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Experience Leads to Progress With Leland Myers

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Leland Myers

Leland Myers is the Executive Director of the Wasatch Front Water Quality Council, a collaborative research organization focused on protecting Utah Lake, the Jordan River, and the Great Salt Lake ecosystem. With more than 35 years of experience — including leadership of the Central Davis Sewer District and guidance on more than $2.5 billion in treatment plant upgrades — he has helped reduce nutrient pollution and shaped Utah’s cost-effective wastewater standards, ecosystem management strategies, and sewer collection rules. Leland’s work has earned national recognition, including an EPA award for outstanding wastewater operations.

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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • [2:37] Leland Myers reflects on forming the Wasatch Front Water Quality Council to study wastewater, nutrients, and ecosystem impacts
  • [7:58] Why changing wastewater regulations and ratepayer costs pushed utilities toward proactive research
  • [10:46] How Leland helped shape a stepwise, affordable approach to nutrient standards in Utah
  • [15:38] What science-based decision-making means for avoiding unnecessary treatment upgrades
  • [22:53] Central Davis Sewer District’s turnaround from EPA scrutiny to award-winning operations
  • [35:39] Leland’s mentor’s advice: “knowledge is not static” and the need to keep learning as new pollutants, rules, and infrastructure challenges emerge

In this episode…

Wastewater systems are often judged by what comes out of the pipe, but the smartest decisions begin much earlier. Utilities weigh regulations, ratepayer costs, infrastructure conditions, and ecosystem outcomes before committing to major upgrades. How can wastewater leaders make progress without spending more than the science can justify?

The answer is using research and data to guide practical, adaptive decisions. Leland Myers brings decades of wastewater leadership and ecosystem research experience, and he explains why utilities should understand nutrient sources, treatment impacts, and watershed conditions before accepting new requirements or investing in costly upgrades. Rather than chasing the lowest possible pollutant levels, Leland emphasizes aligning improvements with measurable ecosystem benefits, maintaining public trust through cost-conscious planning, and using collection system data to guide maintenance frequency, capacity planning, and inflow and infiltration strategies. The result is a more disciplined approach to compliance, infrastructure renewal, and long-term environmental stewardship.

In this episode of Saving Our Sewers, Eric Petersen sits down with Leland Myers, Executive Director at Wasatch Front Water Quality Council, to discuss how science-based wastewater research can shape smarter sewer management. Leland shares why nutrient rules need ecological justification, how data support affordable upgrades, and what collection systems need to do to stay ahead of failure. He also touches on PFAS, regulatory oversight, and lifelong learning.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments: 

  • “At the end of the day, money is an important factor.”
  • “We said, how do we make progress and still not break the bank?”
  • “So we have brought research-oriented science into the equation to make these decisions.”
  • “Knowledge is not static knowledge.”
  • “And you need to adapt your knowledge to meet what those changes demand.”

Action Steps: 

  1. Invest in ecosystem research before making major upgrades: Understanding how wastewater impacts the environment helps utilities make smarter, science-based decisions.
  2. Use data to justify infrastructure spending: Clear evidence ensures ratepayer dollars are spent on improvements that create real environmental benefits.
  3. Plan for changing regulations and emerging pollutants: Staying ahead of new requirements helps systems avoid costly surprises and remain compliant.
  4. Maintain accurate collection system records: Good data helps teams identify risks, plan maintenance, and prevent system failures.
  5. Keep learning as conditions evolve: Continuous learning helps wastewater leaders adapt to new technologies, pollutants, and regulatory demands.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by RH Borden, the leading service provider for innovative technologies that modernize wastewater collection system maintenance.

As Smart Cities evolve, RH Borden empowers communities to leverage data, optimize maintenance resources, and improve system performance. Their digital twin solutions help teams work more efficiently, minimize redundant maintenance, and pinpoint infrastructure issues with precision.

Learn more about how RH Borden is shaping the future of wastewater system management by visiting rhborden.com.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:03

The US Infrastructure Report Card gives the nation’s wastewater systems a grade of D+. Welcome to the Saving Our Sewers podcast, where we feature the practices, tools, technology and ideas that will save our sewers. Let’s get into it.

