We are proud to have members that are actively engaged in both the association and in the water community. Please meet some of our current members, who've earned some extra kudos this year due to their extraordinary efforts!
Congratulations to our Spotlight Member, Eric Ekoue. Eric has been working for the New Brunswick Water Utility for the past three years. He is currently serving as Superintendent of the Utility and he is the backup License Operator for the Utility. He holds a Public Water Distribution System W-3 License and Public Water Treatment System T-3 License and is a Certified Public Manager. He is an AWWA Member and a member of the American Society for Public Administration. Prior to working for New Brunswick, Eric worked for the City of Newark. While at Newark, he served on the Safety Committee at the Pequannock Water Plant and was a 40 hour HAZWHOPPER.
Eric stumbled into the field of water. He was working at various jobs but hadn’t yet found one for which he had a passion. Through his network, he met John Gordon who saw something in Eric and was instrumental in getting Eric to work for the Newark Watershed at the Pequannock Water Treatment Plant in 2006. This is where Eric found his passion!
At Newark, he began his career as an operator and then moved to lead operator, then to lab technician and instrumentation. Eric was always looking for ways to move his career forward and he eventually moved from the plant operators’ side of water to the distribution system side of water.
In 2014, Eric had what he called the longest and best interview ever with Jim Cowley at American Water Enterprise. Eric made an impression on Jim, and Eric moved from Newark to the New Brunswick Water Utility where he currently serves as the Superintendent of the Utility.
Eric credits his passion and success in the water industry to the individuals he has met and worked alongside of and to his great mentors. He credits Jim Cowley with pushing his limits of knowledge and helping him mature and build his confidence in his knowledge of water. Whenever Jim would ask him a question and Eric’s answer was “I don’t know,.” Jim gave Eric one week to find the answer … and Eric always did. A few of his other mentors include Mike, Andrew, Joe, Scott, Jim and Lex. However, Eric also told me that there are many others who helped him along the way too. From all their advice and words of guidance, there was one thread that wove it all together for him, “Don’t just do it. Please do it for the love of water. FLOW it’s my motto.”
While Eric has been in the industry for a number of years, like many of us, he has been busy tending to his career, education, and family. He joined us for our Annual Conference in the Spring and immediately realized that this is an organization that can help him with his career because of the educational opportunities and the networking with people who have the same passion for water as he does.
I love to play Rugby and read water magazines. Lately, my greatest joys are playing hide and seek with my kids, cooking and enjoying an exotic meal with my wife and family.
Eric says that he is blessed to have the family support and a nice group of co-workers. They are the corner stones of the Great Pyramid they are building in New Brunswick. His legacy can be summed up in three statements:
In the wake of the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Gov. Phil Murphy along with Attorney General Gurbir Grewal announced they will be reviewing New Jersey’s current school safety directives. Parents, meanwhile, are demanding more action to protect their children.
Speaking at a press event yesterday, Murphy said his administration will be working with law enforcement to “review current protocol and outline additional steps being taken at the state level to augment the vigilance already being practiced by local law enforcement,” but he did not offer many other specifics.
“It is unacceptable and unthinkable that children go to school each day worried about the possibility of encountering a mass shooting,” Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, who attended the event, said. “We need to do more. We have strong gun control laws here in the state of New Jersey, but we can do better.”
New Jersey’s protocols to prevent or address active shooter events at schools are, for the most part, currently left to the individual districts. Current law states that schools are required to conduct at least one fire drill and one “school security” drill each month with a police officer present to observe and suggest improvements. That security drill can take the form of a lockdown, bomb-threat drill, or other non-evacuation style simulation.
As shooting tragedies continue to escalate — this year alone, there have been at least seven in the country but specific numbers are hard to come by since the federal government does not study or report on gun violence — New Jersey has taken several small steps to improve preparedness.
New laws, approved in December 2016, require that “all employees in school districts and nonpublic schools will be provided with annual training on school safety and security.” Such training was previously only provided to certificated staff members once during their career. New Jersey is one of six states that currently mandate active-shooter drills that include students, teachers, support staff, and law enforcement.
But it’s not clear what effect annual lockdown drills have when it comes to protection. The Broward County school district in Parkland has been holding such drills for more than 10 years and still lost 17 students in the most recent tragedy.
Following school shooting attacks in Orlando, Florida and San Bernardino, California the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security Preparedness, State Police, and the Office of the Regional Operations Intelligence Center developed an active shooter response training program to be implemented in schools and workplaces. The program includes instructions for those who come face to face with a gunman — run first, then hide/lockdown, attacking the shooter only as a final option — and provides resources for recognizing gunfire sounds, aiding wounded individuals, and recognizing and reporting workplace violence.
