Kwin Peterson is a 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:
- [1:56] Reactive versus proactive sewer maintenance and why the shift matters
- [3:57] Kwin Peterson discusses financial, cultural, and regulatory factors driving reactive city operations
- [8:51] Common mindset barriers to preventative maintenance and how to reframe them
- [12:19] The role of data and condition-based maintenance in optimizing resources
- [20:02] Steps cities can take to transition toward proactive infrastructure management
In this episode…
Many cities still rely on reactive sewer maintenance, which leads to higher costs, increased risks, and frequent emergencies. Despite knowing that preventative maintenance is more effective, budget constraints, cultural habits, and outdated decision-making often keep municipalities stuck in this cycle. Why do so many cities continue choosing short-term savings over long-term efficiency and resilience?
Kwin Peterson, an infrastructure expert specializing in wastewater systems, explains that the shift to proactive maintenance begins with understanding the true cost of inaction. Kwin highlights how reactive approaches lead to expensive emergencies, regulatory penalties, and wasted resources, while data-driven strategies enable smarter decisions. By leveraging tools like acoustic assessment and condition-based maintenance, cities can identify problem areas early, reduce unnecessary work, and allocate resources more effectively. He also emphasizes setting clear goals — such as reducing spills or overtime — and leveraging data to build a compelling case for change with decision-makers.
In this episode of Saving Our Sewers, Chad Franzen of Rise25 chats with Kwin Peterson, a Senior Account Manager at RH Borden, about transitioning from a reactive approach to a more proactive sewer maintenance strategy. Kwin provides insights on reducing emergency costs, optimizing maintenance with data, and building political will. He also discusses acoustic assessment, condition-based maintenance, and identifying hidden infrastructure risks.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Quotable Moments:
- “The surprising thing about reactive versus proactive is that it is always more expensive to be reactive.”
- “Emergencies cost so much more than preventative maintenance. And we know this, but the grandpa in us all says no.”
- “It’s a lot more risky, obviously, to be reactive versus proactive because you’re waiting for something to break.”
- “When we have that data, we’re then able to deploy the resources instead of doing work that’s unnecessary.”
- “It becomes remarkably easy to go to the city council when you can go in with data.”
Action Steps:
- Define a clear proactive maintenance goal: Establishing targets like reducing spills or overtime creates direction and accountability for improvement.
- Shift from reactive to data-driven decision-making: Using system data helps prioritize work and avoid costly emergency repairs.
- Implement condition-based maintenance strategies: Focusing only on assets that need attention reduces wasted effort and optimizes resource allocation.
- Use tools like acoustic assessment for early detection: Identifying issues before failures prevents overflows, fines, and infrastructure damage.
- Present data-backed plans to decision-makers: Clear evidence of risks and costs makes it easier to secure funding and drive organizational change.
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: 00:21
Kwin Peterson here, host of the 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. Now, this episode is brought to you, as always, by RH Borden, who provides innovative technologies that modernize wastewater collection system maintenance. RH Borden empowers communities to leverage data, optimize maintenance resources, and improve system performance. Their digital twin solutions help teams move more efficiently, minimize redundant maintenance, and pinpoint infrastructure issues with great precision. You can learn more about that at their website, RHborden.com.
All right. Today the infrastructure expert is, well, it’s me, and I have Chad Franzen here from Rise25. He’s done thousands of interviews, and he is going to be interviewing me about an aspect of saving our sewers that I think everybody kind of understands. They feel it in their gut. If you live in this situation, you’re going to know all about it, and Chad’s going to pull that information out of me.
Chad, thanks for doing that.
Chad Franzen: 01:38
Hey, thanks so much, Kwin. It’s great to be here with you. Great to talk to you again. Yeah, we’re going to talk today kind of about the overall theme, which will be reactive to proactive and how that relates to cities. So tell me, what does it really mean for a city to move from maybe reactive sewer maintenance to proactive maintenance?
Kwin Peterson: 01:56
Yeah. So reactive and proactive are something that everybody who works in the sewer space inherently understands, right? If it’s if I’m being proactive, I’m heading off. I’m heading off problems before they happen. If I’m being reactive, I’m being awoken at 2:00 in the morning by a call from somebody telling me that we have a problem.
And so the ideal and I think everybody who works in this space, whether they’re in the proactive practice or in the reactive practice, everybody knows it would be much better if we could head some of these things off. So your question is, how do we move from reactive to proactive? Well, this is why I really wanted to have this conversation. It’s because in the past, that move took just a ton of time, money, effort and political capital. Because let’s face it, I haven’t talked to very many operators who prefer to be reactive.
