The following is a transcript of the March 16, 2026, episode of Public Power Now. Learn more about subscribing to Public Power Now at Publicpower.org/Podcasts.
Some quotes may have been edited for clarity.
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 Marilyn Gilbert, General Manager and CEO of the Brownsville Public Utilities Board, a public power utility that delivers electric, water, and wastewater services to the Brownsville, Texas area.
Marilyn, thanks for joining us on the podcast.
Marilyn Gilbert
Thank you for having me here.
Paul Ciampoli
Marilyn, the seed that was planted in my head in terms of inviting you on the podcast relates to something we actually covered in our newsletter recently, and specifically the fact that the utility in late January announced its 2026 to 2030 strategic business plan.
And that plan identifies a series of critical focus areas that support the utility's mission to create long-term value for customers.
So I’ve got a total of three questions I wanted to run by you. And the first one is, could you detail the key elements of the plan?
Marilyn Gilbert
Our strategic business plan is really our playbook and is how we make sure that everyone at PUB, every department, every team member, and we're all going in the same direction.
The plan centers a set of critical focus areas that guides how Brownsville Public Utilities Board intends to strengthen reliability, affordability, and long-term value for our community. As you know, we are all public power and most of us have the same type of missions in mind.
But we also have water and wastewater and so we built this strategic plan around 10 strategic focus areas. It sounds like a lot, but it really isn't. Because once you narrow it down, we're guiding towards infrastructure resilience, securing our water supply, modernizing technology, keeping rates affordable, developing our workforce, and strengthening community engagement. It's really comprehensive because utilities are complex, but the goal is really simple.
We want to deliver service that we can count on and service that our community can count on and so we make sure that we have four outcomes based on our strategic plan. First, we want to maintain fair and transparent financial sustainable rates and that is critical.
We want to be affordable, but we also want to be responsible for the system. Second, building a resilient, high-performing workforce. Our people are infrastructure too. We want to make sure that they're taken care of, as well as making sure that our workforce turnover is being addressed. And third, improving customer service satisfaction and trust.
If our customers don't trust us, then we're not doing our job. And the fourth outcome that we're looking into is enhancing the resiliency and reliability of the electric, water, and wastewater services. That's really the core of what we do. We keep the lights on, we keep the water flowing, and the systems working.
We're also tracking ourself against 16 industry benchmarks in KPIs. So we're not just grading our homework, we're measuring against utilities' national standards, and we're making sure that we are accountable and transparent. And this is not just a one-year plan, it's a five-year roadmap, and it covers from fiscal year 2026 through 2030. It helps us sequence projects responsibly, prioritize capital improvements, and make sure that we are not overloading our customers financially while we're stepping in for the future.
So at the end of the day, the strategic business plan ensures that every dollar we invest, every project we launch, and every operational improvement we make is aligned with our mission, delivering safe, reliable, and affordable utility services to our community.
Paul Ciampoli
Marilyn, what are the ways in which the plan represents a culmination of extensive internal collaboration and stakeholder engagement?
Marilyn Gilbert
The business strategic plan is really a result of months of collaboration, and I really mean real collaboration across our organization and with our community. Internally, we included our board of directors, our executive leadership, department directors, managers, and employees across every division because strategy isn't just about leadership.
The people who operate the systems every day have to help design the future of those systems. Externally, we engaged with the City of Brownsville, with Cameron County, with the Port of Brownsville, our economic development partners, and our consumer advisory panel. Utilities don't just operate alone.
We're part of the larger economic and civic ecosystem. Our consumer advisory panel consists of various different customers across the business. The city of Brownsville is our owner and we are an independent agency of the city. Cameron County is where we're at on the border by the sea and beyond.
And the port of Brownsville is within our service territory and they have a separate elected board. We actually conducted more than 40 internal and external stakeholder interviews, surveys, and we facilitated various workshops. We asked tough questions. What are we doing well? Where are we vulnerable? What risks are in the horizons, and what opportunities do we have? We wanted to ensure that every viewpoint was taken into account.
So we went through a full structured planning process that included full SWOT analysis, and we also offered leadership offsite sessions to not be distracted amongst the things that we do on a day-to-day business.
It wasn't rushed, and it wasn't theoretical, and it was deliberate. What I'm most proud of the plan is it reflects both operational reality and community priority. It's grounded data, but it's shaped by the people. And it aligns our leadership around one shared vision, which is essential when you're managing a critical infrastructure. At the end of the day, this is Brownsville's plan as much as it is Brownsville PUB’s.
Paul Ciampoli
And so going forward, how will the utility engage with customers and community members as the plan is implemented?
Marilyn Gilbert
Now comes the execution piece. Very good question. It's a strategy that only works if you actually implement. As we move into the implementation, transparency, communication, and accountability are front and center for us. We are committing to quarterly updates to our board and to the city commission, not at the surface level updates, but real progress directly towards our KPIs.
If we say we're improving reliability and customer satisfaction, we are going to show the data behind it. We also communicate our major milestones and key initiatives through public meetings, presentations, and community outreach.
While something significant happens, whether it's infrastructure investment, technology deployment, or performance improvement, our community will hear it directly from us. Because we built the measurable KPIs into the plan and aligned them into a five-year roadmap, we're able to track progress in a very disciplined way. It really focuses us to prioritize responsibility. It keeps us really focused and allows our customers to clearly see how we're performing.
Community engagement and customer experience are not just side effects for us. They are formal strategic focus areas. It is intentional. We're community-owned, which means we operate for more residents and that we also answer to them.
