"If its installed, it had better be working" – The Secret To Building a Resilient Utility with Rob Thompson, General Manager, OC San, California

Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15 minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, educate, and inform other water sector leaders from across the globe.

My name is Piers Clarke, and today my guest is Rob Thompson, General Manager of at OC San or Orange County Sanitation District, as it used to be called in Southern California. Rob, wonderful to have you with me. Thank you for taking the time.

Rob Thompson: Thank you for the opportunity to be here.

Piers Clark: I'd like to start by just getting a little bit of knowledge about yourself.

How long have you been at Orange OC San? What were you doing before you joined OC San?

Rob Thompson: I've been with OC San for 29 years. I've gone all around the organization. I was a bit of a troubleshooter from the very start. Started in operations, moved to maintenance and power plants, uh, went across to engineering, planning, asset management, uh, director of engineering, assistant general manager, and now general manager of OC San.

So I have a very rounded. Understanding before that oil and gas, uh, primarily in northern Alaska. So our Arctic environments. So a lot of varied background

Piers Clark: From the Arctic to Southern California gang in the right direction. And we first met, I think it was 20 years ago. And, uh, You were inspiring the innovation team at the time, and we might come back to that a little later in this broadcast.

Okay, now let's talk about OC San. How big is it? Who does it serve? How many facilities has it got?

Rob Thompson: So OC San is right here in the heart of Orange County, California, just south of Los Angeles, north of San Diego. We serve 2. 6 million people, in sleepy little Orange County, we think of it, I think of it as the small little place I grew up, but it's the 6th largest wastewater agency in America by population served.

It's a major concern. We do regional sewage, service. We take all the sewer service from, 20 cities for local, sanitary or water districts, and part of the county of Orange. We have, uh, just under 400 miles of trunk sewer pipe, our pipes are generally, uh, 18 inches all the way up to 10 feet in diameter, delivering that water to us, two treatment plants, total wet weather capacity of 640 million gallons a day, on a daily basis, we do about 190 million gallons a day.

Piers Clark: Excellent. The plants are imaginatively named Plant 1 and Plant 2. I always found that, um, particularly amusing.

Rob Thompson: Super creative, yes.

Piers Clark: And for people who don't know the geography, you're about 30, 50 miles south of Los Angeles and, uh, on the coast of Huntington Beach. Is that right?

Rob Thompson: Correct.

Piers Clark: Now, you mentioned there that you serve 20 cities.

Um, and this is important because of how it reflects into your board. So could we take a minute just talking about your makeup of the board and the caliber of the people that are on the board? Where they come from? Are they engineers? Are they water utility people? Or what?

Rob Thompson: We get a cross section of the county.

We serve the 20 cities. Uh, that are part of our agency all appoint one member to our board. They do it at their will, not ours. They're not elected directly. So they're either the mayor or city councilman from each of those cities. Uh, the special districts also send one person also elected to their board, not to ours.

Everyone is appointed and we have one county board of supervisor.

Piers Clark: So you have no one that you have a choice on. You simply get told this person is now your representative.

Rob Thompson: Correct. And we have doctors, lawyers, A few engineers, not many, IT specialists, government people, professional Haven't

Piers Clark: you had a pop star, a rock star?

Rob Thompson: Uh, band member from a rock and roll band, yes. That

Piers Clark: is so Hollywood. And how frequently does your board change over?

Rob Thompson: We lose about 25 to 33 percent of our board every two years because of term limits and election cycles. This year we're guaranteed, uh, in the next elections in November to lose at least seven members of our 25 member board.

Piers Clark: Yeah. Well, very disruptive. And the point of this, this podcast is because Orange OC San is an incredibly resilient Utility. Um, and the more I've learned about it, the more I've been impressed at the resilience you've got. Resilience not just on your engineering and infrastructure, but also on the billing that you've got.

