USET’s Office of Environmental Resource Management and the University of North Carolina Environmental Finance Center is proud to present the Managing Your Water and/or Wastewater System into the Future Webinar Series

The Office of Environmental Resource Management is collaborating with University of North Carolina Environmental Finance Center (UNC EFC) to offer two webinar sessions on Managing Your Water and/or Wastewater System in the Future. The first webinar, “Managing Your Water and/or Wastewater System into the Future: Assessing Utility Financial Health,” will be held on August 17 at 10:00 am – 11:00 am Central/11:00 am – 12:00 pm Eastern and the second webinar, “Managing Your System into the Future: Rate Setting,” will be held on August 24 at 10:00 am – 11:00 am Central/11:00 am – 12:00 pm Eastern.

The speaker for these webinars is Dr. Ahmed Rachid El-Khattabi. He is the Associate Director of the Environmental Finance Center (EFC) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His background is in applied economics and urban planning. He earned his Ph.D. in 2020 from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. El-Khattabi’s expertise is in policy-oriented quantitative research and data management. His research focuses on issues at the intersection of economic development and environmental planning with a particular focus on urban water management. Prior to joining EFC, he was an ORISE Postdoctoral Fellow then an Economist in the Water Economics Center at the US Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Water. At EPA, he co-developed an environmental justice batch screening tool (EJSCREENbatch), contributed to the development of support tools for regulatory benefits analyses, and conducted research to support national rulemaking related to Waters of the United States.

Managing Your Water and/or Wastewater System into the Future: Assessing Utility Financial Health

When: August 17 at 10:00 am – 11:00 am Central/11:00 am – 12:00 pm Eastern

Who should attend: Tribal Leaders, Tribal Utility Board members, Utility Managers, Tribal Infrastructure and Planning Directors, Financial Directors

What: This session will discuss how to think about a water and/or wastewater system as a financial entity and will examine the key financial indicators that allow these systems to make informed decisions in planning and investment. Specifically, this session will cover operating ratios, debt service coverage ratios, and other financial metrics that may be influential in assessment of long-term financial sustainability and introduce a financial health checkup tool that can be used to compare a utility fund’s actual performance against desired goals.

Managing Your System into the Future: Rate Setting

When: August 24 at 10:00 am – 11:00 am Central/11:00 am – 12:00 pm Eastern

Who should attend: Tribal Leaders, Tribal Utility Board members, Utility Managers, Tribal Infrastructure and
Planning Directors, Financial Directors

What: This session will present the basics of rate structure design, and how these structures may affect revenue generation, help or hinder various utility objectives, and potentially support affordability initiatives. This session will also cover how a community can approach starting to charge for water/wastewater and where can revenue be applied and introduce a rates analysis tool that can be used to test scenarios and help determine whether the utility needs to adjust rates in order to achieve financial sufficiency.

Registration: Register for both webinars today!

For questions, please contact Veronica Menta, USET OERM Financial Analyst, at vmenta@usetinc.org.