84115301

Description: The award's purpose is to improve small water system compliance by providing training and technical assistance to rural, small, and tribal systems.

The applicant will provide training and technical assistance in all fifty states as well as tribal entities, and territories to help communities and small water systems achieve their technical, managerial, and financial goals.

Activities: Training and technical assistance will focus on building technical, managerial, and financial capacity (TMF), improving compliance, promoting the sustainable and effective management of small water systems, increasing financial health, and improving system performance.

The grantee will provide training to small water system operators, managers, and decision makers through an array of methods including in-person training, national webinars, synchronous virtual training, on-demand asynchronous training, peer-to-peer sessions, and targeted conference presentations.

Through a structured consultation process, states, territories, and tribes identify priority training topics that best meet the needs of small water systems in their purview and specify their preferred delivery methods.

The trainings will help small water systems meet federal and state regulatory requirements, improve their resilience, strengthen their technical knowledge, and build their financial and managerial capacity.

Additionally, the grantee will provide technical assistance to small water systems including, as examples, addressing sanitary survey violations, conducting water audits, and creating asset management plans.

Subrecipient: Subrecipients will provide training and technical assistance (TA), blending traditional and innovative approaches, to improve TMF capacity of rural, small, and tribal systems.

Outcomes: UNM EFC will present trainings and provide technical assistance on topics relevant to the Safe Drinking Water Act and technical, managerial, and financial capacity.

Outcomes include:

Increased number of systems:
1. Working towards achieving compliance with SDWA
2. Improving financial management after participating in an assessment or rate study
3. Collaborating with other water systems (e.g. sharing resources, joining their state WARN)
4. Implementing asset management activities including data collection, condition assessment, goal setting, risk analysis, and life cycle costing
5. Developing O&M, emergency response, or succession plans
6. Participating in a water loss or energy audit, or source water protection activities
7. Integrating hazards, cyber risks and resilience into their business and operations practices; implementing mitigation measures
8. With websites, maps, hydraulic models, lead service line inventories

Increased knowledge of and/or competency in:
9. Rate equity, affordability, financial sustainability, funding sources and applications
10. Regulatory requirements, system operations, cybersecurity and resiliency planning
11. Leadership, stakeholder communication, workforce development and succession planning
12. Water conservation, water loss, source water protection and green infrastructure

Anticipated deliverables include: library resources, blogs, podcasts, videos, operator interviews and infohubs.

Intended beneficiaries include small water system operators, managers, and decision makers.

University Of New Mexico

5 - ENSURE CLEAN AND SAFE WATER FOR ALL COMMUNITIES 5.1 - ENSURE SAFE DRINKING WATER AND RELIABLE WATER INFRASTRUCTURE

66.424 - Surveys, Studies, Investigations, Demonstrations, and Training Grants - Section 1442 of the Safe Drinking Water Act

Office of Grants and Debarment (OGD) [EPA - HQ]

Office of Water (OW) [EPA - HQ]

Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131-0001 United States

Single Zip Code

Training and Technical Assistance to Improve Water Quality and Enable Small Public Water Systems to Provide Safe Drinking Water (EPA-OW-OGWDW-24-04)