PARTNER PROFILE
Fast Facts
Name:
Aqua America
Revenue:
$496 million (2005)
Residents Served:
2.5 million
Number of Customers:
864,894
Number of States Served:
Number of Employees:
13
1,600
WATER WORKS
Aqua America provides water
to over 2.5 million people
W
HEN LOCAL RESIDENTS and
engineering professors at Swarthmore
College began operating a small water
company in the 1880s, they did it solely to
provide for their own water needs.
Little did they know that their organization,
the Springfield Water Company, would grow
to become Aqua America, now the largest
U.S.-based publicly traded water company.
Headquartered in Bryn Mawr on Lancaster
Avenue, Aqua America now serves over 2.5
million residents in 13 states from Maine to
Florida, as well as Texas. And the company is
growing larger every day.
Acquiring new companies
Known as Philadelphia Suburban Corporation
before changing its name in January 2004,
Aqua America continues a "growth through
acquisition" strategy, says Michael A. Battista,
Director of Corporate Benefit Planning, with new
companies being brought in each year.
In this atmosphere of high growth, Michael's
biggest challenge is providing consistent
benefits to Aqua America's 1,600 current and
future employees.
As part of this effort, he began looking for
a Credit Union that could accommodate Aqua’s
widely scattered workforce. He was impressed
by FMFCU's online Home Banking, and last
November, Aqua America became an FMFCU
Partner. "Even if people are far away, they can
use FMFCU's services," he says, “and when we
design a benefit package, this is what matters
most: access to the benefit, otherwise it’s not
really a benefit at all. FMFCU is able to accom-
(Photo on left): Silent and serene, Aqua America's Springton
Reservoir on Route 252 in Delaware County holds up to 3.5 billion
gallons of water. The Springton dam, built in 1931 to create the
reservoir, is over 70 feet high, 40 feet wide and 2,000 feet long.
modate our diverse family of Aqua employees."
Aqua America's corporate goal is to provide
quality and reliable water service at an affordable price. By acquiring small regional companies in a very fragmented market, Aqua America
uses its infrastructure to lower costs, improve
efficiencies and take advantage of economies
of scale.
The company's ever-expanding service
area also helps minimize the effects of regional
weather patterns, such as droughts, floods or
even extreme cold that can snap water mains.
Aqua’s business weighs heavily on the
amount of rain an area gets during the year,
Michael explains. If it's too dry, people can't
wash cars or water lawns. If it's raining, they
won’t wash their cars or water their lawns, so
there are always two sides to the equation.
So good weather usually means good times
for Aqua America. Because as people use water,
the meter keeps running … and Aqua America's
profits keep flowing.
MONOPOLY Mistake
While many of us first learned about
Water Works in the board game,
Monopoly®, Atlantic City did not
really have one at that time. According
to online encyclopedia Wikipedia,
"the city's water
was piped in from
the New Jersey
'mainland' through
two pipes."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)
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