Kwin Peterson is Senior Account Manager at RH Borden and Company, a Salt Lake City-based firm applying advanced sensor technology and data-driven solutions to modernize wastewater and sewer systems across the US. He has supported more than 60 collection systems in becoming more efficient through condition-based maintenance and innovative assessment tools. Kwin also serves on the San Francisco Bay Section Collection Systems Committee. Before joining RH Borden, he spent 17 years in the electric utilities industry working in education, public relations, and technical committee support.

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

• [1:35] Kwin Peterson introduces the differences between small and large city wastewater systems
• [3:24] The challenges faced by Cherry Creek Heights, Colorado’s tiny wastewater system
• [5:58] Insights into Cherry Creek Heights’ wastewater system performance
• [9:25] Strathmore Hills’ proactive approach to managing aging pipes and system issues
• [12:39] The role of data in transforming small wastewater system governance
• [18:02] How Cherry Creek Heights saved on costs and improved system management
• [21:47] Strathmore Hills’ successful use of data to reduce system maintenance costs
• [24:52] How ongoing data collection helps cities adjust risk tolerance and long-term maintenance strategies

In this episode…

Wastewater systems in small municipalities face unique challenges, particularly when it comes to resource limitations. Aging infrastructure, unpredictable weather conditions, and minimal staffing can make maintenance and upgrades difficult to manage. How can small cities tackle these issues without overextending their budgets or falling behind on necessary repairs?

Kwin Peterson, an expert in wastewater management, sheds light on how small systems can thrive despite their constraints by using technology. He shares how systems like Cherry Creek Heights and Strathmore Hills benefit from data-driven solutions that prioritize maintenance and guide resource allocation. By using tools that provide actionable insights into system performance, small cities can proactively address problems, saving both time and money. The technology reduces unnecessary work, improves decision-making, and allows these communities to function more efficiently, often with fewer resources. The result is more manageable systems and reduced risk for costly failures.

In this episode of Saving Our Sewers, Chad Franzen interviews Kwin Peterson, Senior Account Manager at RH Borden, about the challenges small cities face in wastewater management. Kwin discusses his work with systems like Cherry Creek Heights, Strathmore Hills, and Brighton, focusing on how technology drives efficiency. He also explores the impact of data on system governance, the transition from reactive to proactive maintenance, and the financial benefits of reducing unnecessary work.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Jon Borden on LinkedIn 
• RH Borden and Company
• Kwin Peterson on LinkedIn
• Chad Franzen on LinkedIn
• Rise25
• ASCE Infrastructure Report Card

Quotable Moments: 

• “If you’re a small system, if you’re under-resourced, the technology is actually going to make a bigger difference.”
• “Data is really freeing us in that it tells us what we need to pay attention to.”
• “With technology, we can bridge some of those gaps that you think you have in small systems.”
• “The change in governance is amazing when these small cities have data telling them what they need.”
• “The most rewarding thing about working with small systems is how it changes their relationship with the system.”

Action Steps: 

1. Prioritize data-driven decision-making: Using technology to analyze wastewater systems helps allocate resources effectively and prevent failures.
2. Implement proactive maintenance schedules: Shifting from reactive to proactive strategies can significantly reduce costly emergencies and system breakdowns.
3. Regularly assess system performance: Evaluating the condition of pipes and infrastructure ensures timely interventions and avoids unnecessary repairs.
4. Invest in technology for small systems: Technology bridges gaps in resource-limited systems, improving efficiency and lowering long-term costs.
5. Collaborate with local governing bodies: Providing data to city councils helps secure necessary resources and enhances system management.

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.

Powered by Rise25 Podcast Production Company

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.

Kwin Peterson: 00:20

Kwin Peterson here, host of Saving Our Sewers, 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 innovative technologies that modernize wastewater system maintenance. As cities evolve, RH Borden is empowering 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. You can learn more about how RH Borden is shaping the future of wastewater system management by visiting RH Borden.

