AWWA WQTC57025

The City of San Francisco, through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), provides drinking water for the City plus 33 additional, separately permitted water agencies and municipalities in five counties in the Bay Area. City of San Francisco has specialized environmental laboratories providing full analytical and field studies services in drinking water, wastewater, sediments and solid wastes, limnology, marine biology, and microbiology. Traditionally, the departments they supported managed them and operated separate laboratories. In 1997, the laboratories and associated support services, such as sample collection, were consolidated under the single agency of Water Quality Bureau (WQB), to centralize operations, remove redundancies and improve services. Management structure was altered to create a single Laboratory Director to oversee all laboratory operations. As a natural extension of this concept, a Client Services section was created in 2000. Client services provides a single point of contact and "one stop shopping" to meet the varied analytical needs of regional water system customers as well as those of other City agencies, whether they can be met by City laboratories and field teams or through commercial laboratories. The concept of a specialized client services group is relatively new to laboratory staff as well as the clients. This paper discusses how the client services team is shaping the overall goals of WQB, its role in expanding laboratory services, the benefits to customers and clients, and current practices and future direction.