You know, I think it's planned three percent rises for the next five years. It's a very low cost, resilient utility. And I wanted to understand how you've been so low cost. And then when I learned about your board, I thought this is even more incredible because the board. Aren't necessarily as informed as you might imagine, um, many utility boards to be because they are, um, appointed individuals, via the, the city.

And, and I, so we're going to get to in a couple of minutes as to how you've become a resilient utility. But before we go there, can you just describe what life was like in OC San back 20 years ago, back in the late 1990s?

Rob Thompson: When I started, I came from the oil background. Um, very, very technically savvy, very forward thinking, very, um, conscious of every investment.

Safety was number one because you're talking about, uh, oil and gas. An explosion creates a crater. Uh, when I came here, it wasn't the same. We were very reactive. We were, um, trying to be forward looking, but everyone came in Monday morning, you know, what broke over the weekend, who got called in. What are we going to fix?

What, what's, what's new this week and everyone would scramble around Monday morning, get set and go about their business and wait for the next weekend.

Piers Clark: Yeah,

Rob Thompson: it's come a long way since then.

Piers Clark: It's a firefighting. So, and of course, the reason I want to pause there is because what you've just described is, pretty much how most utilities operate.

There is a firefighting mode. There's also a little bit of heroics that sometimes goes on. You know, there's something heroic about being the operator who gets out of bed at three in the morning and has to go and fix a broken pump or something. But that firefighting mode, which means you're constantly reactive rather than, um, responsive.

Can you now describe the, how it feels to be an employee in OC San today?

Rob Thompson: Oh, it's a totally different situation. We we have become forward thinking and a planned environment. We come in Monday morning and the last 3 in a row. Um, no call outs this weekend. The plants are running fine. We haven't had a sewer spill in our entire service area caused by OC San since November of 2022.

We haven't had a water quality violation in 18 years. Things are stable and things are moving forward and it starts with that strategic planning that you were kind of getting to with how we orient our board. So if I could just take a minute or two and talk about that,

Piers Clark: please do we're we're precisely there.

We're now at the tell me about the strategic plan because this I think is the key to how you become resilient.

Rob Thompson: It is. We have a top to bottom alignment structure where. The, the highest level on our board from the board chair all the way down to the service workers providing maintenance services all understand what we're trying to do.

So we have a plan. When we turn over the board, we're going to get those one third of the, um, our new board. We're going to spend the first three months of their term on the board, educating them on what we do, how we do and why we do it. So we have a strategic planning process that breaks down our entire service provision into 15 areas.

Things like, uh, financial services, wastewater treatment, chemical resilience, um, chemicals of emerging concern, biosolids reuse, energy independence. Fifteen areas that line out what we do. Our job is to have a well written three page summary. For those board members that I can take them through over two or three months, and they know exactly what we're doing why we're doing it and where we want to be.

So the plan is always looking out. It's not a five year plan and it's three years old. Every new board gets to put their stamp on the plan and that's where we're going.

Piers Clark: And that's the bit that I particularly love because we do get trapped into doing, I'm doing the five year plan and I'm now in year four of it.

Whereas actually what you've got is you've got a constant rolling plan that is constantly being challenged by, yes, they might not be, Engineers in the water sector, but they are bright, informed, caring people who, who can apply their knowledge and challenge your plan so that you are constantly tweaking it.

I assume you're not doing sudden swerves in the plan. What's happening is the plans constantly being tweaked a little to the left, a little to the right as, as technology changes, as regulations evolve, as the pressures and what people want. Um, correct.

Rob Thompson: It's written in plain English. The first three months they get to hear the prior wisdom of the board.

It's not staff telling them what they should do. It's the prior wisdom of the board. And then they get the next six months to, just what you said, put their stamp on where they want this agency to go. Um, and it isn't radically different because they see the wisdom in 100 percent water reuse, which is where we've gotten that few people have.

They see us, uh, partnering with Orange County Waste and Recycling for food waste recovery. They see us partnering with Orange County Water District again for water recycling. Always looking for opportunities, always trying to be a good partner.

