Coppleston County's Small Water Systems: A Consolidation Study

Driving question: Should Coppleston County join some of its small water systems into one regional authority?

Scenario: Coppleston County is fictional. Every figure below was invented for this project. The county board has asked student teams to study its six water systems. Each team must hand the board a map, a data table, and a plan. The board will not vote without all three.

The six systems:

Constraints:

• The county board has set aside $4,000,000 in one-time funds to connect systems to Coppleston City's mains. Connecting one small system costs $220,000 per mile of new pipe, and the board's engineer has estimated the pipe distance from each small system to the city system as follows: Hollowmead Village 3 miles, Pyewick Water Association 7 miles, Brackenhoe Estates 2 miles, Marlgate Mobile Home Park 1 mile, Thurlow Ridge 9 miles.
• Any system brought into the authority would pay the Coppleston City rate, an average of $46 per month.
• The recommendation must keep the total connection cost at or below the $4,000,000 the board has set aside.
• Teams must use the widely used rule of thumb that combined water and sewer costs above roughly 4.5 percent of household income count as a high burden, and must say plainly that the bills in this table are water only. The 4.5 percent figure comes from adding two EPA benchmarks, 2.5 percent for drinking water and 2 percent for wastewater; EPA itself has no single official cutoff.

County base map: Before Session 2, the teacher sketches or prints a simple county outline from this description. Coppleston City sits at the center of the county, on a river that runs north to south. Marlgate Mobile Home Park lies about 1 mile south of the city, Brackenhoe Estates about 2 miles east, and Hollowmead Village about 3 miles north along the river. Pyewick Water Association lies about 7 miles west in farm country, and Thurlow Ridge about 9 miles northeast in the hills. These distances match the engineer's pipe distances above.

Final deliverable: A four-page recommendation to the fictional Coppleston County board containing a county map shaded by bill burden, a data table with every value the team calculated, a written recommendation naming which systems to consolidate, and a one-paragraph statement of what the team's plan does not solve.

1. Session 1, build the data table. Each team calculates, for all six fictional systems, the annual water bill and that bill as a percentage of median household income, rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent. Teams also compute violations per hundred connections for each system. Output: a completed six-row data table with three new calculated columns.
2. Session 2, map the pattern. Teams place the six service areas on the county base map and shade each one by its bill burden percentage using four bands they define themselves. Output: a labeled county map with a legend, a scale, and a one-sentence caption naming the pattern the map shows.
3. Session 3, compare the systems. Teams find the median and the range of the monthly bills for the five small systems, then compare both figures to Coppleston City's single value. Output: a half-page written comparison stating the median, the range, and one sentence explaining why the city's bill sits where it does.
4. Session 4, cost the plan. Teams choose which systems to bring into the authority, multiply each chosen system's pipe distance by $220,000 per mile, and confirm the total stays at or below $4,000,000. They then write the added cost and added benefit of each system they included and of one they left out. Output: a costed consolidation plan with a total and a written added-cost and added-benefit note for each system considered.
5. Session 5, write and present. Teams assemble the four-page recommendation and present it in six minutes to the class acting as the fictional county board, which asks two questions of each team. Output: the finished recommendation and the presentation.