Sara Katz and the question before the water flows

A glass of water can become a political argument before anyone takes a sip. Give it a history, attach a disputed project to it, and an ordinary object acquires a committee, a budget and a roomful of questions. Sara M. Katz has spent much of her working life in that room.

Her profession sits at an awkward junction. Public agencies need to explain what they propose to build. Residents want to know what it will cost, why it belongs in their neighborhood and whether anyone intends to listen. A technically accomplished presentation can leave those questions untouched. Katz built a firm around the work of connecting them to the project.

There is an appealing absurdity to the assignment: help people pay close attention to systems they generally prefer to ignore. Water infrastructure earns relatively little affection when it works. When change arrives, however, the audience can become attentive very quickly. Katz’s career has followed that moment of attention, from political work in California to years of public involvement in water and wastewater programs.

The name on the door

Before founding her business, Katz worked on former San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson’s staff and as a political consultant. An early sewer upgrade assignment helped establish the direction of her practice. The subject matter brought policy into contact with the physical workings of a city: treatment facilities, recycled water, conservation and the difficult business of explaining why an investment mattered.

In July 1986, she started Katz & Associates from her first San Diego condo. She had reservations about putting her own name on the company. An advisor persuaded her that her reputation was what clients were buying. The first logo came in mauve on cream. Even the most consequential public affairs career must occasionally begin at a small print shop.

The choice of name contained a problem that would grow more interesting with time. At the beginning, a client could hire Sara Katz. Eventually, a client needed to be able to hire the organization she had built. A professional practice has to carry somebody’s judgment beyond the hours that person can personally supply.

By 2021, her firm had more than 40 employees and offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco as well as San Diego. Its work reached across the United States. That growth gave the name a second meaning: an institution staffed by communications professionals, with a founder whose experience could be applied across assignments.

The professional recognition came well before the acquisition. In 2013, the San Diego and Imperial Counties chapter of the Public Relations Society of America honored Katz with its Otto Bos Lifetime Achievement Award. The chapter later brought its past recipients into an online Hall of Fame. The award’s emphasis includes professional service and helping the next generation, a useful reminder that building a practice also means building a profession around it.

Give the public something to inspect

Pure Water San Diego offers a concrete view of the work. The city’s proposal to add purified recycled water to its supply required an explanation people could examine and discuss. Earlier reuse efforts had encountered resistance. A new technical process still had to pass through the old human habit of asking what, exactly, was going on.

The Katz team supported the program’s outreach from 2010. Its methods included demonstration facility tours, presentations, community events and a working group. These formats gave the explanation different points of entry. Someone might attend a meeting, visit the facility or encounter the project at an event before ever reading a detailed document.

There was room for a less conventional invitation, too. The outreach program included Pure Stone with Stone Brewing and Pure Brew with local homebrewers. Coffee offered another way to encounter the purified water. An engineering explanation had acquired a social setting. A brewery may be an unusual classroom, but at least the audience has a reason to stay.

The important feature of these activities is their variety. A tour lets someone see a process. A presentation gives a group a shared explanation. A neighborhood conversation can uncover a concern about construction rather than water supply. Each format makes a different question possible. Treating all of them as a single announcement would lose much of their value.

This also helps explain the appeal of a virtual tour. At the 2020 WateReuse Symposium, Katz and colleague Megan Drummy were listed to present on extending a demonstration facility’s life through a virtual tour video. A physical site has visiting hours and travel requirements. A video can make its explanation available to someone who never joins the tour bus.

The two also coauthored a conference paper on public outreach for potable reuse, published in the Water Environment Federation’s proceedings in 2016. The subject connected traditional methods with newer, tailored approaches. For Katz, the communication assignment had become something to teach and examine alongside the projects themselves.

Keep answering after the meeting

Katz’s advice to the Southern California Water Coalition in April 2024 was particularly practical. Engagement should continue over time, she said, rather than intensify only when an agency needs support. She also urged using a range of channels. Town halls and newspaper advertising had a place; so did neighborhood social platforms.

The point becomes clearer if you consider the audience’s calendar. A project team may spend years developing a proposal. A resident might first hear about it when a notice reaches the door. Another may become interested only after the construction route changes. The conversation has late arrivals. A communications program has to make room for them.

That requirement is easy to praise and expensive to forget. It asks an organization to preserve answers, maintain contact routes and keep people available after the launch. An announcement is a bounded task. A relationship continues making demands. Katz’s emphasis on consistency puts that continuing work inside the project’s ordinary responsibilities.

In October 2025, she presented findings from key opinion leader interviews to the Los Angeles County Water Communications Task Force. The interviews drew on people from organizations and agencies with different relationships to water. Their findings were combined with a countywide public opinion survey to inform future communication strategy.

The meeting record includes a question about the ways people receive information. Katz explained that the interviewees had volunteered the channels they considered effective in their communities, and that traditional media could still matter. It is a small exchange, but a revealing one: the useful channel depends partly on what people actually use.

Listening on that scale also complicates the notion of a single public. An agency, a community organization and a neighborhood resident can approach the same water issue with different responsibilities. A useful explanation has to remain accurate while meeting those different starting points. The work requires curiosity before it requires a slogan.

The person behind the meeting notes

Katz’s directness becomes rather entertaining when she talks about hiring. Her advice to communications graduates includes a compact instruction: “Read the damn newspaper.” An interest in people, apparently, is insufficient preparation for explaining what those people are arguing about.

She worked her way through school waiting tables. At one themed San Diego restaurant, the costume was Wonder Woman. Her taste in entertainment ranges from Fleetwood Mac to Dua Lipa; concerts and dancing remain pleasures. There is a pleasing continuity between someone happy to join an audience and someone who has spent a career thinking about how audiences respond.

“Read the damn newspaper.”

Sara M. Katz, on preparing for a communications career

The restaurant history adds a useful human scale to the professional biography. Before the conference programs and advisory assignments came shifts, customers and the practical task of dealing with whoever arrived next. The superhero costume is the detail that sticks. The work was still waiting tables.

A different title, a familiar assignment

In 2023, Southwest Strategies acquired Katz & Associates. The initial arrangement retained the Katz name and set out a continuing role for its founder in the water practice, selected accounts and business development. Katz described the opportunity in terms of broader services for clients and professional development for staff.

On February 23, 2026, the accumulated agencies unified as Bodewell Group. The new name brought together Southwest Strategies and businesses acquired over several years, including Katz & Associates. Katz now serves as Strategic Advisor, Principal in Charge, and Partner. The name that had once seemed too personal for a company had completed its own long journey.

Her present assignments include senior communications advice on western water and infrastructure initiatives, including Los Angeles County work and the proposed Sites Reservoir. Her experience also extends to projects in Australia and Iraq. The settings vary; the need to make an infrastructure proposal understandable travels remarkably well.

A founder can measure a career in offices opened, titles held or transactions completed. Katz’s work suggests another unit: the question that finally receives an answer someone can use. A resident understands the next step. A project team hears a concern in time to address it. The meeting ends, and there is a reason to keep talking.

That is a modest-looking achievement beside a reservoir or a treatment plant. It is also the sort of achievement those projects repeatedly require. Four decades after the condo and the mauve stationery, Sara Katz is still working on what happens when the people outside the project are invited into the conversation.