Columns

Postcard from France
By Peter Cook

In November I received an invitation from the French Ambassador to the United States to be the guest of the French government and participate in a “Water Tour” of France from Nov. 27 – Dec. 1 as part of a delegation of individuals involved in the water business in the United States. The purpose of the tour was to talk to French government and water industry officials about the pressing issues facing both countries in the provision of drinking water and wastewater services. One topic of special interest to them is the challenge of improving both water service and water quality in an environment where customers are very sensitive to price increases. Of course, the trip also served as a showcase for French water management and water technology. Pat Cairo from United had suggested to French officials that they might want to consider me as a member of the delegation.

The delegation included four U.S. mayors: Ron Oden, Mayor of Palm Springs, Calif.; James Kennedy, Mayor of Rahway, N.J.; Martin Chavez, Mayor of Albuquerque, N.M.; and Dan Coody, Mayor of Fayetteville, Ark. Enrique Medina, city manager of Arvin, Calif., was also part of the delegation. Associations were represented by Mohamed Dahab, president of WEF; Dena Mossar, National League of Cities; and Bill Verkest, president, American Public Works Association. George Raftelis, the water financial consultant, was also invited as was Nicholas Dungan, president of the French-American Foundation, based in New York City. The World Bank sent Gael Gregoire. Other members of the delegation from the French Embassy were involved in various economic and commercial development issues for the French government. Olivier Piton, Public Affairs Attaché for the French Embassy, was the delegation leader.

The four-day trip allowed me to make some new friends that are involved in the U.S. water business and gain insight into their perspectives on the business. It was especially valuable to spend so much concentrated time with four U.S. mayors; their communities are facing major water challenges. I got valuable insight into how they make decisions depending on the degree of support they have from their city councils. All of these mayors have supportive city councils, which allow them to make even controversial decisions. Public-private partnerships are something that these mayors are considering, and some have already used them in water. We may want to consider having some of these mayors speak at one or more of our major meetings.

After an overnight flight from Washington, we arrived in Paris in the early morning. We took a high-speed train (200 mph) to Lyon, the site of Pollutec, the very large European water expo held every other year in that city. We had lunch with the president of the Rhone Council, Senator Michael Mercier, who is very involved in water issues. We then did a tour of Pollutec, visiting the exhibits of both Veolia and Suez. We attended a large reception that evening hosted by the Mayor of Lyon in honor of the Pollutec.

The next day we returned to Paris to have lunch with a number of French Senate representatives involved extensively in water issues. We talked about common issues we all face. In the afternoon we had a tour, hosted by Suez Operations Director Jean-Michel Desloges, of the modern Valenton Wastewater Plant in a southeastern suburb of Paris. The plant uses state-of-the-art odor containment and treatment equipment to reduce plant odors. However, even with that equipment the residual smell left no doubt we were at a wastewater treatment plant. An interesting note: they do not disinfect their treated effluent, although they expected the government to require this at some point in the near future.

That evening we had dinner with the Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development, Ms. Nelly Olin. The discussion centered on not only how to improve the quality of drinking water and wastewater treatment, but also how to improve the management and health of watersheds through sustainable development.

I observed that today’s management know-how and treatment technology is good enough to allow us to consistently provide safe and reliable potable water and environmentally safe wastewater discharges, provided we are willing to pay the price. For larger systems this should generally be affordable to customers. However, improving the management and health of watersheds will be much more difficult because the dominant form of pollution in watersheds is typically non-point source, which is much less amenable to technical solutions and must be addressed with better land use decisions and the enforcement of those decisions. This will require a degree of cooperation and coordination among government institutions and the private sector that has proven difficult to achieve. In addition, it will require that all these entities approach management of the watershed as a complex and dynamic system that requires both systems analysis and extensive compromising by all stakeholders for the common good. Accomplishing this in practice and sustaining it is very difficult. Finding a way to institutionalize sustainable development is perhaps our hardest challenge. No one took issue with this observation.

On the third day of the visit we had a tour of Veolia’s Drinking Water Treatment Facility at Mery-sur-Oise, led by Veolia Water Development Director Pierre Eymery. The plant is a state-of-the-art surface water treatment facility with a biological treatment train providing 20 percent of the finished water and a membrane train (micro and nano filtration) providing the remaining 80 percent. Both trains use ozone to oxidize and disinfect. Chlorine is used for the residual disinfectant in the finished water.

After the tour we had lunch at Suez’s headquarters with Jean-Louis Chaussade, Suez’s environmental CEO; Christopher Riat, vice president of United Water business development; and Jean-Michel Desloges, Suez’s operations director. Suez has an active operations contract with one of the mayors in the delegation. We had a discussion on many of the same topics we discussed with the Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development the night before. I reiterated the points that I had made in that meeting about our biggest challenge being the managing and improving the health of watersheds. Once again there was agreement on this point.

The challenges faced by the French and by the United States are very similar, although their dominant ownership and operations model is different from ours. The dominant French model for providing drinking water and wastewater services is municipal ownership of the water and wastewater facilities and private sector management of those facilities through long term concessions. With respect to managing watersheds, the regional wastewater authority the French have set up around Paris appears to be very successful, at least with respect to managing and treating sanitary wastewater flows. The Valenton wastewater plant we visited is a member of that authority. While it accepts and treats urban runoff from combined sewers, through a combination of storage vessels and treatment trains, during high-flow storm events the effluent is not fully treated, which is a common problem in our country. The density of development in most French watersheds and upstream areas and the multiplicity of jurisdictions with authority over different parts of watersheds (including multiple European countries) probably make the challenges the French and their fellow Europeans are facing in managing watersheds even more formidable than ours.