The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines water system capacity as:

"…a process through which a water system plans for and implements action to ensure that the system can meet both its immediate and its long-term challenges."

The three categories of water system capacity are:

Technical: The physical system which includes source, treatment, storage, and distribution, plus the ability of water system personnel to adequately operate and maintain the system.

Managerial: The ability of the water system’s manager to conduct necessary activities such as staffing, planning, decision-making, maintaining accountability, and interacting with customers and regulatory agencies.

Financial: The ability to generate sufficient revenue, maintain credit worthiness, and manage funds through budgeting, accounting, and other methods of fiscal control.

Water systems meeting the following conditions are considered to have full capacity. These systems:

Water systems can use capacity development as a comprehensive tool to help your water system achieve capacity. Systems can also seek out and take advantage of the assistance offered by the Office of Drinking Water as part of "your" capacity development strategy. For example:

Over $180 million has been committed to help systems achieve or maintain capacity through low interest loans through the DWSRF program. More program information.

The Office of Drinking Water is committed to providing training to public water system operators and owners. Proper training is important to developing capacity. We continue to provide training in the following capacity-related topics:

Visit our training calendar.

Staff is available to:

Regional office staff are available to help.

EPA requires states to develop capacity strategies to help drinking water systems improve their finances, management, infrastructure, and operations so they can provide safe drinking water consistently, reliably, and cost-effectively. The capacity development provisions allow states a lot of flexibility in development of their strategy. Two publications, "Water System Capacity Development Strategy for Existing Water Systems" and "Water System Capacity Development Program - Demonstration, Implementation and Evaluation of Authorities to Ensure New System Capacity" are available online (see "related publications" in the right-hand column).

For general capacity-related questions, please contact your regional office:

Eastern Regional Office
(509) 456-3115

Northwest Regional Office
(253) 395-6750

Southwest Regional Office
(360) 236-3030

More information is available on EPA's web site.