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We live in an era of water sorcery. Turn on the tap, and clean liquid flows in a seemingly endless cascade; flush the toilet, and the waste vanishes in an instant. In the Western world, this miracle has become invisible, hidden behind miles of pipage and a blase attitude toward the planet’s most precious resource.
“It kind of gets taken for granted,” says Marshall Brown, General Manager of Aurora Water, a municipal department of the state of Colorado.
“People don’t understand the details, the nuances or complexities associated with water services.”
“Communication is key.”
It was this anomaly, combined with an innate desire to devote his career to the water field – against his undergraduate school advisors’ guidance – that propelled the Utah native along his chosen vocational avenue.
The eldest of nine children, from self-confessed modest beginnings, Brown recalls how from an early age he became enamored with geology, physics and – of course – water, eventually majoring in Engineering Geology at Brigham Young University in 1994 before securing a Master of Science degree from the University of Arizona.
Having worked in the private sector for six years prior, his first major public service exposure came courtesy of the City of Scottsdale’s water department, where he initially held a technical position as a hydrogeologist, but was soon lured into a supervisory role.
“I wasn’t actually interested in going into management,” Brown confesses. “I wanted to stay focused on the numbers and the water and the rocks and the aquifers. But I saw an opportunity and the fulfillment associated with helping others succeed and helping them apply their passion and their skills to public services as well.”
Thirteen years later, Aurora Water came calling. Brown was ready to make the move and has now called Colorado home for 13 years. Today, the utility serves around 390,000 residents, with more than 2,500 kilometers of pipeline across its service area.
While Brown’s passion for the public sphere is unwavering, he’s not blind to its shortcomings. As his management career bloomed, he realized that employees in state-run sectors tended to lack formal training opportunities or else employment paths were restrictively linear.
Brown’s solution at Aurora Water has been to initiate a set of formalized training programs, including creating a team focused solely on employee growth and learning, and to lock down specific goals, objectives and visions beneath one strategic umbrella.
“In public sector utilities, historically they’ve promoted people because they’ve been good at what they’re doing and then expected them to be successful in the next position without creating training programs and specific learning opportunities to enable people to be successful,” he says.
If these initiatives were a coup for employees’ career prospects, then what followed is tantamount to a mini revolution. By its nature, the water utilities industry is traditionally risk-averse – its gatekeepers can’t allow a water quality problem to develop or a treatment process failure.
However, as Brown argues, this automatic deference to safety and regulation doesn’t mean the sector can’t embrace new technology or toy with novel ideas. His remedy was to build a small-scale ‘pilot plant’, thereby allowing staff to test treatment processes, emerging contaminants, chemical doses and the like without fearing the consequences of failure, a kind of safe space for experimentation.
“The most important decisions you can make in an executive leadership position are the people you surround yourself with.”
Harnessing the same avant-garde spirit, Aurora Water has also forged forward-thinking public–private relationships with the agricultural and mining industries – which themselves own significant water rights – as a left field way of growing the municipal water allocation.
“There was a water supply associated with a gold mine that had been out there a long, long time,” Brown says. “It’s a lot of water, but people were scared because it had some environmental liabilities. Eight years ago, staff had been approached a couple of times on that supply. I finally challenged them and said, ‘Go figure out what it might look like.’
“What are the risks? And what are the opportunities? We have to mitigate those risks and see if we can put something together to make that supply work.
“Long story short, we now own that water supply, but we don’t own any of the environmental liabilities.”
Under his astute guidance, the utility has also crafted progressive partnerships across engineering, construction, technology and legal services, including diversified real estate firm C&A Companies, Saunders Construction and engineering consultant Jacobs.
Encouraging Aurora Water employees to be bold and embrace change – for example, the utility was an early adopter of AI, using machine learning on its waterline replacements – feeds into what Brown calls a ‘value-based organization’, one that prides itself on core values of integrity, respect, professionalism and customer service.
Brown stresses the importance of pulling together, supporting colleagues and placing trust in each other as key components of the organization’s success in maintaining high-quality water standards and reducing household demand; since the early 2000s, residents have cut water usage by more than 30 percent.
“If we run into people who are attacking their coworkers or are negative in some way, we have to figure out a way to get them off the bus,” he explains.
This candid, no-nonsense but ultimately employee-first attitude, will be familiar to anyone who has worked with Brown.
It’s a management style that extends to his belief in transparency as a way of building relationships with the local community and developers, whether that be enabling broad-minded water policies, engaging with neighboring utilities or building new infrastructure such as Wild Horse Reservoir. Subject to planning approval, this fledgling project will hold up to 1,233 cubic meters of water, once again thanks to a blend of public and private enterprise.
“Communication is key and honestly, that’s probably not one of my natural strengths, but I do prioritize communication,” Brown says. “I have made sure I’ve got people on the executive team with me who are strong communicators and who can help with that.
“I’ve shared with other executives I’ve been mentoring that the most important decisions you can make in an executive leadership position are the people you surround yourself with. Your direct reports and the executive team will make or break your success and the organization’s success.”
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