Patch Kekoa on What Happens When the Workarounds Run Out

Darrell "Patch" Kekoa is not a real person, which is the only reason he can talk this freely. He is a hypothetical small-system water and wastewater operator, assembled from the documented realities of operators who keep marginal private utilities running across rural America. We've placed him on a coffee farm on the Big Island of Hawai'i, where he is semi-retired from a career spent first as the sole operator of a small private water system and then as a circuit rider for the Hawai'i Rural Water Association, traveling between struggling systems with a truck full of parts and a head full of workarounds.

His nickname is self-explanatory.

In Hawai'i, the Public Utilities Commission rate-regulates 38 privately owned water and wastewater utilities, mostly suburban and resort systems, while the county departments handle the big municipal supply.¹ Below that regulatory line sits a tier of small private systems serving communities that are often remote, lightly populated, and running infrastructure installed decades ago on budgets that assumed nothing would change.

Nationally, those budgets are collapsing. S&P Global lowered its financial outlook for small water and wastewater utilities from stable to negative in 2025; 91 percent of the agency's credit downgrades last year were for small systems.² Only 43 percent of utilities surveyed by the American Water Works Association said they charged customers enough to fully cover service costs.²

The operators keeping these systems alive are aging out alongside the pipes. The EPA estimates 30 to 50 percent of the water workforce will be eligible for retirement within the next five to ten years.³ For a small system with one licensed operator, that retirement doesn't open a position. It empties out years of knowledge that was never written down. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 6 percent decline in water and wastewater operator employment by 2035, even as an estimated 10,000 positions will need to be filled annually to replace those who leave.⁴

We spoke with Patch on his lanai in Kona, where he was replacing a valve on his drip irrigation line with a fitting that looked suspiciously like it belonged to a municipal water meter.

You spent fourteen years as the sole operator of a small private water system before you started circuit-rider work. When you describe that job to someone outside the industry, what do you tell them?

Darrell: I tell them I was the plumber, the electrician, the chemist, the accountant, the customer service department, and the guy who got called at 2 a.m. when someone's toilet was backing up into their yard. Then I tell them I also had to be the one who knew what the state wanted to see on paper, which is a completely different skill set from knowing what's actually happening underground.

On a small system, the operator is the institutional memory. EPA's own guidance now says utilities should be using asset management tools to retain system knowledge so it can be passed to the next generation of operators.⁵ That language exists because the knowledge usually isn't written down. It's in my head. Which pipe section got patched in 2014. Which pump bearing sounds wrong on humid days. Which test result came back at 0.18 when the limit is 0.20 and what I did about it. None of that is in a filing anywhere. It walks out the door when I do.

What's the difference between a system that's improvising and a system that's resilient?

Darrell: About $4 million and a spare parts inventory.

Can you unpack that?

Darrell: Sure. I've seen systems that are genuinely well-built. They have redundancy. Two pumps where you need one. A backup generator that's tested monthly. Replacement parts on a shelf. An engineer on retainer. Those systems can take a hit. Storm comes, something breaks, you switch to the backup, you order the part, the engineer reviews the repair plan, you're back in 72 hours.

Then there's the systems I actually worked on. One pump. No backup generator, or a generator that hasn't been load-tested since the last owner. Spare parts are whatever I've got in my truck or can pull off something else. The engineer is whoever I can get on the phone at the state rural water association.

Those systems can also take a hit. But they take it because I absorb it. I'm the redundancy. I'm the backup. I'm the one who knows that if the main pump goes down, I can bypass the pressure regulator and gravity-feed from the upper tank for about six hours if I manually open three valves in sequence, and one of those valves is behind a locked gate that the current owner lost the key to, so I cut my own key three years ago and I keep it on my ring.

That works until it doesn't. And what makes it stop working is when the storm breaks the thing and the workaround and the backup to the workaround, all at once. A flood takes out the pump and the electrical panel and the access road I need to reach the manual valves. Now I've got nothing. The whole ledger of fixes I've been running for years is zeroed out in one night.

You've described what you call the "deferred-maintenance ledger." What is that exactly?

Darrell: Every small system has one. It's the real list. Not the one in the sanitary survey, not the one in the rate filing. The actual list of everything that should have been replaced or repaired and wasn't, because there's no money, or no parts, or no time, or the owner said next quarter.

Sanitary surveys happen every three years.⁶ A deficiency gets identified, you get 120 days or an approved schedule to fix it. But on a system where the total annual revenue wouldn't cover one pump replacement? The deficiency goes on a schedule, and the schedule gets extended, and meanwhile I'm keeping it running with... I don't want to say duct tape, but I've used duct tape.

Blake Anderson at Mogollon Water Management in Arizona has talked about a wave of infrastructure built in the 1970s all reaching end-of-life at once. Does that match what you've seen?

