Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now. I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA's News Director.
Our guest on this episode is Sharon Israel, Utilities Director for the public power community of Loveland, Co.
The City of Loveland in late 2024 announced Sharon as its next Utilities Director.
Prior to her current role as Utilities Director for Loveland, Sharon served as Director of Utilities with the City of Arvada, Colorado.
Sharon, thanks for joining us.
Sharon Israel
Thanks for having me.
Paul Ciampoli
Sharon, to get our conversation started, I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about what your priorities have been since becoming Utilities Director?
Sharon Israel
Well, I've been at this job about seven months, so [the] top priority has been a lot of learning.
For most of my twenty-five year career, I've worked with utility infrastructure at the local and state level here in Colorado.
But to be honest, the electric utility space is pretty new for me since I started in this role.
Most of my career has been in the water utility world.
So here in Loveland, my role includes overseeing the city's electric utility and also our water, wastewater and public broadband services.
So to give you a picture of our scope, our service area includes a population of about 80,000 people over about 40 square miles and our power comes from Platte River Power Authority.
We get power from Platte River and then our internal city team does the work to plan, design and operate the distribution infrastructure for the city and our customers.
So back to your question about my priorities.
As a new leader here in Loveland, my top priority is to learn, to ask questions and really seek to understand where we've been, where we are and where we want to go.
How are we on staffing? How are we on finances, planning?
As a local government here at the city, there are high expectations of things like accountability and transparency.
So I'm asking questions like, how are we doing with public trust? How are we doing with collaboration with other city departments? That's all helping me identify what are the big policy issues that we have here in Loveland?
So I thought I'd share one of the ways that I'm doing this that I'm really enjoying is by hosting employee listening sessions.
We held 14 listening sessions in my first few months and I got a chance to talk with 97 employees.
For context, we have about 250 in the department right now, and now each week going forward, I've set aside some office hours every week so employees can sign up for a little window to come and talk with me.
We also have two advisory boards and those advisory boards are comprised of members appointed by our City Council.
So as I'm getting up to speed, I’ve spent a good amount of time with those board members to help understand what's on their mind and then specifically to the electric utility world, which I think listeners are most interested in here, I'm doing things like going on tours.
I actually went on a tour with some of our linemen up into the foothills west of the city of Loveland, kind of on the way to Rocky Mountain National Park and we've got some power distribution up there and on one of my tours, I even saw a bear.
So that paints a picture for your listeners on what it's like to manage power infrastructure in Colorado.
But I'm also learning a lot from my new role as a member of the Platte River Power Authority
Board of Directors. So, just again, a lot of learning.
My first few months as I've been learning and asking questions, one thing I was thinking about reflecting on knowing we're going to talk today is it's really been interesting that I've heard a lot of public power challenges that feel really similar to the water utility world, which again is where I'm most familiar.
And those kinds of similarities are things like competing priorities of regulatory challenges, aging infrastructure, revenue requirements, rate setting, planning for growth and development.
So whether you're talking about electricity or water, those are all things that we have to as leaders in the utility industry wrestle with, communicate about, advise our elected officials about, and again, whether you're talking about water or power.
I also feel like I would be remiss if I didn't give APPA a shout out because you guys have been a great resource too in helping me get up to speed.
I was not able to make it to the APPA conference this year, but I am definitely going to make it a priority to be in Boston in 2026.
Paul Ciampoli
I would highly recommend that. Obviously, I'm a little bit biased in terms of touting the national conference, but it is definitely a wealth of information.
I did have one quick follow-up question for you, if I could, Sharon. You mentioned these listening sessions with the employees. Anything memorable that jumped out at you from those sessions?
Sharon Israel
It's interesting talking to 97 people. There were definitely some themes that emerged. Let me kind of paint the picture for you.
So I try to keep the sessions to 6 to 8 people, so it was really like a small group conversation and I asked them all to think about what we should keep doing, what we should start doing and what we should stop doing.
So that was the prompt. Keep, start, stop and some of the themes that emerged -- and I think this speaks to just the type of talent we attract in this public utility space -- is a hunger for learning, a hunger for collaboration.
Some of the challenges that are coming up are around -- there's so many different problems we're trying to solve.
How can we work together to prioritize them, not just in this utility space, but as part of the larger city organization.
I also heard there's a lot of pride in the work. We've got a lot of folks who grew up in Colorado who are really proud to serve the community in Colorado.
And so they're looking for ways to continue to grow their careers in this space, which gave me a lot of ideas about just how do we work to support this really engaged workforce who wants to be here, who wants to be serving their communities and doing this work and as you know, this isn't just a nine to five job, right? It's 24/7, 365 emergency call outs on a semi regular basis, all kinds of weather.
So some of those takeaways are really about how can I help continue to support the people who are really the backbone of this organization?
Paul Ciampoli
In terms of preparing for this interview, one of the things that jumped out at me is the fact that in early July, as you know, the utility changed its name from Loveland Water and Power to City of Loveland Utilities.
So two questions related to that. First, could you elaborate on why that change in name occurred? And also, how has the utility communicated with its customers about the name change?
