The Report You Have To Publish Every Year
Consumer Confidence Report publishing, member notices, board documents and managed IT for rural water associations and small telephone cooperatives.
The Short Answer
A community water system has to produce and deliver an annual water quality report to its customers, and increasingly that means publishing it on a website that works. We build and host that site, publish the report in an accessible format rather than a scanned PDF, handle member notices, and provide staff email from $1.95 per user a month — without touching the billing system you run on.
Publishing The Annual Report Properly
A scanned PDF is the wrong answer
Most systems produce the report as a scan or a print-ready PDF and post it. It is unsearchable, unreadable on a phone and inaccessible to anyone using a screen reader. Publishing it as a real page fixes all three at once.
Archive every year, don’t overwrite
Prior years should stay published at stable addresses. Customers, regulators and occasionally journalists look for them, and a system that overwrites last year’s report looks like it has something to hide even when it does not.
Boil notices and emergencies
When a notice has to go out, it has to go out now — a banner on the site, an email to members and a text if you use one. That workflow should be built and tested before the night you need it, not improvised.
- Member notices priced on sends Rate changes, meeting notices, annual reports and outage notifications. Liberation Campaign bills on emails sent, so a system with 3,000 connections that mails a few times a year pays very little.
- Board and governance documents Meeting agendas, minutes, budgets, rate schedules and bylaws published where members can find them — and the internal versions in access-controlled storage at $7.49 per user a month.
- Accessibility applies here too A water district is a public body for accessibility purposes, with WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard and a special-district deadline of 26 April 2028. Your archive of scanned documents is the work.
Members, Notices And The Board
Security, Because Utilities Are Targets
Small systems are attacked precisely because they are small
Water systems have been probed and compromised repeatedly, and small rural systems are targeted on the assumption that nobody is watching. Basic hygiene — patching, access control, tested backups, network separation — is most of the defence.
Keep the office and the plant apart
If anything on your operational side touches a network, it should not be the same network as the office computer someone reads email on. Where that boundary sits is the first thing we look at.
Backups you have actually restored
Billing records, compliance history and sampling data. CodeGuard from $2.09 a month, and a restore we run rather than assume.
- Quotes for a board meeting Written quotes, scope and references formatted for your board packet or your purchasing policy.
- Your state association probably has a preferred vendor Many state rural water associations steer members toward a particular website program. We will tell you honestly when that is the cheaper answer for a very small system, and when it is not.
- Telephone and broadband co-ops Small telephone and broadband cooperatives have the same shape — a member base, a board, a billing system and a website nobody owns — with more technical staff. Same stack, different conversation.
How Small Utilities Buy
- Liberation Email from $1.95 per user/mo; Mail Pro $7.95 per user/mo
- Hub for Teams $7.49 per user/mo for board documents, sampling records and compliance history
- Liberation Campaign send-based from $10/mo for 10,000 emails — member notices and rate changes
- Website Builder $10.99/mo for a very small system, or an accessible built site priced as a project
- CodeGuard encrypted off-site backups from $2.09/mo
- Network separation, security and IT support scoped per system
What It Costs
Rural Water Associations & Telephone Co-ops FAQs
Do we have to publish our annual water quality report online?
Community water systems must produce and deliver an annual report to customers, and electronic delivery has become the normal route. What we do is publish it as a real accessible page rather than a scan, and keep prior years at stable addresses.
Can you help us send a boil notice quickly?
Yes, and the time to build that is before you need it: a site banner, a member email and an optional text, tested, so the workflow exists when the call comes at 11pm.
Does the website accessibility rule apply to us?
If you are a public body, yes. The standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA and special district governments have until 26 April 2028. The archive of scanned documents is usually the bulk of the work.
Do we have to change our billing system?
No. Utility billing stays where it is. We handle the website, the notices, the email, the document storage and the network.
Are small water systems really targeted?
Yes, and partly because they are small — the assumption is that nobody is monitoring. The defence is unglamorous: patching, access control, network separation and backups that have been restored.
Our state association offers a website program. Should we use that instead?
Possibly, and we will tell you when the answer is yes. For a very small system with a simple site, a state program may be the cheaper answer. It stops being the right answer once you need email, security, network support and accessibility remediation.
Start With This Year’s Report
Send us last year’s report and a link to your current site. We will show you what publishing it properly looks like and what the rest of the year would cost.
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