17607_PMAA_Authority_June_2024

municipalauthorities.org | 39 the board adopting the latest budget, which it did at our January meeting. However, MAWC’s budgeting process is different from an investor-owned utility, or a municipal utility. Investor-owned utilities are subject to the PA Public Utility Commission, and must file an expensive rate case, which the PUC usually acts to limit. Some municipally owned utilities must attend public budget hearings and justify their requested increases in that forum. MAWC: Future Vision and Past Projects was not part of a road show or a public hearing. However, lacking those, this map set out to inform our customers as soon as the board adopted the fiscal 2024/2025 budget on what the rate impact would be, and set forth our past record of reinvestment, and our future commitment to continue that. At the 2023 PMAA Conference, I presented work I had done at AWWA through the PAC on the Public Perceptions of Tap Water survey, a poll that has been going on since 2020. There is much said in the poll analyses about proactive communications that are memorable – that these communications do more than just talking at customers to inform them of a particular facet of business. Memorable communications also improve customers’ opinion of your product and services. (Figure 5) It’s interesting to note that three of eight of the respondents who recall communications from their water utility say they were thinking of topics that we might think were neutral at best, or negative. For example, some who recalled communications with their utility remembered hearing that there was an issue with their water quality or water supply, or an increase in the cost of their water. Before we set out to communicate about our recent rate increase, we knew the effort could be worthwhile, if we made it memorable, and clearly justified our reasons for increasing rates. Third party validation helps too. While we do have a small public relations department at MAWC, we aren’t so large that we can afford to track customer sentiment. Where we do see the reaction is through callers and social media comments, which have both been muted, compared to our last increase which started in 2016. “We have had almost no complaints so far. Once we explain to them what the increase is being used for, nobody has been outraged with it,” said Darlene Testa, MAWC’s Operations Manager, Commercial Department. S Westmoreland article continued from page 11. Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5: Source: AWWA’s Public Perceptions of Tap Water poll. Numbers in black were for overall respondents, and numbers in green are from those who recall communications from their water utility in the past year.