While PWD has been making great strides in greening hundreds of formerly impervious publicly owned surfaces, most of the land and structures in the city are in private hands. The real impact on diverting stormwater from streams and rivers can only happen if we can get private landowners to reduce runoff on their properties.

To do this, we offer $5 million each year in stormwater grants to provide non-residential PWD customers with financial incentives to manage stormwater runoff with the added incentive of reducing their stormwater bill. This year—the second year for the program—we awarded $4.7 million to 17 projects that will capture runoff totaling 77 greened acres. Non-residential customers in Special Services Districts can also apply collectively for additional funding through Business Improvement District Grants.

Our plan for the coming fiscal year is to continue to increase awareness of this program among non-residential PWD customers so we can exceed the 77 acres from the past year.

For residential customers, we continue to offer our Rain Check program, which includes a free stormwater property assessment, guidance in picking stormwater tools, and a subsidy for purchasing and installing downspout planters, porous paving and other tools.

Well this is certainly a topic that is fresh in everyone’s minds as recent extreme rains have left basements flooded, cars wrecked, roads closed, and our Water Works temporarily out of commission. These events are becoming more frequent as what used to be known as “100-year storms” occur once or twice each decade now. In this region, PWD plays an important role in planning for consequences of global climate change and mitigating the effects of these weather events.

Our primary method of handling this has been to reduce the amount of stormwater run-off that rushes directly into our streams and rivers by investing $40 to $50 million each year to create more acreage to soak that rain into the ground water. We’re also investing $30 million in infrastructure improvements every year to enhance our ability to collect and divert stormwater. Over the next several years we are studying potentially $1 billion in system improvements through our Green City, Clean Waters program. For homeowners, PWD has provided nearly $1.7 million since 2005 to install basement back-up protection devices at 455 homes in the city.

PWD and our partner city agencies are also coordinating response and recovery with other city, state, and federal agencies to provide advanced warning forecasts in advance of large storms. We’re creating tidal and neighborhood flooding projections and vulnerability analyses, revising FEMA flood map, projecting climate change impacts, installing signage in vulnerable areas, reviewing zoning and building codes, and meeting with communities to help guide them through these changes.

PWD has always been forward looking and has anticipated the challenges and opportunities that Philadelphia has faced over the decades. Storm flood relief is a challenge that is only going to get more severe over the next several decades. We continue to focus on the issue as we have for the past several years.

A collaborative effort of various associations representing the U.S. water and wastewater sector called WaterEUM cuts to the core of why high customer satisfaction is the most important goal for utilities like PWD:

Customer satisfaction is important to water utilities to minimize customer complaints and associated costs, maintain customer goodwill, and increase customer support for utility improvement initiatives.

But most importantly, improving customer satisfaction is just the right thing to do. PWD’s employees are also customers, ratepayers and residents of Philadelphia so we know how important it is to get this right. In our budget testimony to City Council this week we shared some results from changes we put in place in the past year to improve customer service.

By adding cloud technology to the PWD call center in 2013 we significantly increased the number of calls taken each business day. We can now track all calls and use a customer call back system to ensure that every customer gets the chance to speak directly with a representative. The centers are showing significantly fewer abandoned calls and shorter customer hold times: an average wait time of 39 seconds—30% shorter than the average among call centers across all industries (56 seconds). And we continue to work to make that wait time even shorter.