As Brownsville continues to grow and evolve, we're committed to growing within it responsibly in a transparent way that strengthens our trust. And I truly believe that trust is just as important as any physical infrastructure we build.
Paul Ciampoli
So just switching topics here, as I was preparing for this interview and researching, one of the things that jumped out at me in terms of another timely development is the fact that the utility's advanced metering infrastructure project reached a significant milestone in January when all systems went live with real production data.
And as the utility noted, the deployment remains on track to be completed in March 2027.
So against that background, how will this project benefit the utility and its customers?
Marilyn Gilbert
So AMI is a game changer for us. It improves operational efficiency. It strengthens our financial performance. It elevates customer service, all while allowing smarter management of both water and electric systems.
Our AMI system is not just about our electrical systems, but also our water systems. What it really does is shift us from reactive to proactive.
And it's just as important as it gives our customers more control and visibility. There are three areas that I'm going to cover for the benefits, and that's our operational standpoint, financially, and of course, the customer benefits.
From an operational standpoint, the benefits are very tangible. We know that we can reduce labor costs. Why? We no longer are sending out staff for the routine manual meter reads. We know that we can improve safety. Why?
Because there are fewer truck rolls and fewer field visits. We eliminate manual reads, which helps significantly reduce human error. And we gain better system planning capability because we now have real-time, high-quality data to perform those decisions. Financially, AMI [strengthens] the integrity of our billing system…We improve billing transparency because the usage data is accurate and accessible. We increase revenue assurance and protect against loss. We reduce billing corrections and customer complaints.
And from a customer perspective, and this is where it gets really exciting because customers become more aware of their usage. On the water side, they get to see real-time consumption, so if there's a leak, it's a leak detection. And so the behavior that impacts the bill, they can see how to change their usage pattern. We move into a more proactive approach. Customers receive alerts for potential water leaks and unusual electric activity, and we can monitor consumption and conservation efforts.
We can see consumption threats and adjust accordingly. It's about empowerment and information changes behavior. At a high level, this is a $29 million investment in modernizing our infrastructure. And the meter installation -- before the water waste order -- electric will take place through 2026. We're about 60% deployed, and we hope to be fully implemented by March of 2027.
Paul Ciampoli
If I could ask a quick follow-up question. How has the utility communicated with customers as it relates to this plan as it's being rolled out and obviously communicated the benefits?
Marilyn Gilbert
So we have our traditional forms, which is our press releases. We have various different status reports that we do to our board and to our public advisory community panel.
We also push out information to various different media outlets, either through our Facebook or Instagram, in addition to sometimes even Nextdoor. We sometimes have done various different news media releases or actually interviews with the local newspaper. And of course, what's most important is one-on-one meetings with the various different community groups, as well as making presentations at Rotary Clubs or Kiwanis or other service groups that they can then disperse the information into the community.
Paul Ciampoli
I guess it goes without saying that at this point for people that follow the power industry, that data centers are front and center in terms of a hot topic these days. And Texas in particular has drawn a lot of interest from data center developers.
So I thought I'd take this interview as an opportunity to see if there's been any data centers proposed in Brownsville to date. And if not, does the utility have a strategy in place to respond to data center proposals in the future?
Marilyn Gilbert
So we have not been directly approached for a data center, but we have had very large loads that have entered our service community. I will start by sharing that when we had our first large load come into our community, it was a one-year implementation, and then all of a sudden they shortened it to 8 months, and we delivered and provided -- that load was three times the size of our largest customer.
So we were able to enact and communicate to the commission and to our board the various things that we were doing. The important thing to keep in mind is that sometimes, some of the policies and procedures that you have in place may hinder you from taking action when you need to take action or delay a project. And so we have the ability through our ordinances for a non-standard agreement.
What does that mean? Our commission sets the rates for general customer base. Our board manages the full day-to-day ability, but they've been empowered to be able to do non-standard agreements to be able to address and ensure that the customer base is protected against any additional increases that are shifted from the commercial accounts into the residential accounts. So with that also in mind, we also have to think about the energy supply and where it's coming at.
So at the transmission level, we're actually working with our regional planning groups and we're looking into ensuring that we're at the table to ensure that we know what it is that's going on. We're making sure that our substations are being improved and also upgraded and also are including an ERCOT system plannings.
We operate in ERCOT and ERCOT is the balancing authority for us, but we also need to understand what plans they have for us to make sure that we have the right reliability in place for our system….service policies have been aligned to address some of the planning studies for ERCOT.
And so as the additional planning studies are needed, those infrastructure costs are borne by the development and not necessarily by our customer base. So in other words, they're not sunk costs that are coming into the utility. So we're participating in transmission planning means we're implementing technology modernization.
And of course, our strategic plan addresses all of this as well. So as we implement new technology and we modernize our systems, that will help us also in the event a large data center comes in there. Our billing systems are being upgraded and other technology is also being deployed to help us be more efficient. And we're also including various different other best industry practices integrated into our working plans, into our procedures, and into our policies.
Paul Ciampoli
Well, Marilyn, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today.
And we obviously covered a lot of ground, so I would be interested in having you back as a guest at some point in the future. Just for starters, we could obviously kind of revisit maybe the business plan maybe a year or so from now.
And obviously there's a lot of other things that the utilities involved in that we could discuss as well. So I just wanted to throw that out there.
Marilyn Gilbert
Thank you so much for having me here. I really do appreciate being on here and provide the exciting things that we're doing on our strategic plan. And any future plans you have for me to be a guest speaker, I will be happy to come back and give you a progress of where we're at.
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 with more from the world of public power next week.
