Ahmad SoufianiSenior Engineering Manager
City and County of Denver, CO

Ahmad Soufiani

In my current position as a senior engineer manager for Denver Wastewater Management Division , I manage the entire operations engineering groups. These teams are responsible for NPDES Programs under EPA's "Clean Water Act", Construction engineering for in-house projects and all emergency responses, design engineering for sanitary and storm construction and rehabilitation projects. I successfully managed the renewal of our MS4 permit that was due by 2020. With the help of our expert engineers we made data driven strategic decisions which have resulted in improved service delivery. For instance, we collaborated with street maintenance and changed manhole adjustment processes to reduce the need for ordering manhole castings that in the past cost the city around 250K per year. With that strategy, we were able to task our manhole crew with the Green Infrastructure Maintenance Operations.

I am a member of DOTI "Water alignment Group", WAG (recently changed to "Water alignment council" , WAC) to implement "One Water Plan” concept. The purpose of on water plan is to implement multi-benefit integrated water management strategies and to increase resilience and climate change preparedness. I helped the group creating a charter and have accomplished many tasks such as creating a new bucket to fund "Capital Maintenance expenses" and to prepare and present the wastewater 6-year comprehensive plan. Within the plan, I suggested to revisit and fine tune our sanitary lining program in a way that is more meaningful and guarantees a catch up for non-lined pipes within the next ten years. This was agreed and considered by the 6-year plan establishment team which I was part of. We have also secured a GI fund in the maintenance bucket for unforeseen needs related to our new GI and VEMP program and established a program under WMD ops to start large storm system condition assessments.