Results of the 2024 North Carolina Water and Wastewater Utility Management Survey
In 2024, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Government Environmental Finance Center (SOG EFC) conducted a survey of water and wastewater utilities in the State of North Carolina (NC). The survey included publicly owned, privately owned, and not-for-profit utilities in NC that serve customers receiving centralized water and wastewater services. This effort provides an update to the 2018 Utility Management Survey with some modifications. The 2024 survey was developed in partnership with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ) Division of Water Infrastructure (DWI). The goal of the survey was to examine the technical, managerial, and financial capacity of utilities across the state, with a sub focus on long-term planning strategies at utilities. Partial answers were accepted and select questions are highlighted below. The full survey narrative can be accessed on the SOG EFC’s website.
Survey Respondents
241 utilities (48.6 percent) of the 496 invited participated in the Utility Management Survey. This is a slight improvement from the 2018 survey which had a 44 percent response rate with 511 total invited utilities.
Primary survey respondents represented many different sectors of utility administration and/or operations. Survey participants were comprised of workers in an array of fields including finance directors, utility directors, public workers, operations and support, engineers and technicians, office managers, directors and superintendents, mayors, and presidents. City, town, and county managers or administrators make up the largest percentage of primary survey participants at 15.4 percent. Clerks also make up a significant percentage of survey participants at 14.9 percent.
Utilities of all sizes participated in the survey. Utilities with between 1,001 – 4,000 connections represented the largest share of survey respondents (25.7 percent) while large utilities over 50,000 connections represented the smallest share of survey respondents (4.1 percent). Just over a quarter of survey respondents represented utilities with less than 1000 connections (28.6 percent).
Financial Training for Staff
Most utilities regularly incorporate financial training for their relevant personnel. Over half of utilities (53.6 percent) have training every year, and 12.0 percent have training every 2-3 years. Just under 1 in 10 utilities (8.4 percent) do not receive any formal financial training, an improvement from the 2018 survey, where 13 percent of utilities reported no financial training.
Financial Planning
Over 63 percent of utilities set financial targets and goals, nearly half of which are approved by a governing body. A quarter of respondents (24.9 percent) said they did not know whether financial targets and goals were set for their utility, indicating a potential need for education opportunities regarding financial benchmarks. There is a decrease in the number of utilities that do not set financial targets and goals from the 2018 survey (31 percent) to 11.2 percent in 2024 percent.
Capital Planning
Most respondents expect to apply for competitive grant funds to pay for future capital infrastructure (78.4 percent). Another 59.9 percent will pay for future capital improvements through grant funds already obtained while 64.3 percent expect to pay for future capital improvements with cash from their water/wastewater enterprise fund. The relative rankings of these responses are very similar to what was reported in the 2018 survey. The least common way that respondents reported paying for capital improvements was with general fund dollars. A small number of respondents selected “other” methods of funding/financing (2.5 percent). These include ad valorem taxes, equity, and state allocations.
Disaster & Emergency Planning
The most common threat or vulnerability documented to utilities was main/line breaks with 83.2 percent of respondents identifying that particular vulnerability. Since 2018, the number of respondents with documented emergency/disaster plans has remained stagnant (72 percent in 2018) but in 2018 only 20 percent of respondents had identified main/line breaks as a threat. In 2018, the most commonly identified threat was natural disasters (62 percent).
In 2024 water system/source reliability was identified as a vulnerability by 52 percent of respondents, an increase of 50 percentage points since 2018. Notably, water system/source reliability was the least commonly identified threat in 2018 with just 2 percent of respondents identifying it as a system vulnerability.
Other vulnerabilities, including essential personnel loss, natural disasters, contamination, droughts, and equipment failure, all rose by at least 10 percentage points each since the 2018 survey. Threats such as cybersecurity, PFAS, and financial disasters were not identified in the 2018 survey.
Reviewing Rates
The majority of utilities (68.5 percent) review their rates every year. This is a slight decrease from the 2018 survey, where 72 percent reported reviewing their rates annually. “Other” responses included review by the NC Utilities Commission, as needed, and every other year.
Regional Partnerships
Many utilities consider regional partnerships, whether to relieve operational strain, consolidate customer bases for financial benefit, or to provide support in case of an emergency. The results in the 2024 survey indicate an increase in utility interest regarding regional collaborations, as only 16 percent of respondents said they did not engage in any of the collaborative practices compared to 46 percent in the 2018 survey. In 2018, the most common practice was working with regional entities such as councils of governments (26 percent).
The most common methods of collaboration with others were sharing information and knowledge with their neighbors (54.6 percent) and establishing mutual aid/emergency contracts with others (41.1 percent). “Other” responses included forming new or utilizing existing regional authorities, descriptions of bulk agreements between systems, sharing procedures with similar rural systems to facilitate mutual aid, and paying for or selling operational services between municipally owned systems. A few answers mentioned ongoing conversations regarding partnering or assessing the feasibility of partnerships and regional development.