Eric Petersen: 00:20

Eric Peterson here, host of Saving Our Sewers podcast, where we feature city leaders, innovative engineers, and infrastructure experts who are shaping the future of rapidly growing municipalities through smarter technology and data-driven solutions. This episode is brought to you by RH Borden, providing data-driven approaches to wastewater collection system maintenance. RH Borden helps collection system operators bridge the gap of funding labor and other resources with technology that eliminates wasted cleaning and CCTV efforts, automates manhole management, and dramatically reduces inflow and infiltration. Learn more about RH Borden and how we are shaping the future of wastewater collection system management by visiting rhborden.com. So today I have with me an amazing guest, Leland Myers.

Leland has been in the industry for more than 35 years. But let me go back and kind of give you a quick bio of who he is. So he got a degree in the mid 70s and worked in the construction industry around the world in petrochemicals and probably another few other things, but came back to the state of Utah, got a degree in environmental engineering in 1984. After that, he worked for the Division of Water Quality for the state of Utah for a couple of years, and then moved to the Central Davis collection system, where he managed that organization for 35 years recently. So Leland has retired, and he has recently started a research group, and I’m going to let him describe a little bit about that research group.

And maybe we’ll backtrack then into his career in the wastewater industry and the interesting things that he’s come across over time. So, Leland, welcome to the podcast. I really appreciate your time today.

Leland Myers: 02:23

Sure. Now, you want me to tell you about research?

Eric Petersen: 02:27

Absolutely. Tell me about this research group that you started recently. And then we’ll kind of work backwards in your career to learn more about your experience.

Leland Myers: 02:37

Recent would probably be about 15 years ago, maybe a little longer than that. 18. Yeah. We were involved in a number of permitting issues relative to wastewater treatment plants and collection systems. I was also a member of the State of Utah Water Party at the time.

And so we collectively as a group of POTWS along the Wasatch Front, formed a group that we called the Wasatch Front Water Quality Council and. And our, our intent was to do ecosystem research so that we could either justify increasing permit requirements, reducing effluent loads in both, both organic as well as primarily at this time, nutrient issues. Or we would be able to show that those are not going to benefit the ecosystem. And so we began doing a lot of research, particularly Utah Lake Jordan River and Great Salt Lake. Those are the three ecosystems that the physical facilities that we represent discharge into.

And so we do a lot of the ecological research, we look at how the ecosystem functions and how nutrients affect that function, how the wastewater interacts with the ecosystem. We’re looking at other pollutant indicators and how other sources of pollutant arrive at the lake. One of the ones we’ve done a lot of work on in recent years is air deposition. This is when you have nutrients primarily in other pollutants, but primarily nutrients that get deposited on water bodies due to either enriched dust off of like in the case of Utah Lake off the old severe lake bed. Or it could come in through exhaust, tailpipe exhaust or other human caused issues.

They get into the air and then settle as it goes across these water bodies. And so that’s a significant amount of nutrients that go into it as an example. At the time we started the research, Utah Lake had about 250 plus or minus tons of phosphorus coming out of the wastewater treatment plants. Currently, because of upgrades to all those plants, that’s about 55 to 65 tons a year. So these are tons per year. Air deposition is somewhere between 130 to 300 tons a year dropping on the lake.

And so we went from being a major source to being a subsidiary source to air deposition. And so understanding how nutrients arrive at an ecosystem is critical to know whether or not you can change the ecosystem by changing discharge concentrations and or working on other sources of nutrients like stormwater and and or natural runoff. So that’s what we started doing. We worked on Utah, Lake Jordan River, Great Salt Lake, Jordan River. All of these systems are highly managed water systems.

So none of those systems are, are, are attaining any natural flow anymore. So. Right. Water out of Utah Lake, for instance, is pumped into the Jordan River. Unless the lake gets really high and hits a point in the elevation called compromise, it doesn’t flow out naturally.

It’s pumped and it’s pumped to meet irrigation demands downstream.

Eric Petersen: 06:25

And I bet that most people don’t know that.

Leland Myers: 06:28

Yeah. And so it’s very highly managed. And so the Jordan River after it, pumps water for irrigation needs. And then it’s almost completely dewatered. And then you get natural accretion water coming into the river and other sources of water as groundwater discharges or streams.

And that’s what replenishes the river as it goes on down further. So these ecosystems are very highly managed. And if we don’t change how we manage it, we really have a difficult time changing how the ecosystem functions. The Utah Lake, for example, has issues with cyanobacteria, which if the conditions are right, produce cyanotoxins. That’s a concern for both animal and human health.

But if you can change the conditions to stop that, that’s an issue that isn’t yet resolved. There are many things that you have little or no control over, like air deposition, and that’s certainly enough nutrients to keep the ecosystem hypertrophic.

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