Providing a new level of Customer Satisfaction – How we made GIS Work at the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District

Getting GIS off the “back burner”

Recognizing The Need
The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District (LVMWD) is a small to medium sized water/wastewater utility the serving 122 square miles in the western portion of unincorporated Los Angeles County and including the cities of Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Agoura Hills and Westlake Village for potable and recycled water services. The wastewater treatment service area also includes portions of eastern Ventura County in southern California. LVMWD provide water and sewer service to a population of approximately 65,000, it maintains its own sewer treatment plant, and it provides recycled water for irrigation within its 122 square mile service area.

By early 1990’s, some senior staff at the District were convinced that LVMWD needed to implement GIS. They had learned enough about GIS technology to be convinced that it would provide a significantly better tool for performing many of the mapping and information management tasks that were central to the utility’s planning, demand management, and facility operations.

The District did not have in-house capability to perform hydraulic modeling and relied on consulting engineering support for that planning function. Operations and planning staff were constantly struggling with ways to present their modeling results to managers and the Board of Directors. Further, the hydraulic model being utilized was “static” in nature and could not adequately address dynamics of changing operational scenarios. There were other limitations on the hydraulic modeling including the inability of the system to relate changes in land uses with resulting water demands. Finally, it did not provide an easy method for overlaying the pipeline system on a base map.

Figure 1 Las Virgenes Municipal Water District’s Service Area
LVMWD also needed better tools to support aggressive water conservation programs they were mandated to perform within their region. They needed better tools to analyze and thematically map trends and variations in water consumption within its 30,000 parcels. In addition, District staff needed relatively detailed land use information with which to analyze, design and plot individual irrigation plans for the many large land estates that exist with the District’s service area.
Finally, senior staff realized that taking steps to integrate the District’s many diverse sources of information would pay dividends in allowing staff to work more efficiently. Using GIS technology would allow staff to catch up with back-logged work and, most importantly, to maintain the District’s high standards of customer service by allowing quick access to accurate and reliable facility infrastructure information in response to customer calls.