Well, now today I have Chad Franzen here from Rise25. He has done thousands of interviews with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, industry experts and gurus. And today we’re flipping the switch. I am. Maybe none of those things, but Chad is going to be interviewing me to talk about small systems and their peculiarities.

Chad, welcome to the show.

Chad Franzen: 01:35

Hey, thanks so much, Kwin. Great to talk to you again. Great to be here. Yeah, I’m looking forward to talking to you about how RH Borden’s technology can affect small sewage systems. Just kind of tell me about, you know, when people think of maybe a big city and a little bit working their way down to smaller ones, what a what a typical system looks like for a big city and then all the way down to a small city that you might work with.

Kwin Peterson: 01:56

Yeah, they are totally different animals. A large city like a Denver metro or a pueblo or a Sacramento can have tens of thousands, even hundreds, hundred thousand manholes. They’ve got big, big city resources. They’ve got big city bureaucracies. They’ve got big city budgets.

And when you think of wastewater, you know you’re going to be thinking about guys out there with trucks, lots of guys out there with trucks taking care of the system. And in generally speaking, that’s what’s happening. Larger cities have lots of resources. They have lots of obligations, and they’ve got bigger budgets to take care of these things. Smaller systems, on the other hand, they still have all the same problems that big cities have.

They’ve got aging infrastructure. They’ve got very often harsher conditions where their city is like winters and salt and crumbling roads. They have all of these problems and to boot, they have fewer resources. So in probably the first 5 or 6 years of RH Borden, we pretty much exclusively focused on these smaller cities, cities of usually less than 40,000 people.

Chad Franzen: 03:24

Okay. So let’s let’s talk about maybe some specific towns that you’ve worked with. Tell me first about Cherry Creek Heights, Colorado.

Kwin Peterson: 03:31

Oh, yeah. So Cherry Creek Heights, Colorado is a small suburban wastewater collection system. And when I say small, I’m talking really small. They have about 4,100ft of wastewater collection system pipes. They have a total of 21 Manholes.

I didn’t even know they existed until they saw me doing a webinar with their from their insurance company. Their insurance company was pushing all of their systems to use us because they insured mostly smaller systems. And these systems, for the reasons that we already talked about, were having an unusually high number of claims related to sewer system failures. So the insurance companies asked us to come on and do a webinar about the technology. This tiny little system saw this and gave me a call.

And I said, you’re where? And he explained to me, he explained how in in Colorado, where this system is, these small systems are usually governed by a board of five citizens who live in that district. Now, in this case, the district only has like a hundred houses, so they kind of rotate. Everybody takes a turn being on the sewer board, and they have no employees or at the time they had no employees, they had no management company. When you know, when you’re digging, you’re supposed to call 811 and they’ll send somebody from that utility out to go, Mark where the the utility lines are.

These board members who are retirees living in their houses in cherry, Cherry Creek Heights, would have to go out with a can of spray paint and try and mark where their sewer lines were. That’s how under-resourced they were. Yeah. So they asked us to come out and use our technology to tell them how their system was doing. And I’m like, oh, okay.

Usually we we quote these things in weeks, but this is only going to take us like two hours. So we’ll figure out how to how to bill you for two hours of our time. And it was so helpful to them that we’ve done it with them every year since. Hey, they’ll call me up and say, can you come out? And I’m like, okay, we’ll schedule a couple hours to come out and do that.

Chad Franzen: 05:58

How was their system doing?

Kwin Peterson: 06:00

You know, it was really interesting. Not that good. But but when we went to give the report out and we said, okay, of your 21 pipes, these three are not flowing very well. And this one’s really bad. We don’t know why this one’s so bad.

And they said, oh, they just had a baby. They’re probably putting diapers down the down the toilet. We’re like, well, that’s some local color that we don’t usually get when we talk to a, a sewer provider. They don’t know whose house might be producing diapers.

Chad Franzen: 06:33

So when you say 21 manholes, compare that to like maybe a city like Sacramento or something like that.

