Guest Article By Resident X – Community Member Contribution~ Name Witheld By Request
Rahim Harji will be the big wastewater utility’s first completely new leader in almost 30 years. He starts at the
end of this month, and he has a lot to do. Rahim must transform an agency that has grown beyond its mandate. He faces the first budget deficit in decades, and a growing pushback to the agency’s attempts to boost rate increases beyond their historical norms.
At the top of his agenda must be to get Clean Water Services under control.
- Back in 2020, the agency had 382 employees and treated an average of 60 million gallons of wastewater per day.
- Today, it treats slightly more, at 64 MGD, but its staff has ballooned to 500 Employees.
Rahim must ask, Why did this happen? How can I fix it?
A big cause of this decrease in productivity is the generous work-from-home policy that the agency offers its administrative employees . This policy started back during the pandemic and continues to this day. The
line workers have always punched the clock, and worked on site, but many of the pampered administrative employees, including CWS leadership, work from home several days a week.
Even the city of Portland ( hardly a role model) has returned all of its managers, supervisors, and directors back to the office 40 hours a week. Keith Wilson noticed something that should have been recognized years ago at CWS. Administrative work at the agency has slowed to a crawl in recent years. Moving from the old office in Jackson Bottom to the new headquarters in Beaverton has proceeded at a snail’s pace. A program to provide utility bill subsidies for low-income customers has languished, frustrating some members of the budget committee.
Rahim should bring all CWS employees back to the workplace full-time. He and his agency have a lot to do, and it won’t get done unless he can get all hands on deck. In addition, bringing headquarters employees back to
the office will show respect for the line workers who do the hard, dirty work of the agency, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and never get the luxury of working from home. This will go a long way toward narrowing the gulf that
has opened between administrative departments and the union employees who toil in the trenches.
Another reason for this explosion of employees in the last 6 years is mission creep. The agency’s last CEO was an Ivy League idealist who thought she could save the world one treatment wetland at a time. She built an agency that is more like a research university than a sewage agency.
Does a wastewater utility really need:
- a 10-person communication department?
- Or a culture and learning department ?
Look to CWS’s little brother, Clackamas County’s WES, for guidance. Though it is a smaller utility, it leads the way with a much more focused organizational structure and none of the fluff found at CWS. For too long, CWS has been a glittering city on the hill. It needs to come down to earth and focus on its core mission of treating wastewater and collecting stormwater.
Rahim must be serious about restoring public trust in the organization. Creating trust with the ratepayers is not a short-term campaign that CWS can abandon as soon as the heat is off. Huge increases in food and travel spending have been shoehorned into next year’s budget. Did Rick Shanley (interim Director) and his team forget that it was just a bit more than a year ago that the agency was rocked by reports of excessive spending on food and travel by staff and leadership?
One staff member in this May’s budget meeting remarked that food and travel were constrained last year because of the “ climate”, but seemed to acknowledge that spending for this next year was full speed ahead. Did she think rate payers’ memories are that short, or that trust is not important all the time?
Rahim should not get caught in the trap CWS staff is setting for him. He should take great care before attaching his name to a big employee party, or a junket to Scotland with the ratepayers footing the bill. The staff are happy to party, knowing that if things go badly, the general manager takes the blame.
His first day on the job, Rahim must take control of the agency’s food and travel spending with an iron hand. Spending in these two categories should be indexed to the spending in similar agencies around the state, not to CWS’s extravagant past.
The new general manager must make every effort to right-size the agency and wring out operating and administrative inefficiencies, including a hard look at consulting, advising, and training services purchased from outside vendors, before extraordinary rate increases are considered.
And for heaven’s sake, he should get rid of Rick’s cooked-up rate slogan “proportional and competitive”, and go back to the one that was a result of a survey of the rate payers, “ steady and predictable”. One can interpret
proportional and competitive as,” anything goes as long as we charge everyone the same and our rates are not higher than Lake Oswego”.
Above all, Rahim needs to have a vision of an agency that is more open, more transparent, and much more efficient than the one he inherits. Show the ratepayers that CWS can make the same kind of hard choices that they must all make in their daily lives. Show that CWS values every dollar they collect in service charges, and pledge not to squander any of it. This is the real job of restoring and building public trust.
Resident X has 1st hand knowledge of CWS ~ The Herald wishes to encourage all of you who have sent information to us from inside the Agency to please continue to do so. You can reach us at HillsboroHerald@gmail.com
