19366_Authority_August

By Craig Bubb, Executive Director, Mifflin County Municipal Authority A fter 30 years of municipal authority work, you form many relationships from your ratepayers to your neighbors, and a network of colleagues that help guide you through your day-to-day duties. These professionals come from all aspects of our industry. The process of treating public drinking water to reach our customers' tap has many unique facets that require a wide array of knowledge and expertise. Vendors provide us with the tools that we use daily to treat the water, distribute it through our 300 miles of pipe, meter it and ultimately create a bill to generate the revenue that we need to operate the system. We rely on literally hundreds of these vendors to help us manage our system, among those are our engineers that provide expertise in most of the processes that we utilize daily. The history at our authority was littered with examples of how its engineers shaped the evolution of its existence and were prominent in the successes that it achieved. The Mifflin County Municipal Authority (MCMA) is a public water supplier with a long and interesting history that has spanned over a century. It started in 1908 with a merger of two private water companies. They combined their common stock and became known as The Lewistown-Reedsville Water Company (LRWC). It was a jointure that was created with Lewistown Borough’s expanding water needs at the forefront, as it was the county seat and the most densely populated area where Industry and commercial properties were thriving. To continue forward with further expansion, it required mutual growth from utility providers; electric, telephone, water and sewage treatment among them. Over the next 35 years, Lewistown Borough Council, which created a water commission, tried relentlessly to “take over” this water company and operate the water system as part of their own public works. (If you know the history of The Municipal Authority of the Borough of Lewistown, well… then you know!) One thing I found interesting when LRWC was created, the stockholders hired Morris Knowles Engineers, Inc. from Pittsburgh to be the Managers of the Company rather than hiring a local manager who could manage the daily business affairs as well as the personnel. They controlled the day-to-day operations, studied the system, made recommendations for expansion, designed those systems and then managed the construction of those projects. In 1924, for the first time, they presented to the board of directors an annual report on the year ending 1923 outlining in detail the work that was completed during that year, and a preview into the work projected for the following year. Over the next 102 years, this reporting format to the board has not only been standard operating Achieving More Together: How Our Vendors Drive Our Success