Our office has the responsibility of planning, developing, and maintaining designated surface water drainage systems in Oakland County. This work is authorized by state law, commonly known as the Michigan Drain Code. In addition, as agent of the county, Jim Nash, the Water Resources Commissioner, operates and maintains Oakland County-owned water and sewer disposal systems and operates and maintains water and sewer systems for several municipalities within Oakland County through intermunicipal agreements.

Our organization has approximately 370 employees who perform operations and maintenance services for 22 local municipalities and numerous county and intercounty drains also including construction, asset management, environmental regulations, public education, water and sewer rate development, customer billing, and emergency services. We are a regional leader in high-impact regional water service delivery projects. Together, we work to pursue these five outcomes:

• protect public health and safety,
• preserve natural resources and a healthy environment,
• maintain reliable high-quality service,
• contribute to economic prosperity, and
• ensure value for investment.

In Fiscal Year 2023, we demonstrated our unwavering dedication to these outcomes through ongoing work to address affordability, pursue funding opportunities, optimize resource management, and enhance system resilience. Through careful resource management, we allocated available resources to achieve the greatest organizational value. Resource management is critical for cost-effective maintenance, rehabilitation, and replacement of Oakland County’s aging water utility infrastructure. We understand that excellent resource management results in the right resources being available at the right time for the right work.

Our organization is responsible for infrastructure and other assets valued at more than $61 billion. These assets include storm drains, sanitary and combined sewer systems, drinking water systems, lake level structures and dams.

The county's Collaborative Asset Management System (CAMS) serves as the cornerstone of our asset management and work order management initiative. CAMS efficiently records predictive, preventive, and corrective maintenance tasks across all water utilities under our jurisdiction, encompassing 50,000 work orders and over $17 million in maintenance work. However, this constitutes only a portion of our total workload. Additionally, CAMs captures crucial condition assessment data for our assets, which is integral to our asset management strategy.

Within our organization's asset management framework lies a tool for assessing and scoring individual assets within our managed utilities. These scores play a pivotal role in directing both capital and maintenance programs, essential for prolonging the life of system components and averting premature failures. This facilitates the maintenance of five-year capital plans and enables the prioritization of construction projects for drinking water systems, sewer systems, and drains. The overarching objective is to extend system component longevity through routine maintenance initiatives, while strategically replacing components when necessary to mitigate life cycle costs. By adhering to this approach, we foster the long-term sustainability and reliability of our utilities while simultaneously minimizing expenditure.

Safety and Quality Policy 

We are committed to excellence and providing progressive solutions by utilizing quality objectives, sound environmental practices and a comprehensive safety program. Our organization has pledged a commitment to maintain management practices that ensure continuous improvement, the prevention of pollution and a safe work environment for our employees. We set goals to encourage efforts to meet or exceed local, state and federal water quality standards, environmental regulations and safety requirements within our control.