When I first moved to Seattle, my East Coast friends would always ask me the same question: “Does it really rain all the time?” and from my experience the answer is, “for eight months, kind of, yes!” So why does a city that is known for its constant rainfall, is surrounded by lakes, streams, and the entire Puget Sound need a 50 year water resilience plan? Are we not – excuse the pun – flush with water?

The short answer is – yes, Seattle has lots of water! In 2021, Seattle produced approximately 15 billion gallons of wastewater (used water that leaves through sewage pipes), and 37 inches of rain fell within city limits. Managing it all – wastewater and stormwater (which is rain until it hits the ground) – is a gargantuan task. That task falls to Seattle Public Utilities (SPU). SPU is a publicly owned utility that serves over 1.5 million people in the greater Seattle area by providing landfill, recycling, compost services, and sewage and stormwater management, all while ensuring high-quality drinking water reaches Seattle residents.

Sewage and stormwater management falls under the Drainage and Wastewater (DWW) Line of Business, which is where I have been interning since June of 2022. Weeks before I joined the Code, Policy, and Regulatory team, DWW released the nationally award-winning plan – Shape Our Water: A 50-year Plan for Seattle’s Water Resilience Community Vision – and its implications for the greater Seattle area are huge. 

Why does Seattle need a water resilience plan?

We need to plan for an uncertain future of water, due to local and global, human and natural impacts. Everything impacts water, and water impacts everything. Shape Our Water community partner, Nya Shahir (she/they), explains, “There are no borders; water is always flowing through every single thing.”

Locally, Seattle has experienced unprecedented alteration and urbanization since the area was colonized in 1851. The cityscape we now call home is the result of intense dredging and filling that reshaped the entire landscape and water systems that were naturally formed 15,000 years ago by receding glaciers. This terraforming, paired with a decade-long population boom has put an enormous strain on the city’s aging drainage and wastewater infrastructure, a third of which is almost 100 years old. More people, cars, and industrial development means there’s more pollution that has to be treated before the water can enter our local waterways. When drainage and wastewater systems are overwhelmed, system overflows result in harmful pollution in water bodies, flooding that causes infrastructure damage, and distress to people in flooded areas. Also, some neighborhoods still deeply feel the impacts of institutionalized racism such as redlining, which resulted in neglected (or nonexistent) drainage/wastewater infrastructure and a distrustful relationship with government agencies such as SPU. 

Thinking more globally, Seattle is at risk of sea level rise and more extreme rainfall events due to human-induced climate change. These issues exacerbate the aforementioned strains on our drainage and wastewater systems. For example, more intense rainfall (compared to the slow, constant drizzle Seattle is known for) causes flow control issues; our water systems fill too quickly and overflow before water can be treated and slowly released to a waste treatment plant.

And the cherry on top – we must consider and prepare for the threat of earthquake activity disrupting SPU’s 1,800 miles of wastewater and stormwater pipes, other infrastructure, and the services we provide (displayed in the diagram below).

“It is necessary to shift how projects and programs are designed by moving towards a collaborative planning process that includes our communities and cross sector partners. Shape Our Water is our catalyst to do things differently –  from confronting and responding to embedded systematic racism and injustice in past planning decisions to recognizing our future problems are not singular issues and applying a holistic and adaptive management lens.” 

SPU is no stranger to planning for risk and growth; we have had an operational risk framework since 2004, and in 2019, published the most recent Risk and Resiliency Strategic Plan. While SPU has comprehensive work plans and forward-thinking traditional policies, they realized the shortcomings of command and control governance. The Community Vision document perfectly describes the impetus for the re-imagining: “It is necessary to shift how projects and programs are designed by moving towards a collaborative planning process that includes our communities and cross sector partners. Shape Our Water is our catalyst to do things differently –  from confronting and responding to embedded systematic racism and injustice in past planning decisions to recognizing our future problems are not singular issues and applying a holistic and adaptive management lens.” This new Shape Our Water plan has pushed the utility beyond the traditional ‘informing the public of governance decisions’ level of public participation and towards a truly collaborative process, from start to finish; let’s dive into it.

What is Shape Our Water, and what does it mean for Seattle?

Shape Our Water is a plan to identify, implement, and manage community-centered, long-term investments in drainage and wastewater policies, programs and infrastructure. It exists in four stages: analysis, visioning, planning and implementation. As of June 2022, the first two have been completed.

Stage One – Analysis – completed in 2021

After nearly four years, team members from SPU’s DWW and Executive Branch, approximately 20 consulting firms, and other City departments “…identified and prioritized existing and future risk and opportunities.”

The analysis process was intentional and complex. Twenty-eight different projects were organized into five categories: System Capacity, Water Quality & Aquatic Health, Condition & Maintenance, Resilience, and Social, Economic, & Regulatory. Each project was given a risk-based prioritization score which was based on the likelihood of a problem occurring, the consequence of said problem, and potential equity considerations. If projects have the potential to disproportionately affect disadvantaged and/or historically excluded communities, equity was analyzed and considered in the score.

