Fountain Hills is a vibrant community, but if its water and wastewater infrastructure could talk, it would probably admit that it’s approaching its golden years.

Over the past year, EPCOR Water has been hard at work in Fountain Hills, replacing aging fire hydrants, meters, service lines and valves. In just the past year approximately $1.8 million has been invested in Fountain Hills, a total commitment that will rise to nearly $9 million over the course of the next four years.

What helped to put this new and improved infrastructure in place was a new rate mechanism that allows us to accelerate work on critical projects to improve service and reduce water losses, while keeping customer costs down and water flowing to Fountain Hills.

It’s called a System Improvement Benefits mechanism, or SIB. It is simply a better way for utilities to finance a community’s water infrastructure needs.

In the water-parched Southwest, it’s easy to see the importance of ensuring that we don’t lose any water through leaks. Some water companies lose as much as 20 percent of their water supplies due to leaking pipes. We can’t take our water resources for granted, and that’s why, street by street, more than 1,200 underground service lines are being replaced in Fountain Hills over a five-year period. Similarly, community safety needs to be ensured through properly maintained fire hydrants to ensure adequate fire flow at critical times.

But water infrastructure isn’t the only community building block that needs to be maintained, repaired and replaced. The town is working to complete much-needed improvements to Fountain Hills’ roads – many of the same roads that cover underground pipes we need to repair or replace to keep the town’s water flowing reliably.

Road repairs and pipe replacements – both are important, both are costly and both are disruptive.

Working with the planning staff at the Town of Fountain Hills, we’ve coordinated our repair and replacement work on underground pipes with the town’s road improvements, making these projects more efficient, less costly and minimizing the impact and inconvenience to residents. Layering the town’s roadwork construction schedule on top of our schedule for line replacements, we’ve adjusted our SIB work so that roads are disrupted once, not twice.

Take El Pueblo Boulevard, for example. Stretching for nearly three miles and slated for service line improvements in 2017 and valve replacements in 2018, El Pueblo was on the town’s paving improvement schedule for 2015. Instead of tearing up the road twice – inconveniencing neighbors and paying the construction costs twice – we changed our schedule to coordinate with the town’s.

If we had done this work in 2017 and 2018 – after the town repaved the road – it would have cost an extra $250,000, plus as much as an additional $100,000 to fully repave the road. Instead, it cost just $6,000 to shift these replacements to 2015 because we were able to coordinate with the town’s schedule. And those cost savings are savings for our customers.

The work hasn’t changed – just the order in which it gets done.

SIB, based on a five-year approved capital plan, helps us to complete vital infrastructure work in five areas that are critical to the distribution system – hydrants, meters, mains, valves and service lines – and to maintain our mission of delivering safe, clean and reliable water to our customers. It helps us do this faster, reducing financing costs and speeding up construction timelines.

If repairs or upgrades are performed sooner rather than later, the long-term costs to our Fountain Hills customers will be less. If we allow the system to disintegrate, the cost to all of us is much greater.

SIB is strictly regulated by the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC), and EPCOR – like all utilities – is required to prove the infrastructure benefits to the community. SIB protects customers – companies can only recover costs for projects that have been reviewed and pre-approved by the ACC and that will be re-reviewed and re-approved again by the ACC once the work is complete. In return, customers get an efficiency credit on their bill. SIB is another way for utilities to improve service to customers.

The future for Fountain Hills’ infrastructure — and of all our communities — largely depends on a close partnership between communities and private industry.

Like the town, we have an obligation to provide a future in which our infrastructure is a top priority and is maintained and funded as such. SIB sets us on that path, and we have seen the first evidence of that in the past 12 months.

Joe Gysel is the president of EPCOR Water USA, the largest private, regulated water company in Arizona and New Mexico, providing water and wastewater service to approximately 350,000 customers across 22 communities and seven counties.