If you live in rural North Carolina, you know that maintaining and improving our water and wastewater systems are critical needs for our communities. That’s why the Rural Center’s 10 Rural Counts strategies for economic development identifies accelerating modernization of essential rural water and wastewater infrastructure as one of our top priorities for state and federal advocacy.
What are the top challenges facing our rural communities? What is already being done across the state to plan for the future, create regional economies of scale, and promote and expand best practices? Importantly, what is the state’s role in funding and supporting local water infrastructure?
For our spring 2018 Rural Counts webinar, we welcomed two experts from the NC Department of Environmental Quality to share with us what’s going on in North Carolina to meet these critical needs.
The North Carolina State Water Infrastructure Authority (Authority) was created by the North Carolina General Assembly to assess and make recommendations about the state’s water and wastewater infrastructure needs. One of the Authority’s key tasks was to define and address these needs through a first-of-its-kind State Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Master Plan. The Authority immediately recognized that the Master Plan needed to address issues beyond just the cost of water infrastructure. A holistic look at the challenges facing public water and wastewater utilities revealed that the state must also help utilities address the organizational and financial management challenges that may contribute to their physical infrastructure limitations.
Click here to listen as we provided advocacy updates and learned more about the Master Plan for Water and Wastewater Infrastructure in our latest webinar.
The Master Plan for Water and Wastewater Infrastructure
Wednesday, March 21
2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Panelists:
Francine Durso
Senior Project Manager
Division of Water Infrastructure
Jennifer Haynie
Environment and Special Projects Supervisor
Division of Water Infrastructure
John Coggin
Director of Advocacy
NC Rural Center