While the state reviews the current policies looking for areas of improvement, Murphy said state police plans to start regular, unannounced visits to all 107 schools in their jurisdiction in an attempt to increase police visibility.
“It’s not really just about security in those schools,” said State Police Col. Patrick Callahan, “It’s about giving faculty members parents and students the opportunity to interact with our troopers. That’s where the instilling of public trust comes from.”
Grewal and Callahan also noted that increased police presence in schools was always part of the plan to ease community-police relations even before the most recent attack. New Jersey already requires every school board to have a Memorandum of Agreement with its local law enforcement agency, dictating many of the protocols in place for active-shooter situations.
“If you see Jersey troopers in schools it’s for multiple benefits, school security certainly being one of them,” Callahan said, adding that “the metric and the end result of our being in schools will give the public a sense of who state troopers are and what our role is in the protecting and raising of all of our children.”
Callahan and Murphy also implied that having more law enforcement officers on school grounds could deter a potential shooter and open up avenues for students to report suspicious behavior.
Meanwhile, parents across the state are calling for armed guards at their kids’ schools, fearing that drills and school-employed police officers will not keep their loved ones safe.
The East Brunswick school board announced this week it will be adding armed police officers to the current staff of 71 security guards (all of them former police officers) at all 11 schools in the district. Parents in Nutley are urging school officials to do the same, after the school was forced to close due to a threatening video posted on a student’s Instagram page. The police investigated the video and determined the threat was unfounded. Parents have also called for metal detectors in schools and restricted entrance during school hours.
Other districts question whether more guns, even in the hands of trained police officers, are the answer.
All these preventive measures won’t be enough, Gov. Murphy said, without “commonsense gun laws.” He urged Congress to move on universal background checks and an assault-rifle ban but said in the likelihood that nothing will get done in Washington, D.C, he intends to work with the state Legislature to pass gun control legislation such as a bill to limit gun purchases for those with mental illness.
“Nothing we are doing here will be a replacement for comprehensive gun safety reform at the federal level,” Murphy said. “We’re working aggressively on this issue with like-minded states and expect to have an announcement soon.”
In making his announcement, Murphy was joined by a number of state officials, clearly meant to demonstrate a unified front to combat the problem. Those in attendance included state Department of Homeland Security director Jared Maples, Acting Commissioner of Education Lamont Repollet, Col. Callahan, Acting Commissioner of Children and Families Christine Norbut Beyer, Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-Gloucester), and Assembly Speaker Coughlin (D-Middlesex).
Richard Mroz, a commissioner and former president of the state Board of Public Utilities, is leaving the agency that oversees energy, water, telecommunications, and other regulated utilities next month.
His departure opens up a spot in the agency, which could be facing a significant shift in policies, especially governing the future of the state's energy policies and a pronounced focus on clean-energy choices like solar and wind power, the latter mostly ignored in the Christie administration.
In a letter to the governor, Mroz said he would resign effective April 14. His letter said he would return to the private sector, but remain in the energy, utility, and infrastructure industries. In a phone interview, he declined to elaborate. Without Mroz, the agency's board is split between two Republicans and two Democrats.
As president, Mroz was a strong advocate for the Christie administration's policies, including unyielding support for expansion of natural gas pipelines in the state, as well as backing investments by gas and electric utilities to make their power grids more resilient to extreme storms, such as Hurricane Sandy.
Ironically, his resignation has been made public at a time of heightened criticism of the utilities' responses to the latest storm, a nor'easter. Yesterday, there were still some 40,000 customers without power several days after the storm hit New Jersey this past weekend.
Mroz cited his accomplishments in the letter. "We advanced emerging technologies, renewable energy and invested in energy efficiency,'' he wrote. "And we made decisions balancing the interests of the companies we regulate, ensured reliable and resilient services, all while ensuring that customers pay reasonable rates.''
To critics, among them many clean-energy advocates, those policies fell short of advancing more aggressive goals to have the state rely on renewable energy, such as solar and offshore wind. The BPU repeatedly blocked a small offshore wind project three miles from Atlantic City and never took steps to implement key components of a law aimed at promoting 1,100 megawatts of offshore wind along the Jersey coast.
By leaving, he opens a seat on the board for Gov. Phil Murphy to appoint a commissioner more in tune with the administration's aggressive clean-energy policy. Mroz questioned that policy in a meeting last week when he noted the state was moving ahead with setting aggressive offshore-wind goals, without having any idea of what it would cost.
His departure also might shift policies that have allowed expansion of natural-gas pipelines throughout New Jersey, despite widespread opposition from local communities and environmental organizations.