Reactive almost always comes from the governing body, or from a previous generation of people who just didn’t see the value of getting ahead of things. And, you know, there are a variety of reasons why this happens in the West United States. Largely, it’s budget-driven. In the eastern part of the country, it’s largely cultural about whether you’re going to be proactive or reactive. And in the West, there seem to be a lot of legal and regulatory frameworks that encourage more proactivity than we’ve seen in the East.
Chad Franzen: 03:42
So I’m, I’m, I mean, I’m not the expert on this, but I’m guessing a lot of collection systems are kind of managed by schedule or habit or maybe just like, you know, we’ve heard that there’s an emergency, so let’s respond to it, that type of thing. Why is that? Why is that the case?
Kwin Peterson: 03:57
Well, because there are people writing checks. And like I said, there’s a combination thing. There’s economics, there’s long-sided boards and city councils, and there are short-sighted boards and city councils. So let’s break this down into the real drivers of reality of proactive versus reactive. We’ll start with money.
So if you’re in a city where budgets are always tight, money is always hard to come by. I see this a lot in places where there’s a pioneer mentality, like we’re just going to, we’re just going to get through it. We’re going to, we’re going to, we can do this ourselves. We’re going to just use our own gumption and grit and we’re going to do it. Those places tend to predominantly be Reactive because we’re just going to wait until the problem shows up and then, by golly, we’ll get on it and fix it.
People who run those boards, those city councils, tend to think of, you know, why would we spend money preventing problems that may never happen? And so it’s a money thing. The surprising thing about reactive versus proactive is it is always more expensive to be reactive. Emergencies cost so much more than preventative maintenance. And we know this, but the grandpa in us all says no.
You know what? I’ll worry about that when it happens. But the other piece of this is it’s a lot more risky, obviously, to be reactive versus proactive because you’re waiting for something to break. And when something breaks in the sewer system, that’s going to involve possibly fines from your regulator, possibly lawsuits, possibly legal action based on the Clean Water Act. So we’re trying to balance.
Cost and risk. So let’s wrap up the cost piece of this here. The main driver of proactivity from a cost perspective is the mistaken assumption on the part of council members that it’s going to be more expensive to take action in advance, when you take that apart. It’s obviously false, and people kind of have to admit it, but it’s just the way a lot of cities have been operating for 30, 40, 80 years. And that’s why a lot of systems end up being proactive because of the money.
The other piece of this is cultural. Like I said here in California, and where I was in Colorado before then, this proactivity was that’s not something we did. I mean, excuse me, reactivity was not something we did. We’re on top of things. We are heading off our problems.
We’re not having spills. We know that we operate nationwide, we’re seeing that there are regions of the country where people like us do things like this. Well, people like us wait until the sewage is coming out of the ground before we take action. So for the money thing, it’s just a matter of painting the accurate picture for the people who write the checks of no, this is not the cheaper way to do it. And it’s more risky for cultural things.
It really comes down to do I want to be excellent or not? Also, do I want to be waking up at 2:00 in the morning on Saturday to deal with this problem or not. The third piece of this is regulatory, and that is very much a state-by-state approach. There are states where the regulators are very hands-off, where spills are not a big deal. And in those systems, not surprisingly, reactivity prevails here in the West for whatever reason.
Maybe it’s that water is so much more scarce, or that spills have a much higher impact because water is more scarce, the regulations are much tighter. And so proactivity prevails here.
Chad Franzen: 08:30
I could see maybe, maybe a city government or even just people in general having a mentality like, okay, well, right now I don’t have a problem. And addressing it now would be an elective payment whereas if I just waited until something went wrong, that would be a necessary payment and I’d rather just do that. Have you found that that’s kind of a mentality people have or not so much?
Kwin Peterson: 08:51
Yeah. No, that’s absolutely the mentality. And that one’s an easy one to overcome. You can just say, when’s the last time you changed the oil in your car. That’s an elective expense right?
You’re you’re you’re, you’re not going to never change the oil in your car. You know, a lot of cars now have sensors on them to say, well, it’s now time to change your oil. And that’s one of the shortcuts to proactivity is you put a sensor in there and take action when it happens.
Chad Franzen: 09:23
Sure. What is the biggest warning sign that a city could be stuck in reactive maintenance mode?