Sharon Israel
A little bit about Loveland. We are a city. We're a home rule, council manager, form of government and we have a nine-member City Council.
So my role as utilities director, I report to the deputy city manager in our organizational structure.
And I start with that in terms of why the name change because we are an integral part of a city organization that has a lot of other functions.
We've got a fire department, we've got a Police Department, we've got libraries.
We've got planning and parks, golf courses. We've got great golf courses. You should come and visit if you haven't been to Loveland, Colorado.
We've got an amazing history of arts and culture investment. So we've got a museum that's part of the city.
So over the decades, as the city organization has evolved, as it's grown, the utility services have reported through different departments, through different names.
So why the change from Loveland Water and Power to City of Loveland Utilities?
Well, first of all, it's been kicking around for a couple of years. I've only been here since December of last year, so about seven months.
But this started back in 2023 when the city did an overall revamp of our pay plan, looking at positions, titles.
So my position title actually changed back then from Director of Water and Power to Director of Utilities to align better with industry standards.
So at that time when my title change was contemplated to eventually change the department name as well.
But when you decide to do something like that is a lot of logistics and so it was kind of put on the shelf for a while.
But this year we decided it was the right time for a couple of reasons.
One is the city overall is undergoing a rebranding initiative.
So there's a new logo, there's branding design, there's new colors. And so as a department, we thought if we're going to change our name, let's piggyback on that effort.
And so that's the timing of this year, so with our new branding, we're really aligning more strongly with the city organization, the city overall.
We want to be serving our community as one city, one team, one voice, one experience. So that is if you're coming to talk with the utilities department or you're coming in to talk with the Parks Department or you're searching our website for information, it all feels like you're part of the city of Loveland services and it's consistent.
Another reason for the change is that this new name -- it better reflects the full scope of what we do and so having water and power in our title left out our wastewater team and also left out our Pulse broadband Internet team.
So when we decided to call ourselves utilities and under the umbrella, it really unified all of our utility services in one place and as far as communicating it out, we started by talking with our Advisory Board. Our Advisory Board is called the Loveland Utilities Commission.
So when I went and approached them, they said, OK, well that makes sense because that's what we're already called. So that was a good alignment.
And then you also asked how do we communicate with our customers and we have an amazing communications team that helps us with small projects, large projects, short, long-term strategic communications to help enhance our customer experience.
So when we decided this was the year to make the change to our department name and we worked with our advisory boards and council, they started putting it out in newsletters. We changed the names of our social media channels, we changed the communications with our website URL and then we also messaged to say it's going to take us a little time to convert everything over.
So setting that expectation that you're probably going to see water and power for a while, but we're the same great service provider with the same track record, you're just going to start to see us under our new name with our new logo and all that.
And I have to say, so far it's been really well received. Our team members are happy and members of the public are embracing it.
I would say the only potentially negative questions that we've been getting are more about what's it costing to make this change and that's fair.
So one of the things we've committed to is we're using a lot of our existing assets. So if we've got brochures that have the previous name on them, we're just going to go ahead and use those until they're done.
We're not going to try to make this happen overnight, so trying to minimize the upfront cost of converting everything all at once.
Paul Ciampoli
So also in early July, and this is actually something that we covered in our newsletter, as you know the city noted the success of the utility’s drone inspection program, which launched a year ago.
Among other things, the drone has been utilized to inspect utility poles.
So again, two-part question. One, can you provide additional details on how this program has been a success?
And also other than utility pole inspections, what are the other ways in which the drone has been utilized?
Sharon Israel
I love this program and I have to tell you that the folks we have leading this are so excited.
So to go back to a year ago when we kicked off this program it was really to improve the efficiency of our utility pole inspection program.
And so in the past year, we've inspected about 1,500 of our city utility poles with the drone.
We're able to average 31 poles an hour, which is amazing. It's significantly faster than to try to do it manually – not only can we do it faster, it also gives us more information because we can with the drone and being able to fly around different angles around poles, we can get the overhead angles and get the side angles. We're capturing a lot of details that's just simply not visible from the ground.
It's also a safety matter, so we're able to access poles from a much safer space if it's more difficult for one of our team members to get to the top of it and giving us just more information overall.
I asked the team for some more data on their success. I'm going to share a couple of numbers with you.
About 60% of the identified issues, that is they went out, they inspected something, identified an issue. About 60% of them had the potential to cause an outage.
And so we estimate that the inspections, by catching those issues before they caused an outage, we estimate that already in the last year we've prevented over 850,000 minutes of power outage time.
That means that we're not out there responding to an emergency.
It means that our customers are having more reliable service because we're able to get out there and see these things and fix them before they cause an outage.
For the other 40%, those are opportunities that weren’t necessarily outage risks, but they were a chance to enhance our overall safety and resilience of what they're finding up there. So very successful. It takes a little bit to get set up to get folks trained.
When we do have folks out there, our drone pilot, he wears a vest.
He's got a little sandwich board that he'll put on the ground that explains what we're doing and why we're doing it to have some more transparency in case there's a privacy concern.
