We wake up each morning and turn on the faucet—we brush our teeth, get a glass of water, and step into the shower. We get to work and go through the motions of our busy days and never stop once to think about what happens after we flush the toilet. We don’t have to, we never have. Once we’re home, we boil water for pasta and rinse off the lettuce in the sink before settling on the couch with a hot cup of tea. Between taking care of ourselves, our families, our pets, and our houseplants, in just 24 hours we’ve turned the faucet on over 50 times going through more than 80 gallons of water per person. In a year, one person alone uses an average of 36,000 gallons of water. And that is a conservative estimate.
Despite how little we think about these systems, we use them almost nonstop. It’s only when something goes wrong that we begin to realize just how much time, energy, and money it takes to keep the faucet on and the toilets flushing.
Kristina Gillespie-Jaques has spent the better part of 20 years ensuring that Idaho’s municipal water systems keep flowing as we expect them to. Alongside a dedicated team of engineers and construction managers at Merrick & Company, Kristina works directly with Idaho communities to both identify and solve issues with their public drinking and wastewater systems.
This infrastructure is expensive. Communities can expect to spend millions upon millions of dollars to build new systems and nearly just as much to repair them. “In the past five years alone, our team has secured over $400 million in low interest loans and grants from a multitude of federal, state, county, and private partners for Idaho communities,” Kristina shares. “The work to bring America’s aging and failing infrastructure into this century’s regulatory standards is far too great to ignore. In addition, the level of funding required to rehabilitate and replace our water infrastructure is exorbitant.”
Kristina’s role within Merrick includes finding, securing, and administering low-interest loans and grant dollars for primarily rural communities in Idaho. Which is no small feat. This work takes years of planning. Not to mention frequent coordination with stakeholders and funding entities like the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development. Many smaller communities are strapped not only financially but also in terms of personnel. Kristina helps alleviate the burden on these communities by handling the complicated grant applications and challenging compliance requirements for long-term loans.
She continues, “This work is important because our very livelihoods rely on whether we are willing to make these critical investments in our infrastructure. To that end, I am one of many that are laboring to advance this great work using creativity and ingenuity to bring about lasting solutions for future generations.”
A central-Idaho native, Kristina fell in love with the Gem State early on. To this day, she can still be found riding down the Salmon River with her husband, catching rapids and soaking up the sunshine on some of Idaho’s most beautiful waterways; waterways that she works so hard to help protect.