Kwin Peterson: 09:31
Well, if you’re in a city that is in that reactive maintenance mode, you know it. You feel it in your guts. It is this gnawing sense of, we could be doing it better. I don’t know anybody in the sewer space who gets up to go to work in the morning and says, you know what? We’re going to put off as much maintenance as we can.
That’s the right way to go. The signs for the board members and the decision makers in the city are we’re having a lot of spills, which automatically indicates we are not doing enough proactive maintenance because spills are largely optional. We have the tools now to not have them. I know one city in Colorado who hasn’t had a spill since 1985. So it is possible not to spill.
Chad Franzen: 10:27
Acoustic assessment is a source of data for RH Borden and for the clients that you work with. How does it help cities find problems before they turn into, you know, backups, overflows, emergencies, things like that?
Kwin Peterson: 10:39
Yeah, that’s a great question. And it’s really one of the most rewarding pieces of this, this technology I have been called in usually by the insurance company for a city. Say, will you please go in and talk to them about doing some acoustic assessment here. And cities have reputations, like if you’re in a city that has forever been a reactive city, all your neighbors know that, and you’re kind of embarrassed to go to conferences and meet with people. It’s like, yeah, well, that’s my city.
I’ve had the privilege of introducing acoustic assessment to some of these cities that were kind of in the neighborhood doghouse, wearing the cone of shame from the movie up. Right. And they were able to implement acoustic assessment, get enough data in one big dump that they were able to say, okay, we now know where every problem in our system is, and we have a plan to address each one of those problems. And this plan, the first Batch of fixes we’re going to do. We’re going to have that done before the end of summer.
And so immediately they’ve gone from being the black sheep of their county region, whatever, to having more proactivity than all of their neighbors. And to see that happen in a matter of weeks is so cool.
Chad Franzen: 12:10
How does condition-based maintenance change the way that public works leaders assign their crews or their equipment, or configure their budget?
Kwin Peterson: 12:19
Yeah. So one of the outgrowths of going to proactive maintenance using condition-based maintenance is that you’re able to rationally assign resources to your problems. You know, right now, the way we approach things is we look at the calendar, we say, well, it’s 2026, we’re going to clean the third of our system, and every pipe is going to get cleaned, and then we’ll be done with it. Of course, when we go in and have data, we can see that only 11% of that section of the pipe of the system that we’re going to clean this year. Only 11% of those pipes actually need to get cleaned.
So when we have that data, we’re then able to deploy the resources instead of doing work that’s unnecessary to doing work that is necessary. And this is how you can go from being reactive and doing nothing to being proactive, addressing every problem in your system and doing it faster than your neighbor, who is still being proactive, but only on a third of their system at a time.
Chad Franzen: 13:27
Do you think most cities that don’t utilize this technology are engulfed in that kind of unnecessary work?
Kwin Peterson: 13:34
Oh, absolutely. I mean, by definition, if you are cleaning 100% of your pipes, you are doing unnecessary work. It’s just a matter of how much unnecessary work you are doing. There’s a band where the pain of changing, obviously, is not worth the squeeze for some people. But yeah, I’ve been to systems where, as it turns out, 96% of their cleaning was wasted because 96% of their pipes were clean.
And in that case, it’s a no-brainer. It’s like, why are we wasting 96% of our time? I’ve been to other systems where that first leap, like their system, has been neglected for so long. We’ll get to that first leap, and we’ll find that only maybe 46% of their pipes are okay. But what’s great about that is, well, now they know.
Well, at least 46% of our pipes don’t need attention. We still have more to do than our neighbors do. But now we know exactly what it is. And really, that’s the definition of proactivity: knowing what I need to do and making a plan to do it. And then we carry that into effect by actually doing the plan.
But the beauty of that approach is that when you have you, you have prioritized the problems and you’ve made the plan. It becomes remarkably easy to go to the City Council, that same city council that has been pushing back on you for decades and saying, well, that’s an unnecessary expense. We have potholes to fix when you can go in with data and you can say, ” This is what we see, this is what needs to be done, this is how much it’s going to cost. This is the consequence. If we don’t do it, suddenly the money becomes available.
It’s amazing how effectively data can create political will.
Chad Franzen: 15:42
Sure. So what kind of data are what you know, if there are cities that have been just basically using routine cleaning as a way to learn what’s in their pipes or whatever, what, what kind of data are they missing out on?
