Austin Water presented a refreshed enterprise strategic plan to the Climate, Water, Environment, and Parks Committee on Oct. 22, 2025 after roughly 14 months of staff and community engagement. Director Shay Rawls Rolston and Enterprise Strategic Planning Manager Allison Ornat Sprigg said the plan updates the utility’s mission, vision and high‑level goals to reflect climate, population and workforce changes since 2020.

Sprigg described the process and outreach: staff conducted an internal engagement phase with 575 staff survey responses and multiple listening sessions, convened a 20‑person internal steering committee, and ran a community phase that generated more than 3,000 responses to an online survey and about 60 participants across in‑person and virtual listening sessions. All council districts were represented in the public outreach, Sprigg said.

The plan’s core statements and enterprise goals are:

- Mission: "Austin Water works every day to provide water for people and care for the environment."
- Vision: "Building Austin's water future together."
- Five goals: create a people‑first culture; deliver high‑quality and sustainable water/wastewater/environmental services; invest in and maintain dependable infrastructure; foster public confidence and preparedness; and drive innovation to manage risks and improve effectiveness.

Sprigg said each goal includes strategies covering workforce development, technical knowledge sharing, enterprise performance and continuous improvement, data quality and scenario planning. She emphasized alignment across existing long‑range plans — Water Forward, facilities planning and CIP — and noted the plan is intended as a flexible blueprint to guide resource decisions and performance tracking. "We now have a direct line of sight into our high level goals into all of our existing work that's already been going on," Sprigg said.

Committee members praised the outreach and communication. One member said Austin Water’s advance notice and follow‑up during planned outages has improved constituent communications; staff said the strategic plan will be socialized internally, integrated with budget and implementation processes and tracked with performance indicators.

Next steps include broader internal and external socialization, continued alignment with citywide priorities, identification of gaps, and establishing KPIs and reporting to measure progress.