Tom Rooney

Tom Rooney has spent his career fixing things that other people had written off, and these days he does it from the investor's side of the table. He is an Operating Partner at Sciens Water, a research-driven fund that goes looking for the corners of the water sector everyone else finds too boring, too small or too misunderstood to touch, and he chairs the board of its flagship platform, Central States Water Resources, or CSWR, a utility company built specifically to buy the worst-run small water systems in America and make them work. The thing that makes Tom Rooney worth listening to is that he does not talk about water the way an engineer does. He talks about it the way someone who has had to make the numbers work does, which is why his whole argument starts not with a pipe but with a price.

Tom Rooney's central claim is that America does not really have a water infrastructure problem, it has a water economics problem that shows up as broken infrastructure. His favourite way to make the point is a price comparison that sounds made up until you check it: the average cost to produce tap water through American infrastructure is a little under one penny a gallon, while the bottled water people happily buy averages around five dollars a gallon, and yet it is the penny that everyone complains about. That gap, in his telling, is the root of everything else, because if nobody believes water is worth paying for, then no politician will get elected funding it (he likes to say he has never met a leader who won votes by spending money on water) and no utility will invest in the pipes underneath it.

Tom Rooney reaches for Abraham Maslow to explain why a rich country stopped valuing its water, and it is the kind of detail that tells you how he thinks, because he mentions having just re-read Maslow's original 1943 paper over a weekend. Most people know the famous pyramid, where water sits near the bottom with food and shelter. The part Tom Rooney cares about is the lesser-known second half, where Maslow argues that the hierarchy shifts depending on your situation, so that a person who has had something reliably and effortlessly for decades stops perceiving its value at all. That, he argues, is exactly what fifty years of clean water on tap did to the American relationship with water: ubiquity quietly gutted the sense that water was worth anything, and now that the infrastructure is failing in places like Flint and Jackson, Mississippi, a public that forgot how to value water does not know how to react.

Tom Rooney's answer is not to nationalise water or to hand it entirely to private capital, but to blend the two, and his metaphor for it is a racecar. American industry is the engine, all the horsepower you could want, and the private sector is best at squeezing performance out of a dollar, but you would not hand anyone the whole car, so government, regulators and public-health watchdogs are the steering wheel and the tyres. At CSWR that blend looks like showing up in a state, asking for the worst, most out-of-compliance water systems it has, and refurbishing them under the regulator's rate rules rather than around them. From the Sciens seat he runs the same idea in two directions at once, rolling up the thousands of tiny, fragmented service providers and contractors into something with scale, while rolling down proven technology like membrane bioreactors and remote telemetry (sensors that monitor a plant from afar) into packages a small utility can actually afford and operate.

Tom Rooney has the receipts to argue all this, because he has run the kind of companies most people in the room have only invested in. He was president and CEO of Insituform Technologies, a six-hundred-million-dollar, three-thousand-person public company in the unglamorous but essential business of repairing pipes from the inside without digging up the street, and he took its earnings per share from thirteen cents to ninety in four years. He went on to run Energy Recovery, the NASDAQ-listed maker of devices that capture and reuse the energy in high-pressure water at desalination plants, and since 2017 he has chaired Synagro, the largest recycler of organic waste in the country. Nearly thirty years of that, across water, waste, energy and construction, is why he can hold the chemistry, the regulation and the cap table in the same conversation, and why he describes the work, with rare candour, as feeling like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill.

“I've been in the water industry for 20 years and it feels like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill. To me, it really doesn't matter who's owning and operating the water utilities as long as somebody is accountable.”

Tom Rooney is, in the end, a turnaround man who decided the whole American water sector is the turnaround, and his bet is that the change will come less from a breakthrough technology than from a slow shift in how a country prices and values the most basic thing it has.