Organizational Dissolutions in the Public Sector: An Empirical Analysis of Municipal Utility Water Districts

The proliferation of special-purpose districts and the increasing complexity of local governance systems has been well documented. However, even as new special districts are created, others are being dissolved. This article investigates the extent to which both internal and external factors are at play in municipal utility district dissolutions. Decades of existing empirical studies on private, nonprofit, and interest organizations show that factors internal to organizations, such as institutional structure and resources are significant covariates of organizational mortality. Equally important are external factors, where density dependence and resource partitioning pressures influence organizational survival. Public sector organizations, such as special-purpose water districts, operate in relatively well monitored and statutorily constrained environments, however. Drawing upon the organizational mortality literature, we examine when and why municipal utility water districts that operate in fragmented service delivery systems dissolve. The results show that the relationship between internal and external organizational variables and special-purpose organizational dissolutions is more nuanced than existing research suggests.

Drink what you can pay for: Financing infrastructure in a fragmented water system

The article investigates the relationship between environmental violations and water utility infrastructure investment in the Houston metropolitan area through a lens of institutional fragmentation. Special purpose water districts are highly capital-intensive service jurisdictions, which makes them extremely dependent on local fiscal capacity. Fiscal capacity is also important for a water district’s ability to respond to performance failures, particularly regulatory violations. Resource base, however, is unevenly distributed between special purpose water districts in the highly fragmented Houston metro area. Therefore, while capital investments may significantly covary with fiscal capacity, not all water districts are expected to be capable of making needed infrastructure investment when problems arise. There are two major policy-relevant findings that we offer in the article. Institutional fragmentation in relatively more affluent areas does not impede the ability to invest in capital infrastructure related to both service pressures and regulatory violations. However, such ability is limited in relatively less affluent areas, where the fiscal capacity to respond to service delivery problems is limited.

Generation of synthetic cross-correlated water demand time series

This paper presents a procedure for generating synthetic district-level series of hourly water demand coefficients cross-correlated in space (between districts) and time. The procedure consists of two steps: (1) generation of hourly water demand coefficients which respect, for each hour of the day, pre-assigned means and variances; and (2) introduction of the cross-correlation at different time lags through the application of a method which implies the reordering of the data generated at step 1. The procedure was applied to a case study of the Ferrara water distribution system with the aim of generating cross-correlated synthetic series of hourly water demand coefficients for the 19 water districts making it up. It was observed that the application of the method for introducing the cross-correlation (step 2) causes numerical problems when a large number of water districts are involved and the cross-correlations are considered at many time lags; this problem is solved by carrying out an appropriate regularization of the observed cross-correlation matrix. The results obtained show that overall the proposed procedure constitutes a valid tool for generating synthetic water demand time series with pre-assigned characteristics in terms of means, variances and cross-correlation at different time lags.