Kwin Peterson: 15:55
Oh, yeah, that’s a great question. So, some things that even the most proactive cities don’t know because if they’re not using data, what is the correct frequency of cleaning? This is really this is a really good question because even if you’re doing rotational cleaning and you’re starting to say, well, I have a list of 60 hotspots, these are places where I’m going to go clean every quarter maybe. Well, you’re still cleaning every quarter. What we’ve found is once you’re able to use something lightweight, like acoustic assessment instead of something that’s a big, heavy sledgehammer, like a cleaning truck, once you’re able to use that on a regular basis, you can start to find out things like, well, that thing that we’re cleaning every, every month or every quarter, we actually only need to go out and clean it every nine months.
So the more often you can touch something and get data out of it, the more you understand it and what its cadence needs to be. Other things that come out of a data-driven, proactive approach are we get to update our maps with much greater frequency. We, all of our workers are now carrying phones and maps and the ability to report. And that’s all data. And that can all go into being proactive when they’re out just doing their regular thing.
They should be logging. What is the condition of this manhole cover, for instance, because covers degrade over time. They can get cracked. What is the condition of this manhole’s collar? Because those things wear out and can cause bike crashes and things like that.
Here’s a photograph of it. And then we’re going to sort for that. So the old model of let’s just go out and clean and then call it done versus the new model of let’s go out and grab data about it and then decide what to do. It’s just an order of magnitude more effective. There’s so many things you can see when you do that that you won’t capture otherwise.
Chad Franzen: 18:07
Yeah. You touched on manholes there. What, how do city manholes benefit specifically?
Kwin Peterson: 18:14
Okay. So here’s something that we’ve only realized in the last couple of months. When you’re talking about a collection system, you’re looking at the surface area of that collection system for problems. Now the surface area is where the wastewater contacts the side of the pipe or the side of the manhole. And that’s where things break and stuff.
So what we didn’t realize until we did the math is that manholes as a function of the surface area of your system constitute about 30 to 40% of the total surface area of your system. And yet almost no rotational approaches or, and certainly no reactive approaches will systematically result in a manhole inspection that captures that 30% of your system. I was talking with a system operator a couple of weeks ago, and he said, yeah, we are capturing 100% of our system. I said, you’re carrying 100% of your pipes. He said, yeah, we’re capturing 100% of our pipes every five years.
I said, well, then you are capturing 70% of your system every five years. And he was like, oh yeah, you’re right. We are. We are missing all of our manholes. And that’s an example of things that we just don’t even think about.
We’ve been in the business of doing this for six years, and it never occurred to us that that was what was going on.
Chad Franzen: 19:47
Interesting. So as we kind of wrap things up here, if a city wants to become more proactive, what’s kind of the first step? Worrying about data, collecting better data, changing their operating procedure, training their crews differently, or just rethinking the whole maintenance strategy?
Kwin Peterson: 20:02
Yeah, that’s really the first thing you need to do is think about what do we want to do? What is our desired end state? And it can be as simple as I want to have no emergency overtime this year. Is that my primary driver or I want to have, you know, I had 14 spills last year. I would like to drop that by 75%.
I would like to, you know, reduce that down to maybe four spills this year or no more than four spills this year. So it’s setting a goal. Maybe it’s saying, okay, we’re going to build a model in our heads or maybe on paper of risk versus cost. And there’s a lot of data out there about what the right balance is or how you can balance risk and cost. The most risky and costly thing is to do reactionary maintenance.
The least risky and the most expensive is to clean every pipe every year and camera, every pipe every year. So somewhere in there, there’s an ideal balance. We’ve found that using acoustic assessment across an entire system and then cleaning only what needs to be cleaned is where the ideal balance is between risk and cost. Just statistically, your mileage may vary, and every system has their own things that they’re really anxious about. But my advice would be, if you want to go from proactive to reactive.
Number one, realize it’s possible. And then number two, decide what success looks like. What does proactive mean to you? Does it mean we’re having no overtime? Does it mean we’re having no, no.
A certain number of spills or no spills. And then start to work back from there to say, what data do we need to know, and what actions do we need to be prepared to take in order to get to that end state?
Chad Franzen: 22:10
Okay. Hey. Great stuff. Kwin, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for having me today.
Kwin Peterson: 22:15
Well, Chad, thanks for talking to me. I’m always flattered when I get to play an expert here on the internet, so thank you.
Chad Franzen: 22:23
You did great. Thanks so much. So long, everybody.
Outro: 22:26
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.