Bill often jokes that his water career began when he was pushed in the Santiam River as a 13-year-old pipe mover to clean the suction intake on an irrigation pump! He doesn’t remember being asked if he could swim…
After serving in the United States Marine Corps, Bill worked on a paper machine crew in Halsey, operating a Save-All water reclamation system. After 7 years of rotating shifts, loud pumps, and even louder machinery, and tired of daily wet feet, Bill and his wife Dena moved their young family to Knoxville, Tennessee to attend Bible College.
After sleeping through classes during the day, he supervised the wastewater treatment plant in a large nickel-plating manufacturing facility. This experience provided him the opportunity to work with plate clarification, metals precipitation with filter press sludge removal and Hazardous Waste solids disposal. It also provided him with the experience of working within the parameters of a Federal Clean Water Act Industrial User Discharge Permit. All discharges to the City of Knoxville sanitary sewer system required frequent grab sample analysis for not only pH but metals, using the Atomic Absorption Standard Method.
Moving back to Oregon, Bill was hired as the lead operator of an ultra-pure water treatment system, which included reverse osmosis, ion-exchange, metals precipitation, solids removal, and solids disposal, for an airline component manufacturer in Tualatin. He worked closely with the Clean Water Services Pretreatment Program to insure discharge permit compliance.
He was hired away from the “Dark Side” by the City of Albany’s Water Pollution Source Control Team, enforcing the Federal Clean Water Act at the municipal level. Not only was he involved in the daily inspections and enforcements of multiple Industrial User Discharge Permits, but he also worked as the City of Albany’s first Erosion Sediment Control inspector. He also supervised multiple environmental clean-ups involving the City’s stormwater and wastewater collection systems.
In 2007 he was recruited and hired by Young Life as the Water Quality/Water Resources Manager for Young Life’s Washington Family Ranch, working as part of a team restoring and upgrading the dilapidated former Rancho Rajneesh, bringing drinking water systems, wastewater systems, and water rights into compliance with State of Oregon regulatory agencies. He also provided field utility construction supervision for multiple Young Life construction campaigns.
Most recently, and prior to his service with the OAWU team, Bill was a superintendent for a heavy civil construction firm, supervising public and private utility installations for multiple projects in Central Oregon.
He holds licenses in Drinking Water Treatment 2, Drinking Water Distribution 2, Wastewater Collections 1 and Wastewater Treatment 1.
An avid fly-fisherman, Bill is married to his high school sweetheart Dena. Together they share 2 adult children and 7 grandchildren. When not enjoying time with his family or helping a small water system with an issue, he can be found waving a stick in a Central Oregon river.