Darrell: One hundred percent. And the other wave he's right about is the knowledge wave.² The volunteer board members running these systems know there's grant money out there. They don't know where, they don't know how to apply, they've never managed a federally funded project. I've sat in rooms with board members who are retired schoolteachers, ranchers, small business owners. Good people, smart people. And they're looking at a $200,000 repair and they've never done a capital project over $50,000. They don't know procurement rules. They don't know how to hire an engineer. And the money that was supposed to help, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act money, that expires this year with nothing replacing it.²

After the Eaton Fire in California, Las Flores Water Company had to add a $3,000 surcharge per household just to avoid bankruptcy. What does that tell you?

Darrell: It tells me exactly what I'd expect. That system wasn't on anyone's watchlist before the fire.⁷ It was fine. Then it wasn't. And the customers who are left, the ones whose homes didn't burn, they're now paying to keep a utility alive that's serving a fraction of its original customer base.

That's the math that kills small private systems after a disaster. Your infrastructure repair costs don't shrink because you lost customers. They grow. But your revenue base just collapsed. So you surcharge the people who stayed, which makes it harder for them to stay, which shrinks your base further. It's a death spiral with a billing department.

If a receiver were appointed to take over a failing small private system after a major storm, what do they actually inherit?

Darrell: The building, the debt, and the mystery.

They don't inherit me. They don't inherit what I know. They get a set of as-built drawings that are 30 years out of date, a filing cabinet full of compliance paperwork that may or may not reflect reality, and a system full of workarounds that nobody documented because the person who did them is gone. The PUC can appoint a receiver when a utility is failing to provide adequate service.⁸ That's the authority part. But authority without capital is just a guy with a clipboard standing next to a broken pump.

What happens to the community when the system actually fails?

Darrell: They become their own water system. Neighbors with trucks haul water. Somebody knows somebody who can get a pallet of bottles delivered. The people who can't drive, who don't have connections, who are elderly or sick, those are the ones who disappear from the story. Nobody's writing about them because nobody can reach them.

I've watched it happen. The community improvises the way I used to improvise with the system, except they're doing it with five-gallon buckets instead of bypass valves. And just like my improvisation, it works until it doesn't.

Is there a version of this where small private systems survive long-term?

Darrell: [Long pause.] I want to say yes. Consolidation with larger operators, that's what the industry people recommend, and they're not wrong.⁹ A bigger utility has the rate base, the engineering staff, the parts inventory. But consolidation means somebody has to want to buy a system that needs $2 million in repairs and serves 200 customers who can't afford a rate increase. That's not an attractive acquisition. That's a charity case with regulatory obligations.

After the interview, Patch walked us to the edge of his property to show us his rain catchment system: three 2,500-gallon tanks fed from his roof gutters, with a UV filter he'd built from salvaged parts. "This is my water system now," he said. "One customer. No board meetings. No rate cases. And I still check the filter every morning."

Footnotes

1. Ziptility, "Hawaii Water & Wastewater Operator Certification Guide," citing PUC regulation of 38 private utilities. https://www.ziptility.com/states/hawaii ↩

2. Brett Walton, "Broke and On Their Own: Small Water Systems Lose Ground as Federal Support Wavers," Circle of Blue, June 11, 2026. https://www.circleofblue.org/2026/supply/water-management/infrastructure/broke-and-on-their-own-small-water-systems-lose-ground-as-federal-support-wavers/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. EPA, "2024 Interagency Water Workforce Working Group Report to Congress," August 2024. https://www.epa.gov/dwcapacity/2024-interagency-water-workforce-working-group-report-congress ↩

4. Michigan Public, "Retirements by water and wastewater plant operators are leading to workforce shortages," September 23, 2024. https://www.michiganpublic.org/environment-climate-change/2024-09-23/retirements-by-water-and-wastewater-plant-operators-are-leading-to-workforce-shortages ↩

5. EPA, "Fact Sheet: EPA's Compliance Advisors for Sustainable Water Systems Program." https://www.epa.gov/compliance/fact-sheet-epas-compliance-advisors-sustainable-water-systems-program ↩

6. EPA ECHO, "Drinking Water Dashboard Help." https://echo.epa.gov/help/drinking-water-qlik-dashboard-help ↩

7. Brett Walton, "Climate Emergencies Are Breaking Water Utilities. Customers Are Paying," Circle of Blue, May 20, 2026. https://www.circleofblue.org/2026/supply/water-management/infrastructure/climate-emergencies-are-breaking-water-utilities-customers-are-paying/ ↩

8. Hawai'i PUC receivership authority as documented in research panel discussion materials. ↩

9. National Association of Water Companies, "Consolidation for Small Systems." https://nawc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/UPDATED_FactSheet-Consolidation-for-Small-Systems.pdf ↩