Full Description

Community water systems face pressure to improve performancebecause of increasing public scrutiny, decreasing financialhealth, and increasing infrastructure rehabilitation/replacementcosts. This pressure requires community water systems to improveaccountability to stakeholders relative to all aspects of their performance.However, the current performance assessment and evaluation(PAE) approach of community water systems is highly individualizedby service, and it provides little opportunity for benchmarkcomparisons across the community water system (CWS) sector.Existing PAE frameworks focus on the continuous improvement ofcore processes internal to a CWS without providing a standard forconsistent comparison across services within a geographical region.The research presented in this article hypothesizes that an effectivesolution to this problem would be to: (1) facilitate public awarenessby developing a standard efficiency metric (SEM) parameter fora standardized PAE that would enable stakeholders to compare theperformance of their CWS to the regional benchmarks; (2) enhancefinancial health characteristics by enabling regional management tobase resource allocation decisions on uniform performance informationabout the services in the regional water system; and (3) increaseservice operating efficiency over the current practice.The SEM parameter described in this article is capable ofproviding assessment information to the individual communitywater system provider in order to improve performance. The SEMparameter also enables the comparison and benchmarking ofCWSs operating as a regional water system through the standardizedPAE framework. As accountability in the CWS sectorimproves through the use of the SEM parameter, the expectedresult will be more effective resource allocation decisions acrossa collection of CWSs operating as a regional system. Includes 28 references, 2 tables, 4 figures.

Product Details

Edition: Vol. 97 - No. 10 Published: 10/01/2005 Number of Pages: 11 File Size: 1 file , 270 KB