Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority honored for its accomplishments

One can suppose that the commission meeting room for the Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority is rarely the host for lively chatter and some good-natured teasing, as it was on Tuesday.

“Hey Scott, the suit is a different look!” says one man.

“I’d prefer my sweatshirt,” responds Scott, aka Scott Schreiber, executive director of the CCMUA.

Schreiber and his crew and a variety of community partners were there to celebrate the “Our Water’s Worth It” award presented to CCMUA by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s commissioner, Shawn M. LaTourette, who praised the behind-the-scenes hard work that facilities like CCMUA perform to provide clean drinking water, take care of sewage and build communities.

The accomplishments that won the award included the development of a long-term control plan for combined sewer overflows and an ongoing $24 million sewer separation project to alleviate flooding in the Cramer Hill section of Camden and improve the ecological health of local waterways.

“Seven times. That’s the number of times I turned on the tap this morning, getting ready for work,” LaTourette said, pointing out that we all expect clean water to come from the tap on demand.

“From the health of our families, to the success of our businesses, everything depends on our water supply — on plants and pipes hidden from view, which makes it easy for us to lose sight of our aging infrastructure until there’s a failure,” LaTourette said.

On receiving the award, Schreiber said it was based on three things:

The New Jersey Water Bank (the state revolving fund) — without that, he said, projects like the ones being celebrated would not happen. “For every million that we borrow, the Water Bank saves us $500,000 in borrowing costs.”

Collaboration in and from the community: “This community puts the ‘Our’ in ‘Our Water’s Worth It.”

And, of course, “The 1,300 or so folks that work here. For every wrench that’s turned, for every pipe that’s laid, you do the very dirty work that makes it all happen.”

But it wasn’t just about celebrating the “painstaking and difficult work,” as Schreiber described it. LaTourette pointed out how CCMUA engages with its community: “That’s not work that everybody does, but everybody should.”

And that community was in the room cheering on the CCMUA’s efforts:

Carlos Morales, the executive director of Heart of Camden, said, “The CCMUA is a model of how to live adjacent to a community and how institutions should own their role to build with and not around the communities.”

Olivia Liu, program and communications director of the Upstream Alliance, praised the CCMUA’s involvement in the improvements in the Cooper River: “The Cooper River tells your success story.”

Camden County Commissioner Jeffrey Nash remembered the legacy of Msgr. Michael Doyle, who spent 46 years as the pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Camden and was, Nash said, among the first to champion environmental justice.

Also offering congratulations were: Camden City Mayor Victor Carstarphen; Camden City Councilman Arthur Barclay; Camden City Councilwoman Nohemi G. Soria-Perez; and State Senator Nilsa Cruz-Perez.