Water Champion Chat: Emily Simonson

For those who don’t know, can you tell us about who you are and what you do?

I’m the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the US Water Alliance. I love that very vague title because it means I’m involved in a range of topics and efforts. I work with our diverse, amazing members from across the country on the things that are most near and dear to them. Another favorite part of my job is bringing new efforts to life.

The US Water Alliance and our members believe in an equitable and sustainable water future for all people, so everything I’ve worked on over the years has been very personally fulfilling. Our network is inclusive, with many perspectives represented. An approach at the heart of what we do with our national network is One Water, which is both a mindset and a set of approaches that address complex water challenges collaboratively and with a systems-thinking lens. It involves breaking across silos between drinking water, stormwater, wastewater, and among water users within a watershed. It first gained traction in the early 2000s when more and more water professionals started recognizing that modern communities look vastly different to the ones the nation’s water systems were originally built for. We’re a whole leadership movement dedicated to thinking about new ways of addressing 21^st century water challenges through what is, in my opinion, the only framework strong enough to navigate a rapidly shifting social, economic and environmental landscape.

Are there any ideas that stuck with you from MPC’s Vision for Water event?

At that time, everybody came down off our Bipartisan Infrastructure Law sugar high and we were feeling a little pessimistic. What if we never get this amount of funding again? The gap’s still so big, what do we need to be doing? Knowing our reality now, the solutions that we came up with in that panel and the conversations that followed are even more important.

One thing that resonated from that event to this day is that there are things we can do and lean into regardless of what’s going on at the federal level. I remember talking a lot that day about where my inspiration comes from. Its local leaders thinking not about how to fight over slices of the pie, but rather how to work together to make the pie itself bigger, like the stories that we shared from Madison and Pittsburgh. I also think a lot about the regional capacity issue. We talked about how you really can’t understate the potential significance of regional solutions, and I would double underscore that. The Alliance is embarking on a project over the next three years that focuses on policy research and innovation in the equitable regionalization landscape. And regionalization is one piece of it, but regional water partnerships of all kinds are emerging as strategic frameworks especially in times when ever resource needs to count.

Has your work changed or evolved since then? Are there any new focus areas coming into view for you in 2025?

It’s not that the old focuses were wrong. The challenges we talked about—workforce, funding, lead, affordability, setting the table with those experiencing the greatest water stress —are still major challenges. It’s just that the tools, the landscapes, and the moments of opportunity for solutions are changing in nature.

For example, we talked in the panel about chronic underinvestment in people. Now public sector employment has been under attack at the federal level, and that permeates the national culture and also directly impacts capacity among the regulatory community. We knew investing in people was important a year ago, so what can we do now? A back-to-fundamentals message about essential workers is more important than ever: showing their contributions to our communities in a very matter-of-fact, nonpartisan, “everyone-can-support-this” kind of way. At the end of the day, these are the folks we need working on behalf of all of us. Investing in these water systems—including in people—has economic benefits that multiply across our communities—rural, urban, blue, red, or purple. They’re core to what we need to have thriving communities at any scale.

Another priority is to remind people to see the opportunities where they come up—that it’s not all doom and gloom. For example, one of the things we’re watching with more Republican control federally is whether there are going to be utilities who approach EPA about renegotiating existing consent decrees. [MPC note: A consent decree is a legally binding agreement, often used by the federal government to resolve civil cases involving violations of the Clean Water Act and other federal environmental laws. It is typically negotiated between regulatory agencies and the violating party, outlining specific actions, timelines, and compliance measures to address the violations and prevent future infractions.] Could these renegotiations be opportunities to take what would have been a traditional approach to getting to a compliance outcome and replace it with a more innovative, multi-benefit approach?

Are there connections that don’t tend to happen on a regular basis in the water sector that you want to build and maintain?

Something that’s been bubbling up more and more is around the tools that aggregate data within a region, which can lead to different, more transparent decision-making processes and strategy conversations across sectors.

There’s some really cool work happening in Central Ohio right now, where folks are working together across 15 different counties because they know that that region of Ohio is where a lot of data centers will want to come in. They’ve built a tool that combines data and can show where there’s treatment capacity for drinking water and for wastewater in the county alongside other data from that region like population and land use and in the context of different climate modeling projections. With that tool, they can play with different scenarios and think about tradeoffs among different solutions. Those simple data efforts can lead to a lot more collaboration on actual projects and decision-making. The tool in Central Ohio, which is about to be launched, is going to be valuable to developers, conservation groups, municipalities, especially small municipalities. It levels the playing field to have a shared set of information.

There’s one more type of collaboration I want to flag. The sector is learning a lot about the benefits of having strong engagement between large government institutions and community-based organizations and residents. Without these, there’s no way to ground truth that the solutions being proposed actually work for people. We need to keep knitting together the social networks so that, where that’s happening, the trust that’s been built and the progress that’s been made doesn’t get lost. I want to celebrate the water leaders out there saying the outcomes that were important to us remain important to us— and having proactive strategy conversations about how to best get to those outcomes, despite the landscape changes.

How are you thinking about using messaging and communications to help navigate uncertainty in the water sector, given changes in federal policy?

You message because you want somebody to do, think, or feel something that is aligned with an outcome you’re searching for. With only so much ability to message at once, we’re thinking about the highest return on investment opportunities for messaging right now.

We need to talk about the essential nature of investing in water infrastructure. Coming back to that as a nonpartisan issue is key: reminding folks that when you get down to what our movement is trying to do for water, this is in service of our economy, public health, and our national security. People often ask, how are you messaging on climate? At the end of the day, it’s not code-switching to boil your message down to the fact that this is about community safety—the climate resiliency solutions we’re trying to advance are about keeping us safe. We can get back to those basics.

There’s a lot of intentional pressure being put on people to code switch—to drop the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We’re learning that some organizations face major risks to using the language, others hardly any, and many who are finding a way to talk about the work in different ways with the intent to keep doing the actual work. Those decisions are being made based on each organization’s context. If it’s just about messaging and concern about how you might be perceived or how effective you might be if you keep using certain words words, you can use message testing to test that rather than shooting from the hip. Best practices like that still apply at this moment.

What’s your vision for water for Chicago and Illinois?

I work nationally, but this is my home. Chicago has some amazing water champions in it who care about the region as a whole and the state as a whole. I want us to be purposeful in this moment and triage what we have to triage strategically. My vision for us is that four years from now, we’ve laid the groundwork for what we need to be doing as a basin and as a nation. How do we avoid what I think is being suggested, which is just triage and back down? How do we get ahead of planning, and use our work to unite and shore up our democratic institutions and culture, and our democratic culture through what we do in the water space? I think Chicago can be a beacon for that, and I think Illinois can be a beacon for that.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.