New Orleans' Marcia St Martin on Leading Her Utility Through Hurricane Katrina, Understanding the Business of Water, Developing Creative Teams, and Giving Back to Her Community

Marcia Armand St. Martin is a highly respected water utility leader, now retired, who led the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans through the destruction and restoration of the City's water and sewer systems during Hurricane Katrina. During the Hurricane and its aftermath, Marcia and most of her staff had lost their homes and were living in a trailer park.

Marcia comes from a Public Administration background, and talks about the importance of recruiting women through non-traditional methods and from non-traditional fields for the water industry. She emphasizes that water is a business that requires financial backgrounds and understanding of Wall Street for effective delivery of services. Communication skills are also crucial as water has a significant social impact.

Marcia's journey began in 1992, and she was retained as the Deputy Director for the business sector of the utility, where she worked for ten years. After the retirement of the director, she replaced him, becoming the first non-engineer, first female, and first African-American to lead the water utility.

In this conversation, Marcia talks about her experience with Hurricane Katrina and the importance of preparing for the human impact of disasters on teams and communities. She discusses the challenges of evacuating her team and providing basic necessities like food and clothing, as well as a temporary school for the children of her employees. Empathy and community support were crucial during the disaster, highlighting the importance of these values in the water industry.

Marcia shares her experience of rising to leadership of a water utility through non-traditional paths, having waited until her two sons were nearly grown before she began moving into more leadership roles. St. Martin emphasizes the importance of nurturing people during times of crisis. We discussed her role as a mother as helpful in developing her leadership style, as well as how witnessing her role as a leader influenced her son's future career path. She highlights the benefits of having women in water agencies, as they can bring human aspects to the agency, and shares an example of a team member's foresight in providing phone lines for her staff whose families had dispersed to other states following Hurricane Katrina.

She talks about the influence of COVID on the water industry, and recognizes the advances that took place in the adoption of remote meter reading and other ways of integrating new technologies to serve communities, stating that, "For the water industry to survive for the next 100 years, we need to constantly look at innovation and different ways of delivering services and different ways to maximize the intelligence of our team members." She noted that, during COVID, when smart people had fewer constraints, they were able to "expand their brain capacity and people were able to demonstrate what they could do working independently."

Since her retirement from SWBNO, Marcia has continued to work on behalf of water in her hometown through 6 years of service on the Board of the Pontchartrain Conservancy (which she just completed), a nonprofit that drives sustainability and stewardship of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin which encompasses most of Southeast Louisiana including state capital Baton Rouge as well as New Orleans. Marcia notes that in New Orleans, "we live with water" and talks about some of the work she's been a part of to restore a mostly Black community in the 9th Ward that had not received much public funding.

As a product of Catholic Education, she has also volunteered extensively with Sisters of the Holy Family, a religious community that was founded by Women of Color at a time when they were not welcome in the Catholic Church. She has been active in supporting their educational initiatives, which extend throughout the Americas and in Africa. She notes that her work for a water utility has provided her with the resources to support this community, and also credits her Catholic Education with her commitment to service.