Kwin Peterson: 06:38

Oh, Sacramento’s got 100, well over 100,000 manholes. Pueblo has like 80,000 manholes. Denver might have 100,000 manholes. This is the real key here to these smaller systems is they don’t have enough resources to take care of this. Okay.

Stuff that’s going on.

Chad Franzen: 07:00

So Cherry Creek Heights, you they utilize your services. We’ll kind of talk about the specifics of how things are different for them once we go through a couple more towns. What about Strathmore Hills, Colorado?

Kwin Peterson: 07:10

Okay. So we’re moving up I guess a list from the super tiny to the just tiny and Strathmore Hills was an interesting case. So we very often these small systems, they’ve got their aging pipes, they’ve got a they’ve got a lot of deferred maintenance and they are just reacting. So if you haven’t got enough people to get ahead of your problems, what you’re going to end up doing is when you have a spill, when you have a backup, that’s when people get called out at 2:00 in the morning, and your workers have to drive in and get the truck fired up and hope that it’s going to work, because they don’t use it all that often and roll out there and try and fix the problem. And that’s what was happening in Strathmore Hills, and I just visited with them one day I was driving by.

Oh, I should stop there. I went in and talked with the district manager and he said, I would love to get ahead of our system issues, but I just don’t know where to start. They had probably 90, I think, thousand feet of pipe, which is really small, but for one crew of two people with one sewer maintenance truck. Where do you start? And what we were able to do is come in and use the technology and say, okay, about half of your system needs attention, but half of your system doesn’t.

So let’s not spend any time over there. Let’s start. Let’s start here and move down through the system and hit this button. This button, this button, this spot. We’re going to put these in priority order.

And then you just start knocking them out one at a time. And for Strathmore Hills, the technology and this view into what needed attention, how bad it needed attention, and even more important, what didn’t need attention was the difference between reacting being called out at 2:00 in the morning and being able to have a regular schedule of, we’re going to start at 7 a.m. and we’re going to knock off at 4 p.m. and we’re going to do this and this and this, and then we’re going to do this and this and this.

Chad Franzen: 09:25

So when, when a city like that utilizes RH Borden and your technology provides that kind of direction is that they just apply that then to their crew, maybe they hire additional contractors or additional people or does RH Borden and, you know, go in there and help help them with their systems.

Kwin Peterson: 09:44

You know, that’s a great question. What we are providing them is data and a prioritized list of their problems. So we’ve got this dashboard and it’s color coded. And if something is black on the dashboard that’s your top priority. If something is red that’s your second priority.

And if something’s yellow, maybe that’s not even a priority at all. But everything that’s green you don’t worry about. And again, it goes back to what the limiting factor is there. If it’s that we can’t hire enough guys because the labor market is really tight, then maybe they’ll bring in a contractor to knock to help them knock out a few of their highest priority problems. If it’s that we have enough guys but we don’t know how to allocate them, then, then the data will tell us how to allocate them.

But the most rewarding thing about working with these small systems is the change it makes to the governance of that system. I have one system, and I don’t know if we were planning to talk about this one. It’s Montrose, Colorado, which is out over on the West Slope, and it was my best experience ever using this technology because of the way it changed their relationship with the system. For years they had been understaffed, under-resourced, but with the technology, they were then able to go in and say, okay, we now know exactly how what work needs to be done, which means we know exactly how many man hours it’s going to take and exactly what equipment we’re going to need. Then they were able to go to the county, excuse me, to their city governing board and say, this is what we need.

This is the data that is telling us what we need. Can we have that, please? And seeing the governance structures of these small cities, small districts stepping up and saying, oh, thank goodness you’re bringing us data. Now we know how to provide you the resources because city councils, boards of directors, they they want to do a good job, they want to manage the resources. But it’s really hard to do without data.