Piers Clark: So, so the secret to this is, is perhaps to try and break out of that registry cycle and, and keep a long term view that, that enables you to build 20 year partnerships.

You know, your relationship with OC Water District, which is obviously the potable side, OC San does the wastewater side. Um, that is not just on the food waste. You're also, of course, doing it on, uh, on recharge of the aquifers. which I think is a topic for another podcast. Um, now, none of this sounds like rocket science.

This sounds like it's pretty straightforward. Um, so, so what's the special, what's the specialty here? What, what is it that you're doing that other people have missed? Is it? Is there something that's,

Rob Thompson: it's, it's focus. So we have this long term plan. Um, the plan is coupled with an asset management plan. We took the time to develop, um, asset engineers that are assigned to each area of the treatment plant, each of our watersheds for our collection system.

And there's ownership of each of those areas. My, my directive is. If something is installed, it better work.

Piers Clark: That's a brilliant point.

Rob Thompson: If it doesn't work, you're going to answer to the general manager, why this pump, this asset, this centrifuge, whatever it is, why isn't it available? It's installed, it better work.

Piers Clark: That, that is going to be the title of this podcast. If it's installed, it better be working. I think that's a great mantra for, we don't accept half, half, Um, half measures. We do it right. We do it right first time. Now, this just means that things don't, don't, don't go wrong.

Rob Thompson: Of course, things break all the time.

I have 14 billion dollars in assets, things break. But we have designed our systems, like most people did from the start, to have resilience. If you need four pumps, you have five, maybe you have six, depending on your, your duty standby split. But you can't let that fifth pump be down. And be okay with it being down until Somebody finds the parts until the supply chain.

No, it's not. Okay Work it out If you if you need parts in the warehouse because it's a critical pump get your parts in the warehouse I don't want to hear You can't have your pump. People paid for it. It better work.

Piers Clark: I'm loving this because we've got to the bit. I've known you for a long time, Rob, and, um, and you are, I believe that the secret isn't just that you've got a well informed board and you've got a, a, um, a plan that is, is constantly evolving, not stuck into a timeframe.

I think this is about leadership and you just showed there that, that you're the Captain Kirk on the, on the, on the bridge of the enterprise. Going through a meteor shower and you're making sure that everybody is held to account and there is some brilliant brilliant exceptional leadership there

Rob Thompson: So so one of the one of the ways we made it happen as I became operations and maintenance Director for a period of time was I would go out every two weeks with my chief operators The managers over operations and maintenance walk the plant And point out why is this broken?

Why is that conduit hanging there? How come this motors tagged out? And they had to answer for why things were not well kept, why housekeeping wasn't right, and why things were broken.

Piers Clark: You don't want that conversation happening twice, do you?

Rob Thompson: Correct. Certainly not.

Piers Clark: Now, you've been very generous in sharing with me that these plans that you've referred to, which obviously will need to be made specific to each utility, but they are all available.

This isn't about some soft, clever software. It's about a process and a procedure. And these are available online and any utility can look at them and you're very happy for them to be plagiarized and adopted and adapted to fit other utilities. Is that correct?

Rob Thompson: Absolutely. Absolutely. Our strategic plan is there to see.

Take it, morph it to your own needs. Our asset management plan is there by each of the areas. Take the format. All you need is an owner for each area and it's something that is our management procedure. It's not just a document on the shelf.

Piers Clark: You're a star. All right, we're coming up to time. Um, I'd like to finish by just asking you to go back, go back 29 years to Rob Thompson as he's just joining.

What advice.

Rob Thompson: Do the right thing. Be patient. Stay at it. It will work out.

Piers Clark: Do the right thing. Be patient. Stay at it. It will work out. That is spectacular. Um, thank you very much, Rob. You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with Piers Clark. I've been talking to Rob Thompson, the general manager at OC San.

Please join us next time. Goodbye.