How do you find, maintain and preserve water in the desert? Cooperation. This was the most important strategy used by the seven municipalities in southwestern San Bernardino County, Calif., as they successively joined the Inland Empire Utility Agency (IEUA) after it was founded in 1950. They had to band together because water resources are so limited in southern California that its residents had to create IEUA as a special, independently elected district, which could import water from the state’s northern regions, and eventually collaborate on solving a variety of wastewater treatment issues to make them more efficient, too.
—Written by Jim Montague, executive editor of Control.