Meet One of the Gang

Our Snapshot feature will introduce you to new friends in the wastewater industry

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I'm excited to announce the launch of a new feature in Onsite Installer this month. It’s called States Snapshot, and each month it will allow a wastewater professional from a different region and representing a state or provincial trade association to share their story, in their own words. Turn inside and you’ll meet Bernie Miller, a member of the Minnesota Onsite Wastewater Association and owner of Miller’s Sewage Treatment Solutions in Kimball, a small town located northwest of the Twin Cities.

Miller graciously agreed to be our guinea pig for this new type of feature story, and we’re indebted to him for the help. In editing the story, I learned a lot about this 23-year veteran of the industry, who is a systems designer, advanced system inspector, service provider and maintainer. I think you’ll enjoy reading about Bernie too, and perhaps see some similarities between his business and yours.

The Snapshot is an outgrowth of our State of the States feature that started in 2013. At that time, we decided to dedicate a story each month to sharing the news from each of the wastewater trade associations in U.S. states and Canadian provinces. It took almost four years, but we finally got around to featuring all of the trade groups as were willing to be interviewed.

A few of the groups from our Associations List, which runs every month, failed to respond when we called. If your group wasn’t featured over the years, call your association leaders and contact me at editor@onsiteinstaller.com. We didn’t mean to slight your group. We want to give every organization a chance to share information about the good things they’re doing.

At any rate, when we got through the first round of State of the States features, we came up with the idea of profiling a member of each organization. But we’re taking a fresh approach to this assignment. We know everybody in the industry is extremely busy these days, and it can be easier to respond to our interview request if you know the questions ahead of time. And heck, we know some of you would like to sit down and write your answers to these questions at your own pace.

So we developed a list of questions and topics that we email to the featured contractors. They can either fill out the answers themselves, like Bernie Miller did, or they can think about how they would respond to the questions when a writer makes a follow-up call. We work on the provided information or conduct the interview, then create a package that includes the Q & A-style story and a photo of the wastewater professional and his crew.

We hope to accomplish a few main objectives with the States Snapshot. First, we want you to get to know another friend in the industry and learn about his or her team, hobbies and what they find most important about their career in wastewater. Also, we want to learn why they belong to a trade association and what they believe are the most important issues they would like to address through their membership. We want them to tell you about the most challenging job they’ve had, their favorite piece of equipment and to share a helpful nugget of small-business advice.

We will eventually get around to asking every wastewater trade association to provide a member who we can talk to for the Snapshot feature. If you read Bernie’s story and think, “Hey, I’d like to take a crack at this,’’ drop me a note and we can talk.

What’s happening to the State of the State feature? We will continue to focus on important issues being addressed by our trade associations as they come up. So the space will be filled each month either with a Snapshot story or a States story. If your group is working on an important issue and you’d like to share information with the rest of the industry, just let me know and we’ll get right on it.

I invite you to go and learn more about Bernie Miller. I’m sure you’ll like him.

We Lost a Valuable Friend, Communicator

Over the years, many of you were called by our longtime Rules & Regs, Association News and State of the States writer Doug Day as he gathered news of the industry. We regret to announce that Doug passed away early this year, on Jan. 21, at age 60. A final Safety First story by Doug appears in this issue.

Doug did a great job keeping his finger on the pulse of the onsite industry through his monthly contributions. In addition to monitoring legislation about wastewater issues and interviewing trade association leaders throughout the U.S. and Canada, Doug also wrote occasional contractor profiles and worked on other features for the magazine. His varied communications background operating his own public relations agency and working as a veteran radio announcer made him a skilled reporter of our industry’s happenings.

Doug’s work went well beyond his writing for Onsite Installer, though. He was a local politician in his hometown of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, on the shore of Lake Michigan, serving as both an alderman and city council president. He was also a busy volunteer for local civic causes, and in his spare time worked many years as a high school athletics official. On Friday nights every fall, you’d find Doug on a football field refereeing a big game.

Thank you for a job well done, Doug. You will be missed.



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