And so we get this, this perfect storm of data and desire, and it all comes together to change the way budgets are done, change the questions that are being asked, change these small system operators. And by the way, small system operators know what’s going on in their system very often. But small systems are usually governed by volunteers who are drawn in from the community. They don’t know. They don’t know how to judge, you know, what needs to be done.

And so everybody just benefits extraordinarily from having this kind of data?

Chad Franzen: 12:39

Yeah, a lot of, you know, it’s like we talked about on our last episode, you can’t really nobody really sees anything. So even if there is a problem, unless it, you know, blows up from underneath the ground or something, nobody ever really knows what’s what’s breaking down or where things need to be fixed or things like that. Would you say a lot of communities that you talk to are more reactive than than proactive?

Kwin Peterson: 12:59

You know, it really depends on the area of the country. So for instance, in Colorado, the number of cities that are reactive is actually relatively small because there is a very strong regulatory structure in place, and there’s a very strong insurance structure in place that is putting in place incentives, strong incentives to be proactive. It was kind of a joke. The the rules in Colorado are we clean every pipe and we camera every pipe every three years, and you go into a city and you say, so how often are you cleaning and hammering every pipe? And they’ll say, we’re trying to get to every one of them three, every three years.

And the subtext in every case was, but we’re not. But in Colorado, for instance, pipes are generally in great shape. Other parts of the country where those incentives are not as strong. The majority of small systems are reactive simply because that’s the only way they can function at all.

Chad Franzen: 14:10

Let’s go to one more, one more, maybe a little bit bigger town. I’ve actually been to this one. Brighton, Colorado. Tell me about your experience with them.

Kwin Peterson: 14:17

So Brighton is an interesting case because it was a small town. But you know, people want to live in small towns. And so especially there on the Front Range of Colorado, you get these towns that have been small towns for 100 years. And then just in the last decade they have blown up. So the town of Brighton was so small that they had a routine where they were cleaning every pipe every year.

But over the last 10 or 15 years, they’re on the front ranges. You know, Chad, the population has just exploded. And the city of Brighton was adding a thousand sewer taps. That’s a thousand homes or a thousand multi-family units, something that taps into the sewer. They were adding a thousand of those every year, which means their system was growing just hand over it, just just growing so fast.

And they were at the point where they were like, we can no longer clean every pipe every year unless we go out and buy another $800,000 truck and hire two more crew members, again at a at a huge price to run that truck. And this is the difference between a small system and a big system. A small system is going to have one truck, maybe, whereas a big system, a Denver or a pueblo is going to have 5 or 6 trucks. The thing to know about these trucks is they break down, they wear out really fast. And so if you have six trucks, you really have four trucks.

And if you have one truck, you really have half a truck. And I had a I had another city in, in Colorado that had one truck and they had scheduled to buy a new truck, but that was in 2022. This year, 2026, they’re finally going to make that purchase. But they were able to put the purchase off for another four years because the data told them, you don’t need to clean 90% of your system. So you can you can reduce the use of that truck by 90%.

So these this this is the kind of thing that that Brighton looked at. They said, hey, if we can like that system in the Colorado Springs area, if we can stop using our truck 90% of the time, then we can take those resources and put them somewhere else. And if we’re if we can change from not having to buy another truck, that’s going to be a huge win for us. So we went through their system. It took us about seven weeks because this was a system that had been tiny, but over the last ten years had grown to a system of over 700,000ft and about 3000, 4000 manholes, something like that.

In seven weeks, we were able to say, okay, 96% of your pipes don’t need to be cleaned this year. And they’re like, oh, that’s great. So which 4%? We say, okay, you need to clean these these 4%. They were mostly downtown in the old part of town.

And so they did. They went out and they just cleaned those pipes that were shown to be a problem. And then they were able to save all of the resources that they would have done if they had had to go out and clean every pipe, or had to buy another truck and hire two more guys.

Chad Franzen: 17:42

Wow. Nice. So it sounds like, you know, you’re. Technology at RH Borden helps towns become more efficient with regard regard to this potentially more proactive rather than reactive. What are some ways specifically, let’s go back to Cherry Creek Heights that you feel like RH Borden technology really helped them.

