“If It’s Installed, It Better Work”: How OC San Built a Resilient, Low-Cost Utility
Executive Exchange — Episode Feature with Rob Thompson, General Manager, OC San
In this episode of the Exec Exchange, host Dr. Piers Clark talks to Rob Thompson, General Manager at OC San (Orange County Sanitation District) in Southern California—one of the largest wastewater agencies in the United States by population served. What emerges is a masterclass in operational resilience, disciplined asset management, and board alignment in a highly political environment.
OC San serves 2.6 million people across 20 cities, plus several local districts and the County of Orange. With nearly 400 miles of trunk sewer (ranging from 18 inches to 10 feet in diameter) feeding into two major treatment plantswith a combined wet weather capacity of 640 million gallons per day, this is not a small, niche system. It’s a complex, high-stakes regional utility—and yet it operates with low, predictable bill increases and an impressive record of reliability.
So how did OC San get from firefighting to “quietly competent” resilience?
From Firefighting Culture to Forward Planning
When Rob joined OC San 29 years ago—from a technically rigorous, safety-obsessed oil and gas background in Arctic environments—the culture was familiar to many utilities: reactive, heroic, and permanently on the back foot.
Monday mornings began with: “What broke over the weekend?”
Operators and maintenance teams were constantly scrambling to catch up. The system worked, but only through effort and sacrifice rather than design.
Fast forward to today and the picture is completely different. OC San:
- Has had no sewer spills caused by the utility since November 2022
- Has gone 18 years without a water quality violation
- Routinely reports no weekend call-outs
The shift didn’t come from a single flagship project or a shiny technology deployment. It came from changing how the organisation plans, aligns and leads.
Governing Through Change: Making a High-Turnover Board an Asset
OC San’s governance would give many utilities nightmares.
- The utility’s 25-member board is made up of appointed representatives from 20 cities, local districts and the county – not specialists in water or engineering.
- Members include mayors, councillors, lawyers, IT specialists, government professionals, and the occasional rock band member.
- Due to election cycles and term limits, OC San loses 25–33% of its board every two years.
The leadership team has no say in who sits on the board. They are simply told: “This is your board member now.”
Instead of fighting that reality, OC San designed a system around it.
The Strategic Plan: Plain English, Rolling, and Owned by the Board
At the heart of OC San’s resilience is a strategic planning framework that is:
- Top-to-bottom aligned – relevant to everyone from the board chair to frontline maintenance workers
- Structured around 15 core service areas, including:
- Financial services
- Wastewater treatment
- Non-revenue water and chemicals of emerging concern
- Biosolids reuse
- Energy independence
- Written in plain English – accessible to non-engineers and non-specialists
- Continuously refreshed – not a static five-year plan gathering dust
Every time the board changes, the first three months of the new members’ term are spent on orientation:
- What OC San does
- Why it does it
- How each of the 15 strategic areas contributes to long-term resilience
Crucially, Rob emphasises that this is not staff lecturing the board. The plan is framed as the “prior wisdom of the board”. New members are invited to challenge, refine, and update it over the following months.
The result? A rolling, living strategy that:
- Survives political cycles
- Avoids wild swings in direction
- Keeps the utility focused on long-term outcomes like 100% water reuse, regional partnerships, and resilience investments
Asset Management With Teeth: “If It’s Installed, It Better Work”
If the strategic plan provides direction, OC San’s asset management approach provides discipline.
Rob’s mantra is disarmingly simple:
“If something is installed, it better work.”
Behind that line sits a very deliberate management system:
- Dedicated asset engineers are assigned to each treatment area and watershed.
- There is clear ownership of critical assets – pumps, centrifuges, power, control systems and more.
- Redundancy is designed in (four pumps in duty, plus one or two standby), but standby assets are expected to be fully available, not cannibalised or left offline indefinitely.
- Supply chain and spares strategies are aligned to criticality: if an asset is critical, the parts must be available. “Waiting on parts” is not considered an acceptable steady state.
Rob’s leadership style reinforces this. As Operations & Maintenance Director, he personally:
- Walked the plants every two weeks with operators and managers
- Asked direct questions about visible issues:
- Why is this conduit hanging?
- Why is this motor still tagged out?
- Why hasn’t this pump been returned to service?
- Expected issues to be resolved quickly—and did not expect to have the same conversation twice.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not digital-first. But it works.
Partnership, Reuse and Regional Thinking
OC San’s resilience is not purely internal.
The utility has built long-term, strategic partnerships across the region, including:
- Working with Orange County Water District on groundwater recharge and advanced water reuse
- Partnering with Orange County Waste & Recycling on food waste recovery
- Embedding reuse and circularity in its long-term direction, rather than treating them as standalone projects
These partnerships are explicitly reflected in the strategic plan, giving the board a clear line of sight from policy and investment decisions to regional outcomes like water security and resource recovery.
What Other Utilities Can Take Away
For utilities and agencies facing their own mix of political churn, ageing assets and operational pressure, OC San’s story offers some very practical lessons:
- Accept your governance reality—and design for it. You may not control who sits on your board, but you can control how informed, aligned and engaged they are.
- Keep strategy live, short and in plain language. Three pages people actually read beat 120 pages nobody opens.
- Tie asset management to accountability. If it’s installed, it should be working, and someone should own that outcome.
- Make resilience visible. Sewer spills avoided and violations prevented are just as important as crises handled.
- Lead from the front. Leadership walks, asks hard questions, and reinforces standards through behaviour, not memos.
As Rob puts it, his advice to his younger self still holds for utility leaders today:
“Do the right thing. Be patient. Stay at it. It will work out.”
To hear the full conversation and dig deeper into OC San’s approach to board alignment, strategic planning and asset reliability, listen to the latest episode of the Exec Exchange with Rob Thompson, General Manager at OC San.