But I can’t see a future where we're not using drones for exactly this purpose.
And Paul, you also asked what other ways we're using this and power poles is the primary reason that we set this up.
But here's some other ideas that the team has run with in terms of what we can use the drone for.
We have a solar field as part of our suite of energy generation here in the city, so we've been able to conduct inspections of the solar field using a drone looking for hail damage. We have an infrared camera on there so we can identify if there are any cells within the solar array that are underperforming or have some sort of outage in them that we need to get into repair.
Last year we had a major fire in our watershed that provides drinking water to the city, so we actually used the drone to go out and fly the burn area after the wildfire that helped assist us in identifying areas where we might want to do some mitigation to prevent runoff of water in the burn area and protect our water supply.
Similarly, on the water supply side, we've used drone imagery to try to identify where we have invasive species plants that we can go in and remove and again be a preventative measure.
And then when we have major projects that we've got going on.
For example, we just built a water storage tank. We've been using the drone to capture footage of the progress of that project and document it both for communicating with the public, which is just cool to see a tank being built, but also for a future reference in case we ever need it for maintenance reasons.
So those are just a few other ways that we've been able to really enhance our overall operations and maintenance using that kind of technology.
Paul Ciampoli
So a quick follow up…I would imagine if you're a public power utility that's listening to this episode of our podcast and they don't have a drone that they're using currently the idea of getting one and doing some or all of what you guys are doing is intriguing.
Against that backdrop, what would be the key factors they would have to consider before going down that road?
Sharon Israel
There's a couple things that come to mind.
One is you need to have a commitment for professional training for your pilot. There's certain requirements that that pilot has to meet in order to fly the drone safely to meet FAA regulations. So don’t just go out and order a drone on Amazon and give it to somebody and have them fly it.
You really want to make sure that your operator is trained on this.
You're also going to want to have some kind of way to tie the drone photography and footage and other imaging to your asset management system.
So spend some time thinking about how your asset management system could integrate with the information and data you're collecting in the field. That's just going to save you a lot of time in the long run. So those are just a couple of ideas.
And then of course you know as technology is evolving all the time, there's different functions of different cameras.
So if you're more interested in more simple imagery, just like taking a video, that's going to cost you less than if you want to do something like I described with more infrared type capabilities.
So just think about what you're trying to do and what you're looking for and before you just go buy something, really look at the pros and cons of the different options out there.
Paul Ciampoli
Yeah, that makes sense.
Sharon, my final question for you and you mentioned Platte River Power Authority earlier in our conversation.
Obviously, Loveland is one of four Colorado communities. It's served by Platte River Power Authority, which is a joint action agency.
So I wanted to give you the opportunity to describe the ways in which Loveland benefits from its relationship with Platte River Power Authority.
Sharon Israel
Loveland, as you mentioned, is one of four communities that comprise Platte River. It's a partnership that's over 50 years old.
Our other owner communities are Fort Collins, Estes Park [and Longmont]. So just for perspective….Platte River supplies energy for a population of about 350,000 people.
The way it is organized is there's a board of directors for Platte River that's comprised of the mayors of each city and then one city employee.
I sit on the board of Platte River in my role as utilities director for Loveland, along with the mayor of Loveland and then representatives from the other three communities.
I mention that because one of the benefits that we have in Loveland….being part of this is local control. We decide our community's priorities, what direction we want the Platte River to take, the level of service, working with our regional partners together.
This is becoming especially important as we're transitioning to decarbonizing our portfolio, as we're moving toward virtual power plant structures as we're moving toward together as four communities, figuring out how we want our DER systems to be integrated together.
So local control is a huge benefit because it's our decision on how we're going to deploy the resources in our community for what we want as far as level of service and an energy portfolio.
But also it's not-for-profit, which is a great advantage of public power, right? We're really proud to be able to provide high quality services at a low cost.
The people who are working for our utility, they live in this area and that's a special kind of commitment to service and then by partnering together, we have an economy of scale, right?
So we're better together and we're spreading those fixed costs across a larger customer base -- helps keeps our rates lower.
I was thinking about again what I've learned in my tenure here so far and one example of local control I'd like to highlight is Platte River's Board of Directors adopted a resource diversification policy back in 2018 where we directed Platte River's general manager to work toward a goal of 100% non-carbon resource mix and asking that general manager to come up with a plan so that we could do that because that reflects our community values, while also maintaining our three pillars -- we call them our three pillars of providing reliability, being environmentally responsible and financially sustainable.
And so those three pillars again are also reflective of what I consider our local control, our decision on our values and policy.
Paul Ciampoli
Sharon, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us.
I'm going to go ahead and offer you an open invitation to come back as a guest, perhaps, you know, six months, a year from now, where we could revisit some of these topics and I'm sure there's a lot of other activities at your utility that we can talk about in the second interview.
Sharon Israel
Paul, it would be a pleasure.
Paul Ciampoli
OK. Well, thanks again, Sharon.
Sharon Israel
All right. Thank you so much.
Paul Ciampoli
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, graphic and digital designer at APPA.
I'm Paul Ciampoli and we'll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
