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 emergency. Many of the project planning documents and capacity development activities that are needed...funding is available. The Water Office, LLC can help apply for funding assistance and begin planning to meet your needs. 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.

Asset Mapping and Condition Assessment

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 a one of the quickest and most efficient ways to understand the needs of your system. GIS mapping is an ideal to start to conduct a condition assessment, prioritize needs, develop an asset inventory, or estimate upgrade costs.

Operation and Maintenance Manuals

For an Operation and Maintenance (O&M) manual to be easy to use it must have a simple structure. For the manual to be effective, vital information must be easy to find, quickly and efficiently. When developing the manual think about Who will be using the manual? Are they 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

Facility personnel should be made aware of procedures to follow to isolate equipment items or treatment units required during emergency operations. Information on fail safe features such as no bypass , peak flow capacities , standby power and overload alarms should be made available to operating personnel. List and discuss emergency operating and failsafe features for each treatment unit and process. Train your staff on these critical procedures!

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, often many of water or wastewater customers reside within the downtown area are which often encompasses infrastructure service area represent a lower income than the overall population. The more affluent homes are on the outskirts of the town or village. An income survey is then needed to determine that the service area is comprised of 51% low/moderate income (CDBG funding) or is below the state median household income (USDA or SRF funds) to access .

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 human-made) 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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