Kwin Peterson: 18:02

Yeah. So with Cherry Creek Heights, what we were able to do for them is they were under this rule where you have to clean and camera every pipe every three years. But the rule has an exception. If you use technology like RH Borden provides, you don’t have to do that. And cleaning costs a dollar to maybe a dollar and a half per foot.

And so you multiply that out by 4000ft. And that that’s a number that they would have had to go through. Every year. We’re able to do it at a 10th the price of just giving them the data. And then they called in a contractor instead of hiring somebody to come out and spend, you know, a whole week and clean every pipe.

They had a contractor come out and clean that one pipe that had the problem, and that was a huge savings for them. They also get coverage from their insurance company for doing that. They get a lower rate because they’re doing that. So it led to a series of upgrades in this tiny system to where they said, you know what? We should start treating our system like it’s a real system.

They went out and they hired a management company with the savings that they had from this, and they were able to allow their board of directors, these retirees, to actually be retired, and they just have a board meeting, You know, every month or every two months. And they have a professional manager who takes care of the bills and files the paperwork and engages us to come out and do the the cleaning. So these are the kind of changes that one of the reasons I like talking about the technology and small systems, because if you’re a small system, if you’re under-resourced, the technology is actually going to make a bigger difference to you than it will to a city that has lots and lots of resources. It’s the difference between being proactive and being reactive. It’s the difference between being hands on with volunteer labor and being professionally managed.

It’s the difference between having liability for spills and not having liability for spills.

Chad Franzen: 20:17

So how is Strathmore Hills different? I know they’re more proactive now than they than they were.

Kwin Peterson: 20:21

Yeah, yeah. They were able to do the same thing their, their their district manager wanted to stop putting out fires and start getting ahead and preventing fires, and it’s been a longer climb for them. They had a long period of neglect and, you know, their problems didn’t happen overnight and they didn’t get fixed overnight. But they are using the data to get ahead and reduce their spills. When last I talked to the insurance company, they were not on the naughty list anymore.

So yeah, it’s it’s helping them out. But they had a pretty steep climb, as opposed to a place like Brighton where they were killing themselves to clean every pipe. So their system was already in really good shape. I mean, 96% of their pipes that first time around did not get any attention. Now, when we came back two years later, they had stopped cleaning everything that wasn’t marked as a problem, so they had avoided cleaning like 1.5 million feet of pipe or something like that.

And their number dropped from being 96% clean to 90% clean, which is still way above the industry average. But they saved, saved, they saved like using their their pipes, cleaning their pipes by about 1,000,000.5ft.

Chad Franzen: 21:42

So they were completely able to kind of reallocate their resources to the. Yeah.

Kwin Peterson: 21:47

Yeah. And in fact, they they took those resources. And the next year they went after their manholes and they had been on a tear to line every one of their manholes, and they were spending about $200,000 a year doing that. And we were able to come in with a different technology and scan the the next tranche of manholes and say, yeah, maybe this one needs to be lined. But these others, these dozens of other manholes, they don’t need to be lined.

So they were able to save that $200,000 and then apply that somewhere else. So it’s this rolling thing. Technology. If you’re a big city, technology is going to be your friend. If you’re a small city, technology is going to be your savior.

Chad Franzen: 22:31

Interesting. Is there a is there a you mentioned that a lot of these places have had you guys come back? I’m guessing, you know, once you utilize our services and technology, you kind of change your outlook on your sewage system. That’s not the end of your relationship.

Kwin Peterson: 22:48

No, no, no. A lot of these people, it’s just an automatic. Yeah. We’ll be back again next, next June. And we’ll we’ll do the same thing.

But you know, it’s interesting too. Once you have data, you you can start making decisions. And this is usually a more sophisticated city a larger city. We have a town in Colorado named Castle Rock. We went in the first year and we assessed their system.

