Our Mission

Our mission is to help local governments and water-based utilities function well. We help local governments directly. We also help them indirectly by helping associations and state and federal agencies to serve them better through training, software development and more. How do we carry out our mission? Consider our primary service - user charge analysis.

When we do a user charge analysis we listen carefully to the city's or utility's management and decision-makers. We determine what they need to accomplish. We draft analysis scenarios and share them with management as "works in progress." That enables management to decide on goals as we go along. We produce final analysis scenarios according to goals management settles upon. We present final analysis scenario versions and recommendations to management, the system's decision-makers and customers, if desired. That enables the system's decision-making body to pretty completely "dodge the political bullet" for having to raise rates. After all, it is not by their whim that rates need to go up. It is the financial needs of the system. The analysis results make it clear that to oppose setting rates where they need to be would only choke off essential utility services with unsustainably low rates. Ratepayers "get it" when the situation is laid out in this fashion. Finally, we help decision-makers and managers enact our recommendations and take steps to avoid this situation in the future.

In performing our mission we never usurp the responsibilities of local officials. Carl Brown has performed or supervised over 114 rate analyses and conducted scores of workshops on rate setting, asset management and a wide range of environmental issues. One of the notions he stresses to community leaders in all settings is this. What they do with and for their community, including making rate adjustments, is up to them. We will give them good information so they can make well informed decisions, but those decisions always belong to them. They own them. They should never give that power up, not even to us. Thus, if we end up working for a community, Carl Brown Consulting will always be working FOR the community, never the other way around.

Finally, we perform our mission with the utmost integrity. Occasionally a local government official will ask us to perform an analysis in some way that differs from our sense of integrity in hopes of bringing the aura of integrity to the outcome they desire. We turn all such projects down. The only pre-conceived outcomes we entertain are rates set where they should be, people trained in things they need to know and the like. Otherwise, we let the process take us to the right conclusion. We never start with the conclusion and build a process to justify it.

The same sense of mission and values flows through our services to associations, state and federal agencies and others. If we sign on to help you to serve local governments and utilities, we intend to tickle you with the results you will achieve.