In a recent interview with APPA, Sharon Israel, Utilities Director for the public power community of Loveland, Co., detailed how she has proactively engaged with the utility’s workforce and discussed the success of the utility’s drone inspection program.
The City of Loveland in late 2024 announced Israel as its next Utilities Director. Prior to her current role as Utilities Director for Loveland, she served as Director of Utilities with the City of Arvada, Colorado.
In a recent episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast, Israel discussed what her priorities have been since becoming Utilities Director.
“I've been at this job about seven months, so [the] top priority has been a lot of learning,” she said in the interview, which took place in July.
“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?”
She said that “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.”
Israel noted that she has hosted 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.”
When asked if anything memorable jumped out at her from the listening sessions, she said, “It's interesting talking to 97 people. There were definitely some themes that emerged.”
She said that she tries 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.”
There are “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?”
She 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?”
Drone Inspection Program
In early July, 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.
“I love this program and I have to tell you that the folks we have leading this are so excited,” Israel said.
“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,” she noted.
“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” 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,” she said.
“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.”
She said that 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.”
She noted that it takes “a little bit to get set up to get folks trained.”
The drone pilot 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.”
Israel said that she “can’t see a future where we're not using drones for exactly this purpose.”
She went on to note that “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,” Israel said.
“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.”
In the interview, she also discussed the utility this summer changing its name from Loveland Water and Power to City of Loveland Utilities, as well as the ways in which Loveland benefits from its relationship with the Platte River Power Authority, a joint action agency.
