Strategy and tactics take center stage at WateReuse Symposium

El Paso, Texas, planted a pioneering flag for water reuse when it broke ground on its $295 million direct potable reuse facility Feb. 27.

With this groundbreaking, El Paso is set to construct the first direct potable reuse facility in the nation with its Pure Water Center, an advanced wastewater treatment plant envisioned by the city more than a decade ago. It is a milestone for water reuse professionals and was one of the central talking points at the WateReuse Symposium in Tampa, Florida, March 17 to 19.

The other talking points: how did El Paso do it? From public education and outreach to community buy-in and elected officials as champions, panel discussions and educational sessions have veered in the direction of strategy and tactics to achieve the moonshot visions of prior symposiums. Attention in 2025 is being paid to the actionable and tangible as professionals in the space witness the growing need to reuse water, particularly in areas not commonly viewed as water scarce.

And as that growing need rises, so too does the need for connection, collaboration and outreach.

Developing community and political champions

“Our water is right below our feet, and we still have challenges with it,” said Bill McDaniel, Plant City, Florida, city manager in responding to his California co-panelists’ comments on water struggles in the west. “To worry about water 73 miles away is a little scary from where I’m from.”

McDaniel noted how these nuances are common among utilities, but at the end of the day, the core problem is still a lack of water, regardless of why that scarcity exists. But it is those nuances that generate public buy-in to get reuse projects across the finish line.

All the panelists agreed that getting elected officials and community leaders involved in reuse projects early nets the best outcomes. David Pedersen, Las Virgines Municipal Water District (LVMWD) general manager, said rethinking elected official involvement is vital.

“You want them to feel a sense of ownership in the project and when you achieve that, the elected officials become your best champion for the project and you get more support,” Pedersen said during a panel discussion March 18.

Historically, bringing a project like this to a county or city board would result in a pitch during a meeting in which all the details and the parameters had been metered out by utility workers without the input from board members or community leaders. But in bringing those stakeholders to the table early, Pedersen said the utility can peel back the onion of problems the community is facing. Once the center of the issue is revealed, he said, the parties involved often come to an agreement on the best way forward.

Jay Lewitt, LVMWD board president, said the first question he had was “Can the staff turn our wastewater into drinking water?” After receiving an emphatic “Yes!” after some education on existing technologies that have been proven to work, he said the next step was public acceptance.

In the case of LVMWD, this resulted in a community-led pizza party with recycled water beer. On another occasion, the district made gelato for its citizens to show the purity of the water. Even one of the board members, an amateur wine maker, chose to take a deeper role by making wine with the water. These efforts are tangible and allow the officials, operators, utility leaders and residents to connect in person rather than an internet forum or social media page. The product is tangible, physical and real; all aspects that communicators have noted cannot be understated in gaining public acceptance.

Lewitt said all those programs, however, could not have been successful without first starting at a foundational level.

“Most people don’t even drink their tap water in their house, and the ones that do have a filter,” Lewitt said. “We started a campaign we called ‘Drink from the Sink’ so we could get the community to trust us with tap water because if we’re going to ask them to drink wastewater, first they should trust us with tap water.”

Roy Rogers, retired commissioner for Washington County, Oregon, said these efforts are well and good, but getting the elected officials on board is a different challenge entirely. Speaking from his experience, he said the visibility of potholes in roads, transportation congestion, homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse in the community, and other larger public issues make them hot button topics for campaigning. The number of issues can overwhelm a public or elected official.

“We rarely talk about sewer issues. That’s not a sexy issue on the ballot, let me tell you,” Rogers said during the panel discussion. “So from their perspective — those who were elected — as long as it doesn’t stink and there’s no problem, just do the work and move on.”

Rogers said this points to a terrible business approach and business plan for water and wastewater systems. He encouraged those attending the symposium to rethink their mission and redefine their north star. For him, it was a moonshot question.

“What if we didn’t need ratepayers anymore? If that’s a north star, water reuse becomes an arrow in the quiver,” Rogers said.

Data centers and manufacturing push cities toward reuse solutions

August 2025 will mark three years since the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, which spurred a flurry of data center construction in the U.S.

Northern Virginia, Dallas-Fort Worth and Silicon Valley have led the charge for data centers due to affordable power, enterprise demand and relocation incentives. Rising in esteem are the metro areas of Columbus, Ohio, and Atlanta, Georgia, where data center siting has led water utilities in those areas to seek alternative supply, often with a focus on water reuse and recycling projects.

Newtown County, Georgia, for example, is home to a Meta/Facebook data center campus and a Takeda pharmaceutical plant. Meanwhile, electric automotive manufacturer Rivian is set to begin construction on its new plant in 2026.

During a session at the WateReuse Symposium March 18, Mike Hopkins, Newton County Water & Sewerage Authority executive director, said each of these industrial users has its own needs that must be balanced with the needs of residents.

For example, Takeda employs 1,300 workers and its facility deals with human plasma resulting in high strength wastewater discharges that need to be properly managed. The Meta data centers use water for cooling equipment, a water need that Hopkins said came in lower than the tech giant originally projected.

But because of the success of the existing companies, the area has become a target for expanded locations from others. Hopkins said around nine data center companies are now looking at the Atlanta region for new construction, which led the county to plan around potential growth.

“Three years ago, we decided we were going to do industrial reuse because we knew that our water supply, even with four rivers, was going to be finite,” Hopkins said during an educational session at the WateReuse Symposium 2025.

With that thought of finite resources in mind, the city developed a business case evaluation that looked at water security, cost savings, environmental compliance and social responsibility.

Also speaking during the session, Burke Murph, Georgia Water & Environmental Services principal, said while that business case evaluation was specific to Newton County, it impacts the surrounding community. Newton County owns the treatment of all the water, including drinking water, which it distributes to Newton County Water & Sewer authority for distribution along with five other municipalities.

“The importance of water conservation is that it protects the community,” Murph said. “If one industrial partner is [selfish], they are not protecting the interest of all industrial partners and can ultimately define how much growth can actually happen if it’s not sustainable.”

Regulatory permitting is chief among the primary challenges for water reuse facilities of this nature, and that permitting is then linked to the concentrations that can be discharged, which are then ultimately treated at a wastewater plant. Similarly, construction is tied very closely to funding availability and timing.

Hopkins and Murph noted that its new reuse facility to provide reuse water to Takeda, Meta and Rivian is expected to be commissioned in January of 2027, three years ahead of the projected Rivian plant commissioning date. That timing, they note, will pose another question: who will be the beneficiary of that reuse water until Rivian arrives? It is a question they will aim to answer in the next two years.