And they are one of these larger places that has the the resources to to do more. And after that first year, it was clear that the data said, you know what, maybe we only do this half of it every year. So instead of doing the whole system every year, now we do half every year. And then they clean the hotspots as, as it comes up. And that has worked out just fine for them.

Other cities, like over there on the West Slope, Montrose, which is a small rural city, they looked at the data and and said, okay, we’re willing to tolerate this amount of risk. And we’re willing we have these resources. So what we’re going to do is make this technology a part of our system, but we’re going to do it our way. We’re going to do it by dividing up our system into thirds. And we are going to instead of cleaning everything on a third of your rotation, we’re going to have the technology deployed across a third of a system every year.

And we’ll swap out one technology which is cleaning and camera work for another technology that’s faster and cheaper. In this case, it’s called acoustic assessment, and that’s how that city does it. So yes, we have ongoing relationships with these cities. They don’t always just repeat what we did the first or the first and second year. It the data is really freeing us in that it tells us what we need to pay attention to and what risks we can and should take, and how we should balance out our resources and our needs.

Chad Franzen: 24:52

It’s interesting that you talked about Brighton kind of learning that they they were doing a lot of maybe unnecessary work, that they could have been doing work in other areas. I always figured, you find out this the data for the first time and you realize, oh, you’ve got a million things that you need to address. But in some cases, you could just be pointing people in different directions and not and and saving them effort rather than giving them more things to do.

Kwin Peterson: 25:16

Yeah. yeah. You know, if you’ve got a small system and I’ve talked to so many of these small systems, then they’re just they’ve just thrown their hands up in the air. It’s like, I’ve got so much that I need to do, and I don’t have enough guys or equipment or money to do it. And when we can come in and say, well, 90% of the thing that you think you need to do, you don’t actually need to do.

If it’s been a city that’s been neglected, maybe it’s not 90%, maybe it’s 60%, 60% of the thing you think you’re not doing, and you feel bad that you’re not doing it. You don’t need to do it in the first place because it’s fine. One of the very first cities I came into, and again, it was one of these small places. His response when I showed him the data was, wow, we’re not in as bad a shape as I thought. And that was really nice.

Chad Franzen: 26:07

That’s nice. So when the city utilizes you or utilizes RH Borden Technology. How does that look? You know, in terms of the bottom, we looked at their outlook in terms of their approach to sewage management. But what about just the bottom line?

Kwin Peterson: 26:23

Well, it doesn’t change the bottom line. That’s kind of the point. All of these places are under-resourced in the first place. So it’s not like they’re going to hand money back. What they’re going to be able to do then is take that money that they were using on expensive cleaning work, or on getting their vector, their combo truck fixed, or buying a new combo truck.

They’re able to take that, usually a large amount of money and apply it somewhere that has a desperate need, but they didn’t have the ability to pay for it before.

Chad Franzen: 26:56

Okay. Well, hey, Quinn, it’s great to talk to you again. Anything else that we should touch on?

Kwin Peterson: 27:03

Just, just if there’s anything I could communicate to a small, these small cities, it’s that there’s hope For so many of these places, they’ve been used to being run roughshod. They feel victims of their of their system, and they feel victims to the circumstances that they’re in, that their city council hasn’t got enough money to give them, or that their board of directors doesn’t want to hire more guys, or doesn’t want to buy another truck, or just flat doesn’t have the money to do that. And if I can communicate one thing to that overworked system operator, it is there is hope. You can use technology to bridge some of those gaps that you think you have, and you don’t need to be a victim of the circumstances that you’re in.

Chad Franzen: 27:54

Okay. Awesome. Great to know. Quinn, great to talk to you as always. Thanks so much.

Kwin Peterson: 27:59

All right. Thank you Chad.

Chad Franzen: 28:01

So long everybody.

Outro 28:02

Thanks for listening to the Saving Our Sewers podcast. We’ll be back next time with more insights you can use. Be sure to click and subscribe to get future episodes.