The Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies has named Dan Hartnett to its chief executive post on a permanent basis, effective Nov. 1, 2026, according to a report from Water Finance and Management. The report states that Hartnett, who has been serving as interim chief executive, "has been selected to serve as its CEO on a permanent basis." That is a personnel record. It says nothing about the association's policy positions, its comment filings, or the priorities it will carry forward, and a utility should not read those into it.
Municipal staff tend to treat an association's stance as a settled fact because it arrives in a clean document with a letterhead. In practice, a position is the product of member input, board action, and staff drafting, and each of those steps has a date. A useful record ties a stance to the document that adopted or filed it, not to the name of the person who signed it. A change in chief executive then becomes a note in the file rather than a reason to reopen every position on the list.
Build the position file before the handover
Start with the association documents your agency actually relies on. For each one, log four items: the title and date of the filing or statement, the topic it addresses, the body that approved it if the document says so, and the date your staff last checked it against the association's current materials. If your agency has submitted its own comments through the association or alongside it, keep those copies with the same fields. Gaps found now are easier to close while existing contacts are still in place.
Not every position deserves the same effort. A tradeoff exists between completeness and staff time. Prioritize the positions that feed a rate study, a capital plan, a permit comment, or a compliance schedule, since those are the ones a board is most likely to cite. Positions that only inform background reading can be logged in a shorter form. The cost of an incomplete file usually surfaces at the worst moment, when a packet is due and nobody can say where a stance came from.
Mark open items as open
An interim period can keep an organization running without settling every question. The announcement does not describe how the association will handle positions still in draft during the transition, and this piece cannot supply that detail. Where a position was pending when the leadership change takes effect, the file should say so. An open item is a fact about the record. Treating it as settled because no objection has appeared is an assumption, and a board packet built on that assumption is hard to correct after it has been circulated.
The same discipline applies to vendor input
Municipal staff also collect technical advice from equipment suppliers, consultants, and service firms, and the same logic applies. A treatment recommendation from a vendor, including one from local RO specialists, should be filed with its date, its author, the water data it relied on, and the scope it claims. A vendor summary that cannot name its data source has the same problem as an association position with no adopting document. Ask for the source before the summary reaches a board, and note any sampling limits the vendor states, since a recommendation is only as firm as the data beneath it.
Review the file at the first board meeting after the change
Set a calendar item for the first board or committee meeting after Nov. 1, 2026. At that meeting, staff can confirm which association contacts are in place, which logged positions remain current, and which items need a direct question. The review takes far less time when the file is organized by document. It takes much longer when it has to be rebuilt from memory, and memory is the first thing a leadership transition tends to lose.