Strategic Direction Policies (SD Policies)
SD22: Resiliency Policy
Effective Date: August 1, 2023
EWEB is committed to providing essential services that protect and enhance our community’s vitality and strives to maintain these services without disruption. With the goal of sustaining safe, reliable, affordable, and environmentally responsible drinking water and electricity services, EWEB faces the challenge of effectively planning and operating in an environment of a changing climate, new technology, developing markets, political and regulatory flux, natural and human-caused threats, and evolving community expectations.
Meeting our ongoing obligation to provide essential services requires an organizational culture that fosters sustainability and resiliency of our infrastructure, finances, workforce, information, and decisions. In addition, EWEB acknowledges its role in furthering community resiliency so that our customer-owners can self-sustain through periods of disruption, recognizing the broad and unique needs of members of the community.
EWEB defines resiliency as follows.
Resiliency: The ability to reduce the likelihood, magnitude, and duration of sudden or gradual disruptive events through risk mitigation, emergency preparedness and response, and recovery strategies.
Consistent with EWEB’s Vision, Mission, and Values (SD1) and other Strategic Direction (SD) policies, along with other policies guiding Governance Process (GP), Board-Staff Linkage (BL) and Executive Limitations (EL), the Board supports a comprehensive approach to organizational and community resiliency, as defined above, using the following primary guidance.
- Infrastructure and Systems (including service delivery, financial, and information systems)
The Board authorizes, delegates, and directs the General Manager to ensure that infrastructure design and construction, communication and information systems, and operational and maintenance processes use risk-assessment methodologies to identify and achieve resilient outcomes under both normal operating conditions and disruptive events.
- Workforce
The Board further authorizes, delegates, and directs the General Manager to build workforce resiliency through transfer of knowledge and skills across the organization, creating redundancy, flexibility, and depth in mission-critical functions. The organization shall facilitate employee and family emergency preparedness, improving EWEB’s response to and recovery from disruptive events.
- Finance
The Board further authorizes, delegates, and directs the General Manager to ensure that the organization considers resiliency in the development of budgets and financial plans under a range of potential future conditions, including but not limited to, the variability of economic and market forecasts, and the impacts of regulatory changes.
- Community
The Board further authorizes, delegates, and directs the General Manager to cultivate partnerships that enhance community resiliency, leveraging unique capabilities with the potential to plan, mitigate adverse impacts of, or respond and recover from a variety of operating conditions or disruptive events. EWEB shall educate and encourage the community at-large, including vulnerable and/or historically marginalized customer-owner segments, to plan and prepare to self-sustain through periods of disruption, as well as other options for response and recovery.
IMPLEMENTATION
The guidance outlined in this policy are acknowledged as results or conditions that are acceptable to the Board in the process of establishing policy and approval of Strategic Plans, Long-Term Financial Plans, Capital Improvement Plans, annual budgets, and goals, as established in Board Policy BL4 “Delegation to the General Manager”. According to this policy, the aforementioned plans will include resiliency considerations by incorporating content showing the sensitivities of recommendations, actions, and/or outcomes to variables impacted by relevant changing future conditions.
Implementing the guidance provided in the policy will include the development and maintenance of risk mitigation and recovery plans for major potential threats (e.g., wildfires, chemical spills, etc.), and others in partnership with local agencies (e.g. Natural Hazard Mitigation Plan).
Triple-Bottom-Line (TBL) assessments of plans, designs, and processes will include resiliency criteria to highlight each alternative’s performance and/or outcome under both normal and disruptive event conditions. The resiliency of major decisions will be evaluated by assessing the sensitivity of outcomes under a variety of different future conditions.
So that EWEB’s actions related to this policy are visible to the Board and our community, at least annually EWEB will compile and report on the status of strategic initiatives and annual goals associated with the implementation of this policy, as applicable.
Source: Lawson, Board Approved 08/01/23, Resolution No. 2313
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