade school, or college education? How technically adept is the user?

If these manuals are to benefit treatment system operations, they must be aimed at communicating to those individuals operating the facilities and not the design engineer.

Emergency Response Plans

When your system fails does your team have the appropriate tools and procedures to recover successfully? Our Emergency Response Plan provides team members company protocols at their fingertips to quickly resolve issues and resume operations in a timely manner. We create streamlined procedures, provide fail-safe information, and list appropriate contacts. Give your team the tools they need to recover from an emergency failure with ease.

Standard Operation Procedures

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) provide step-by-step instructions for completing O&M tasks. Well written SOPs provide direction to those who may need to fill in, improves communication, reduces training time, improves work consistency.

Current copies of the SOPs also need to be readily accessible for reference in the work areas of those individuals actually performing the activity, either in hard copy or electronic format, otherwise SOPs serve little purpose.

Income Surveys

An income survey is needed if it is believed that the census data does accurately reflect the demographic information of a service area that is looking to access/maximize grant dollars or principal forgiveness on a loan.

For example, many water or wastewater customers in downtown areas represent a lower income than the town population as a whole. The affluent homes on the outskirts of town often tilt the scales and do not allow the water or wastewater systems to apply for grant funding or principle loan forgiveness. Income surveys are used to determine if 51% or more of the water or wastewater service area is comprised of low to moderate income. If they quality, it will allow for CDBG funing. Income surveys will also show if the income is below the state median household income. The qualification would allow for USDA or SRF funds.

Wellhead Protection Plans

The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) is designed to protect drinking water quality through the "multi-barrier approach" that considers all threats (natural and humanmade) and establishes barriers to either eliminate or minimize their impacts. Developing and enacting a wellhead or source water protection plan is the first barrier in protecting sources of drinking water to prevent contamination of sources of drinking water.

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