Marty Kropelnicki and the business of being taken for granted

Two days before Valentine’s Day in 2017, nearly 200,000 people were ordered to leave the area below Oroville Dam. Among them were customers of California Water Service. While company crews worked to protect the water system, their chief executive, Marty Kropelnicki, went looking for chocolate. He bought the See’s Candies he could find and delivered it to evacuees. The company also provided movie tickets for displaced families.

It is an unexpectedly revealing errand for someone whose résumé runs through economics, corporate finance, and utility regulation. Chocolate cannot mend a dam. It can, however, acknowledge the person waiting for news about home. In a career spent explaining the value of infrastructure, Kropelnicki had found a particularly uncomplicated form of customer service. No slide deck was required.

That small episode provides a way into a much larger job. Now chairman, president, and chief executive of California Water Service Group, he leads a business whose subsidiaries provide water and wastewater services to more than 2.2 million people across five states. Its daily achievement is easy to overlook: people expect the tap to work. His career has increasingly involved making the work behind that expectation visible.

The accountant takes the long way round

Kropelnicki’s route to water passed through several versions of the California economy. From 1989 to 1996, he held positions at Pacific Gas & Electric. A year at Deloitte & Touche Consulting followed. In February 1997, he joined Hall Kinion & Associates as vice president, chief financial officer, and secretary. His experience crossed the boundary between utility operations and the faster tempo of a technology staffing business.

He later became chief financial officer of PowerLight, the Berkeley company supplying large-scale solar electric systems and energy-efficiency services. There, his responsibilities extended beyond finance and accounting to human resources, information technology, and facilities. By the time Cal Water recruited him, the finance title already covered a fair amount of operational ground.

His arrival was announced in February 2006, with a March 13 start date. Peter Nelson, then president and chief executive, was hiring someone with experience across several industries rather than a career confined to water. That breadth would become part of Kropelnicki’s argument about what the utility business could learn.

He had earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in business economics at San Jose State University. The university named him Graduate of the Decade in 2002; its economics department recognized him as Alumni of the Year in 2005 and 2010. It was a local education with a long afterlife in his working vocabulary: investment, planning, incentives, and the question of who pays.

A finance prize, then a different chair

In 2009, Kropelnicki received the Bay Area CFO of the Year award in the category for public companies with revenues up to $500 million. The other finalists came from Peet’s Coffee & Tea and Riverbed Technology. Water had made it onto a decidedly Bay Area shortlist, alongside coffee and technology. Some regional traditions are difficult to escape.

The recognition came while he was still Cal Water’s vice president, chief financial officer, and treasurer. His next step shifted the balance of the job. Effective October 1, 2012, he became president and chief operating officer, while Nelson remained chairman and CEO. Thomas Smegal took over the finance position. The succession had a distinct intermediate stage: Kropelnicki would run operations before taking the chief executive’s chair.

On September 1, 2013, he became president and CEO and joined the board. Nelson moved into the non-executive chairmanship. A decade later, Kropelnicki added the chairman’s role, effective June 1, 2023. His rise inside Cal Water unfolded over years, with finance, operations, executive leadership, and board leadership added in sequence.

Those transitions matter because the different jobs expose different parts of the same promise. A finance officer has to understand what the company can fund. An operating leader has to make the system function. A chief executive has to account for both, while explaining the result to employees, customers, regulators, and shareholders. In his case, the résumé supplies a map of those obligations.

The lesson he brought from Silicon Valley

Kropelnicki has described early work at Hewlett Packard as part of his education in brand marketing. He connected that lesson to Hall Kinion’s public offering and, later, to water. In a 2016 interview, he argued that utilities could learn from technology companies about acting proactively and explaining the value of their work.

“Our days of being the silent service provider are over.”

Marty Kropelnicki, 2016

It is a useful line from an executive in an industry whose products spend much of their time underground. The pipe attracts attention when a street is dug up. The bill arrives with greater regularity. Explaining the relationship between the two is an enduring task for a regulated utility.

