- December 17, 2024
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As Palm Coast prepares to increase its utility rates in 2025 in order to upgrade its wastewater treatment facility, the city is looking for ways to involve and educate its residents on how its utility department functions while gaining feedback of what residents want to see in the future.
“There's a lot going on that — if you haven't been through Citizens Academy, or if you don't sit through our marathon council meetings — you may not be familiar with,” Communications Director Brittany Kershaw said.
The first step to that was Wateropolis, a scenario-driven board game meant to help people understand how a utility company makes budgeting decisions. The game night took place on Dec. 11 and Kershaw said because of the limited space, the city did not advertise the event widely. There was a limit of 40 people, divided across five groups.
The game was hosted by Raftelis Vice President of strategic planning Catherine Carter and principal consultant Jackie Jarrell. Raftelis is a local government and utility management consulting firm.
“Wateropolis, at its core, is a budgeting game,” Carter told the groups.
Jarrell said Wateropolis is a game the firm commonly plays with client staff or city residents. The players function as a generic utility company’s “board” — as the Palm Coast City Council functions as the city’s utility board — and, based on a given budget, have to make decisions on how the company functions to keep the budget balanced.
Those decision could be raising rates, using reserve funds or even making other cuts, she said.
“Everything costs something,” Jarrell said. “Letting people just kind of go through some scenarios and exercise and doing that kind of helps them to understand that it isn't just like this very straight line, direct thing.
Resident Anna Gibson and her mother were two of the residents who attended Wateropolis. Gibson said the experience left her with more confusion than before, especially as the event was not well advertised or explained online.
Before Wateropolis, Gibson said her concerns centered mainly around her pep tank functioning.
“I definitely learned stuff from attending the event,” Gibson said. “As an outsider who doesn't work in the utility department, there wasn't a lot of explanation.”
She said she wished that the city had filled more of the seats with city residents instead of having one or two city utility employees at each table.
Kershaw said Raftelis asks city utility employees to participate at each table so there are knowledgeable people available to answer any questions from those who have less experience with utilities.
But Gibson said, even with the employees, she felt her table made arbitrary decisions because the different line items, fees and parameters were not well explained. She said it also wasn’t clear what Palm Coast was trying to achieve in the first place from hosting the game.
“If your goal is to get input from the community, then you should really limit how many people are there from the actual utility department,” Gibson said. “What were the goals? If it was to educate me, great, I did learn quite a bit. But I have probably more concerns now than I did before about utilities.”
Kershaw said the city won’t likely be hosting more Wateropolis games but instead plans to host several other events, including a open-house event, beginning in January.
“That will be one where everyone will be invited and included, and we'll be able to hear feedback from the community on what they want to see for the future of the [city’s] utility,” Kershaw said.
