What Will You Do When Your Professional Advice Is Ignored?

Consider the following scenario:

You are the owner of a small (twenty employees) land surveying and civil engineering firm located in a rural village (population 5,000) in northern Minnesota. Your firm’s normal mix of work includes the design of potable water and wastewater treatment plants. Your client base includes the village where your office is located and many municipalities within a distance of $150\text{miles}$ .

You have more than thirty years experience in the design of water treatment plants and water distribution systems. Because your firm is relatively small and your municipal clients are also small you have the opportunity to get involved not only in design but also in troubleshooting operations problems and optimizing plant performance. In fact you have become known in your field through papers that you have published discussing some of the things you have observed and problems that you have solved in your work with water treatment plants.

Several months ago you received a telephone call from the mayor of a small city (population 10,500) about two hundred miles away and just across the border in North Dakota. The mayor, while vacationing in Minnesota, had become familiar with your firm and your work when he spent a day with the mayor of one of the villages that you currently serve. The reason for the call was that his city presently draws its water supply from a nearby natural lake and provides disinfection and fluoridation only. The city’s water supply had always been safe and reliable but federal regulations requiring filtration of all surface water sources were not being complied with and the city was under a consent decree to remedy this violation. Your firm’s current workload was light (you were anticipating the need to lay off two technicians at the end of the week) so you accepted the mayor’s invitation to attend the next city council meeting. The purpose of the meeting you attended was to discuss the steps necessary for designing, funding, constructing, and commissioning a new potable water filtration plant. Your meeting went well and, in due course, your firm was given a contract to provide the engineering services necessary to bring the city into compliance with the federal regulations.

Most of the water treatment plants that your firm has designed over the years have utilized a particular “prepackaged” or “preengineered” filtration system because it was reliable, economical to construct, relatively easy to operate, and not overly expensive. The only drawback that you have seen over the years with this system is that it requires considerable adjusting of chemical applications if the characteristics of the raw water change (e.g., temperature, turbidity, algae blooms, etc.). About six years ago you became aware of another “prepackaged” plant that utilized a completely different process. As you had watched its development it became clear to you that it was equally reliable, less complex, and less expensive to operate. It also proved to be less susceptible to “upset” on changes in the raw water quality. In your studies you also observed that the cost of construction of each type of plant was usually about the same.

Upon being awarded a contract, your firm’s first task was to review the existing records of the city’s water department in order to develop appropriate design parameters for the plant. At the same time the quality and character of the raw water supply were determined, again to be sure that the design parameters for the new plant were well defined. Once these matters were completed and the plant design parameters derived, a preliminary estimate of construction and operating costs was prepared for both the more traditional system and the newer technology that you judged to be superior. Your twenty-five-year life cycle cost estimate for the newer technology shows it to be $12.5 million less expensive to operate than the more traditional system (the cost to design and construct each is estimated to be $12 million). With all of this work completed you prepared the customary report recommending that the city proceed with the design of a new water plant utilizing the newer, superior technology.

In the meantime, the marketing staff of the traditional filtration equipment had been making regular visits to the office of the mayor and the department of public works. They arranged for visits to several similarly sized plants in the area and developed personal relationships with the mayor, the city council, and many of the people in the department of public works (the relationships noted are strictly friendship-based and completely above-board). During the preparation of your report you held several meetings with the mayor, city council, and department of public works, and while you cast no aspersions on the traditional system, you were quite candid regarding your positive experiences with and judgment regarding the newer technology. They, on the other hand, have expressed a primary interest in utilizing the traditional equipment.

When your report was complete, you traveled to your client’s city, met with the mayor, city council, and department of public works together and reviewed both your report and its recommendations. At the completion of your presentation the mayor instructed you, abruptly, to return to your office and rewrite the report recommending use of the traditional filtration equipment. The reasons that he cited were:

You explained to those in attendance (the mayor, the council members, the operator of the present water plant, and a representative from the local newspaper) that you believed selection of the older technology would be an imprudent choice and an unwise expenditure of the taxpayers’ resources. The response that you received was, “If you wish to continue working with us on this project please do what is necessary to comply with our wishes.”