His involvement in the National Association of Water Companies began with attendance at its annual summits while he was CFO. He went on to co-chair a financial-reporting committee, join the board, and become president-elect. In October 2016, he was elected president of the association’s board, succeeding Joe Gysel of EPCOR Water USA. The accountant had acquired a national platform.

By May 2017, he was appearing before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on the association’s behalf. His written testimony linked investment in water infrastructure with communities’ ability to attract employers and retain workers. The argument placed water beneath the rest of the economy, a physical prerequisite for businesses that might otherwise appear to have little in common.

In February 2025, he stood at the New York Stock Exchange opening bell with fellow NAWC leaders as the association marked 130 years. The ceremony gave an unusually public stage to a business built around continuity. For once, the water industry had arranged to be heard at precisely 9:30.

First, ask the people doing the work

After moving into senior leadership, Kropelnicki met employees in small groups to talk about the company. Two subjects kept coming back: interest in an employee stock purchase plan, and questions about how individual jobs fitted into the business strategy. The discussions exposed a practical communication problem. People wanted to understand their place in the plan.

He described spending a year and a half working with the board and corporate communications leadership on an updated strategy, followed by six months meeting employees to explain it. The length of that process is striking. A strategy can be announced in an afternoon. Making it intelligible across a workforce requires considerably more diary space.

In the same account, he emphasized emergency training, relationships with suppliers, and coordination with local and state response organizations. Those connections become particularly consequential when power interruptions threaten pumps or a wildfire changes the operating conditions. The customer’s ordinary expectation depends on a network of people who must be able to work together under unusual pressure.

His own account of joining the company carries a more personal register. Remembering his first interview, he said the place felt right as soon as he entered the lobby. After a career crossing industries, he had found somewhere he could imagine staying. Twenty years after his arrival, he was still there.

A ledger with a very long horizon

The investment figures show the scale of the work during his tenure. California Water Service Group’s annual infrastructure investment rose from $293 million in 2021 to $517 million in 2025. Between those endpoints came $328 million, $384 million, and $471 million. Each year’s spending adds to the physical system future employees will operate and future customers will use.

That horizon remains visible in the financing. On October 15, 2026, the group and its California subsidiary announced the pricing of $275 million in notes and mortgage bonds combined. The maturities stretched from 2031 to 2056. The transactions were expected to close by year-end, with proceeds intended for refinancing and general corporate purposes. A financing announcement reaching thirty years ahead is a reminder of the timescale involved.

The former CFO’s world therefore remains very much present in the chief executive’s job. Infrastructure needs money before it can provide service. Borrowing, regulatory decisions, construction, and customer bills occupy different calendars, but eventually meet in the same system. His working life has moved among those calendars.

The next vulnerability

In February 2026, Kropelnicki joined 21 other California chief executives on the newly established CalCEO Council. Created by the California Foundation for Commerce & Education, the group was intended to develop policy proposals and practical approaches to economic concerns, including affordability. It extended his involvement beyond the water industry into the broader conditions facing California businesses and communities.

September brought another appointment: the board of the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure. The alliance brings together companies in sectors including communications, energy, finance, technology, transportation, and water. Its agenda includes physical and cyber resilience and the emerging implications of artificial intelligence. For Kropelnicki, protecting a water system now also means participating in conversations far removed from the pipe itself.

There is another strand of service running through his public life. In 2016, the United States Navy Memorial Foundation presented him with its Naval Heritage Award in Honolulu. The recognition acknowledged support for military personnel through employment, training, and mentorship, as well as the Lone Sailor Memorial at Pearl Harbor. He accepted it on behalf of employees and retirees who had served.

In March 2026, reflecting on Cal Water’s centennial and his own two decades there, he singled out employees in three roles: cross-connection control, project engineering, and customer service. It was a revealing choice of cast for an anniversary reflection. The executive with three titles at the top of the organization was directing attention back toward the people handling its daily promises. There are many ways to explain a water company. He keeps returning to the people who make it work.