In the end, 15 projects were included in the Shape Our Water plan. This newly published website gets into the nitty gritty of the analysis process.

Stage Two –  Visioning – completed in 2022

After almost two years of intensive community engagement, the Shape Our Water Community Vision document was released. The Visioning Stage aimed to deeply engage communities and collaboratively develop goals and priorities for the future of DWW, however, it faced many challenges. Engaging disadvantaged and/or historically excluded communities takes time and trust-building, particularly when communities have experienced neglect and discrimination from their local governments. Additionally, the inability to meet in-person due to COVID-19 presented a relational hurdle as well. Finally, compensating people for their time appropriately was a priority, especially those whose who may be low-income and/or have the weight of racial or socio-economic discrimination everpresent. But to those up to the task, these challenges were seen as opportunities.

Due to the remote nature of COVID-19, virtual tours of community neighborhoods were created to educate the community about their local DWW infrastructures and included the chance for community members to respond to SPU about the present-day state of said infrastructure. Influential community partners shared stories about their connection to water and were highlighted across a variety of platforms, including the South Seattle Emerald newspaper and KVRU 105.7 FM.

Along with storytelling, seven Summer Speaker presentations and a three-part Fireside Series were developed featuring local tribal members’ relationships with water and perspective on community centered project planning. All of these remote and recorded events were open to the public, as well as SPU employees working to develop the Shape Our Water plan.

The culmination of these events brought forth the goals and priorities for the next stages of the Shape Our Water plan. This video below portrays these themes in beautiful detail.

While the visioning stage has completed, SPU has stated that they are committed to further engaging community partners and equity framework during future Planning and Implementation stages.

Stages Three and Four – Planning, and Implementation

Looking to the future, SPU is initiating the process of planning projects, programs, and policies. The overview figure below shows the steps of the planning process.

Any selected plan that comes from this multi-step process will “[a]ddress Seattle’s (current and future) drainage, wastewater, and receiving water challenges, Meet Shape Our Water goals…[and] deliver community co-benefits.” Once a policy, program, or project emerges from the Planning Stage, it must be implemented.

Implementation is the least defined stage of Shape Our Water, and is arguably a very technical stage. Community partners and stakeholders will help prioritize which projects to begin, and be informed of progress and success metrics throughout the implementation and maintenance process. Fifty years is a long span of time to plan for and maintain collaborative community partnerships, so I am curious to see how Shape Our Water unfolds in the future.

Challenges and Strengths of Shape Our Water

I wonder if you have noticed a potential challenge facing this goliath of a plan.

We now have decades-worth of collaborative programs and infrastructure to implement, monitor, and maintain; so who is going to make this all a reality? While employment rates have been slowly rebounding since COVID-19, the impacts are still present and SPU is shouldering a lot of new responsibility considering how busy we already are with maintaining our current workload. Shape Our Water intends to share the weight of implementation and maintenance by relying on a vast network of partnerships with city agencies, residential, and commercial customers. Regardless, this is a lot of work for the people at SPU. I am particularly interested in seeing how SPU will prioritize our frontline staff and their capacity for an expanding workload, considering we presently have fewer-than-desired frontline staff. Every employee of SPU – regardless of if they wear a reflective vest or a business casual pants suit – needs to be considered and involved in a plan this huge.

“True collaboration between communities and their governments is rare; it takes commitment and excitement from everyone involved, and these efforts cannot be overstated.” 

Perhaps it is because I have never had the opportunity to peek behind the curtain in the way I get to do so at SPU, but I am blown away by the huge number and wide diversity of considerations that are being made throughout the process-oriented Shape Our Water development – climate change, population growth, righting historical wrongs, environmental protection, and the list goes on. True collaboration between communities and their governments is rare; it takes commitment and excitement from everyone involved, and these efforts cannot be overstated.

I have been constantly impressed by SPU’s culture of acknowledging and working to repair historical wrongs whether it be inequitable infrastructure maintenance or designing waste management systems for our growing population. Having the opportunity to be a fly on the wall as the Shape Our Water team leads the utility into a new way of serving the public is inspiring, and I feel grateful to be learning from and supporting my team at SPU. I am hopeful that the hard work and intentional consideration by everyone, inside and outside SPU, involved in this process will pay off and create a sustainable, healthy, and thriving Seattle.

There is a lot more in store for Shape Our Water, so I recommend staying involved by signing up for email updates. Being involved can also look like watching the variety of speaker and fireside videos shared above, or talking to friends and family about your own vision for your city’s future.

Special thanks to Annalisa McDaniel and my Drainage and Wastewater Code, Policy, and Regulatory team for their support in capturing the essence of Shape Our Water.