Keeping the License to Operate: How ReWa Turned Infrastructure into Community Trust

Utilities rarely get credit for the hardest part of their job: keeping the public on side while spending decades of money on things nobody wants to think about. Rebecca West, Chief Executive Officer of ReWa (Renewable Water Resources) in Greenville, South Carolina, has spent much of her career proving that engagement isn’t a communications afterthought. It’s the foundation of a utility’s ability to operate at all.

From Sewer Authority to Resource Recovery

ReWa wasn’t always ReWa. In the early 2000s, the utility, then called Western Carolina Regional Sewer Authority, made a decision that reshaped its public identity: it rebranded around resource recovery rather than waste disposal. That shift wasn’t cosmetic. It gave the utility a new vocabulary for talking to its community about what used water actually becomes, and it laid the groundwork for the recovery-focused strategy ReWa runs today.

Energy Neutrality as Both Environmental and Financial Strategy

ReWa operates nine water resource recovery facilities, five of which use anaerobic digestion, alongside biological nutrient removal and UV disinfection across the system. That infrastructure is energy intensive. Energy currently accounts for roughly 30% of ReWa’s operating budget, which is why the utility has set a goal of reaching energy neutrality within the next decade. For West, this isn’t purely an environmental target. It’s a financial sustainability strategy tied directly to the utility’s stringent nutrient removal requirements as a headwaters system.

Making an $80 Million Pipe Upgrade a Community Event

ReWa is midway through an approximately $80 million upgrade to its wastewater collection pipes, work that is disruptive by nature, cutting through the historic core of Greenville and temporarily closing sections of the Swamp Rabbit Trail, a path used by 2 to 3 million people a year. Instead of treating the disruption as a liability to manage quietly, ReWa is hosting a community morning at a cafe along the trail, inviting residents, a mayor, a state representative, and the county council chairman to see the pipes, ask questions, and understand both the engineering and the financing behind the project, including ReWa’s policy of cash funding half of every capital project to limit long term debt.

Turning Farmers into Advocates

ReWa’s biosolids program follows the same playbook. As the utility transitions from a liquid to a solid cake biosolids product, it has worked directly with farmers using the material, including one who now speaks to his neighbors about trusting ReWa’s product over synthetic fertilizer alternatives, PFAS questions included, because he understands exactly what it is and how it’s applied. That kind of grassroots advocacy, West notes, is worth more than any campaign ReWa could run on its own.

A Sector With No Fixed Path

Asked what advice she’d give someone entering the water sector today, West’s answer was simple: there’s no longer a defined career pathway, so pick what interests you and get fully immersed. It’s a fitting closing note from a leader who has spent her career treating community trust not as something a utility earns once, but as something it has to keep building, project by project, conversation by conversation.