Pima County RWRD 2010 Security Report Card

The Pima County Regional Wastewater Reclamation Department (RWRD) sought to achieve greater security at their wastewater facilities. The most rapid path to achieve this goal was to change the “security culture” i.e. to move staff towards a greater investment in the day to day security of all 20 RWRD locations while hard security improvements were planned and installed. Staff security culture was enhanced through competition rather than through disciplinary action. To achieve enhanced security culture, staff developed a “Security Scorecard” which generated a security grade for each site. Grades were given based on observational tallies performed during random site visits. These observations included physical facility measures and personnel related observations for each site such as locked buildings, perimeter checks, staff challenges of nonemployees, access control, employees wearing ID badges and more.Results of the Scorecard assessments showed approximately 40% improvement in 2008 and 100% improvement in 2009 and 2010 with all facilities improving to a grade of at least “C” or better. It is important to note that these improvements were obtained without disciplinary action of any type against any employee or facility staff. The Scorecard approach documented duel benefits; the first was generating healthy competition between sites, while enhancing security awareness and practices; the second product was measurable statistics which provides evidence of the status of security on each plant site.