A standard efficiency metric for evaluating the performance of community water systems

Community water systems face pressure to improve performance because of increasing public scrutiny, decreasing financial health, and increasing infrastructure rehabilitation/replacement costs. This pressure requires community water systems to improve accountability to stakeholders relative to all aspects of their performance. However, the current performance assessment and evaluation (PAE) approach of community water systems is highly individualized by service, and it provides little opportunity for benchmark comparisons across the community water system (CWS) sector. Existing PAE frameworks focus on the continuous improvement of core processes internal to a CWS without providing a standard for consistent comparison across services within a geographical region. The research presented in this article hypothesizes that an effective solution to this problem would be to: (1) facilitate public awareness by developing a standard efficiency metric (SEM) parameter for a standardized PAE that would enable stakeholders to compare the performance of their CWS to the regional benchmarks; (2) enhance financial health characteristics by enabling regional management to base resource allocation decisions on uniform performance information about the services in the regional water system,, and (3) increase service operating efficiency over the current practice. The SEM parameter described in this article is capable of providing assessment information to the individual community water system provider in order to improve performance. The SEM parameter also enables the comparison and benchmarking of CWSs operating as a regional water system through the standardized PAE framework. As accountability in the CWS sector improves through the use of the SEM parameter, the expected result will be more effective resource allocation decisions across a collection of CWSs operating as a regional system.-KD.