'Tis the Season for Generosity and Giving
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Metropolitan employees embraced the holiday spirit in many ways, offering their time, talents and donations to help others. Here are stories of two projects:
“It’s what we do for our own,” says
Holly Scroggins
, Skinner plant business support team manager, referring to the plant’s holiday food drive. “We are all local - living in Murrieta and Temecula Valley. These are needy people in our community who we care for.”
This year, plant employees donated and collected 1,000 pounds of non-perishable food items, paper products and personal care products. The truck-full of goods went to the Community Food Pantry of Murrieta which provides an outreach program to more than 600 local families.
Among the Metropolitan employees who helped were
Alisa Groves
, administrative support,
Patrick Eyer
, team manager and
Robert Armstrong
, tech support, who loaded his pickup truck to trek the goods to the food pantry.
Alisa
shared this sentiment, “It’s a great cause, super rewarding and fulfilling to help those in need and give back to the community.”
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Another holiday giving project was led by Metropolitan's Black Employee Association. “I love doing the toy drive every year. It’s a great way to spread joy and blessings,” says BEA president
Judy Holland
.
The drive collected a wide array of toys - from board games to Lego sets - that were provided to BlackNLA, which coordinated with the
Drew Child Development Corp
and the
Heads Up Foundation
to give toys to more than 1,500 children.
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Colorado River Water:
How Low Can We Go?
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This story is taken from a blog by
John Fleck
with information provided by Metropolitan's
Bill Hasencamp
.
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California has quietly achieved a remarkable milestone.
Its use of Colorado River water in 2019 was 3.858 million acre-feet. The last time it was below 4 million acre feet was in 1950.
Fleck writes that decision-making going forward must take seriously the hydrologic science that the Colorado River never had the water the planners schemed for in the 1920s, and climate change makes that reality worse. But, he notes, in almost all the municipal areas served with Colorado River water, water use is going down, not up, despite population growth.
Some of the key factors on the muncipal side this past year:
-- A good snowpack in the Sierra Nevada meant Metropolitan got a 75 percent allocation from the State Water Project.
-- Bang-up water conservation success in our service area. Data suggests municipal water use across Southern California is essentially where it was in the 1980s. It’s not clear where the floor is here, but California’s experience during the Big Drought of the teens suggests there is still room reduce water use even more.
-- There are aggressive efforts to maximize local supplies with desalination, wastewater reuse, groundwater cleanup and stormwater capture. Expect these numbers to continue to go up.
This isn't to suggest all is fine, Fleck concludes. But we can "recognize enormous success without losing sight of how large are the looming problems that remain."
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A Graduate of Met's First Apprenticeship Program
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As a graduate of Metropolitan’s first-ever apprenticeship program about 17 years ago,
Daniel Salgado
has the winning combination of experience, technical expertise and exceptional customer service.
An O&M Tech IV for mechanical issues at Weymouth,
Daniel
maintains the process equipment throughout the plant to make sure it is working properly and stays reliable. He’s also a chemical responder and one of just two L.A. County-certified backflow testers at the plant. (The devices that prevent non-drinking water from contaminating clean drinking water.)
Daniel
first stepped foot in Metropolitan about 22 years ago as an agency temp under the Don Addams Memorial Program. He left, but then returned in 1999 as a Maintenance Worker 1.
Later, he was chosen to be part of the first apprenticeship program in 2003. “I met a lot of great people here over the years, but especially in the shop at that time,” he says. “I credit my then co-workers with teaching me a lot of the things that I know today and for that, I am very grateful.”
One more benefit of working at Metropolitan? It’s where
Daniel
met
Stephanie Salgado
, an Administrative Assistant III in WSO, whom he married in 2007. They have two young children and
Daniel
spends much of his free time with family activities and projects around the house.
At the fall service awards luncheon where
Daniel
was honored for 20 years, he joked about his son (now a toddler) some day working at Metropolitan. “Who knows, maybe 40 years from now he could be here celebrating his 20-year anniversary with Met.”
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