As part of the Water Institute's WaterTalks lecture series, Gregory Baird, President of The Water Finance Research Foundation, will present, "Perspectives on the Sustainable Water Infrastructure Challenge: Engineering, Technology or Financial Crisis."
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We understand “Water is Life” and that clean drinking water delivered to your tap is not free - so why is our aging water infrastructure in crisis?
This WaterTalk dives into the interconnectivity of policy and practice through the financial perspective of sustainable water infrastructure funding and investment.
Speaker Bio
Gregory Baird is President of The Water Finance Research Foundation and a financial management and infrastructure asset management specialist for municipalities and water and sewer districts. He is focused on helping governments and utilities improve the cost-effectiveness of their operations and the affordability of water services through the use of technology and asset management practices. Greg is influencing the industry to require infrastructure asset management plans as a prerequisite to local, state and federal funding, as well as an analysis component for credit risk and public/private partnership evaluations. Greg has served as a municipal finance officer in California for a full service city with a population over 200,000 and as the CFO of Colorado’s third largest municipal utility serving over 300,000. He has also worked for some top water engineering firms, including MWH (now Stantec) and GHD, in financial, asset management and affordability engagements. Greg actively serves as Chair of the sustainable infrastructure committee with the American Water Works Association (AWWA) and is a member of the rates and charges and asset management committees. He is also the American Public Works Association’s (APWA) engineering & technology committee and is Chair of the underground infrastructure technology subcommittee. With the American Society of Civil Engineers (ACSE), he is on the utility asset management committee in order to help answer the questions of what to do with a poor infrastructure report card grade. Greg participates as a member of the ISO 251 technical committee working on the integration of finance and infrastructure asset management (ISO 55010). Greg is an asset management trainer and contributor to Louisiana Tech'sCertificate of Training in Asset Management (CTAM) series. Greg is also Virginia Tech’s Sustainable Water Infrastructure Management (SWIM) education chair for their new online water asset management certificate training series and is also supporting the development of a U.S. national pipe inventory database, called PipeID. He has been promoting the 2018 release of Utah State University’s “Water Main Break Rates In the USA and Canada: A Comprehensive Study” to increase awareness of the aging water infrastructure crisis and the need for life-cycle cost analysis and a howartificial intelligence/machine learning can be used in underground water pipe assessments. Greg is widely published on municipal utility infrastructure asset management and integrated finance issues for the U.S. and Canadian water and wastewater industry.