Page 139 - CSD - PUD 02 28 19

Yasser Abouaish

Tuesday, February 12, 2019
1:09 PM
1. What drives you to seek this position? Tell me a bit about what you know about the City and the
fit you see with your interests.

What spiked my interest, is I've been in the water for a long time. I started as an engineer on the
wastewater side, then I went to the public sector and I worked on the drinking water side. I have a
technical background and the management experience plus active with the EPA and AWWA, was
the VP travelling the country to promote our interests, that’s how I came across the City of San
Diego.
The set of experience that I've gained in the last 20+ years if very diverse, private consultant,
having worked with the cities and the water district. I feel that this position meets all of above,
matches my set of experience. I am sort of unique in having acquired all those diversified
experiences throughout my career, that's where I see a good match in my set of experiences, and
what the public utilities department needs.

I just want to point out a couple of challenges that I feel the department faced - there seems to be
a culture of beauracracy but necessarily support for work. Being a union protected with collective
bargaining agreements, I have dealt with one of the ways to correct that quickly is to improve the
technical performance and the cultural aspect. There are options that the City and the department
can take if the performance level is not corrected.

2. Please describe your most recent position and day-to-day responsibilities.

My most recent position was limited to managing the water operations. It was only a
drinking water operation. Surface water - plenty of water. Aging infrastructure and
residual of lack of performance in the organization forced the department to do a
performance audit. They had different challenges in terms of water supply. We had a
finance department and city attorneys.

RFL: Wife got a job in California and we have always wanted to move there. She got a
position in San Jose for American Water. Is living in San Jose now, could easily move to
San Diego.

City of Anderson - many things in the maintenance field were ignored. In California you
have to get the authorization and approval from customers and have to adhere to Prop
218. In their case it was a public utility - they had to submit an authorization to rate the
rates, they wanted to raise the rates 47%. That's what I was hired to do and we achieved
that goal. We achieved the first rate increase of 23% and then a second six months later of
24%. I learned a lot through going through that process.