Elizabeth L. Cousins

A native of Australia, Cousins said there are parallels between the drought conditions that often plague both her homeland and areas of California.

The Nossaman partner works on California transactions that sought innovative solutions to mounting water shortages.

“In some ways the partners here were visionaries who were looking for people with international experience in new infrastructure technologies,” she said. “Part of the benefit I brought when I moved from Australia was that I had worked on desalination and wastewater treatment projects there. Both Perth, where I’m from, and California are forever dealing with drought.”

In 2020 she reached a milestone as the lead on the East County Advanced Water Purification project in San Diego. The job will develop four progressive design-build operations packages to provide East San Diego County with a new, safe, sustainable and drought-proof water supply, she said, in a project valued at about $700 million.

“The idea is to purify and recycle wastewater flows that would otherwise be discharged into the ocean,” Cousins said. “It’s pretty great to think that an existing resource can be useful and sustainable as we go into drought.”

She is also lead on the City of Los Angeles’ Advanced Water Purification Facility, where the Department of Public Works’ Bureau of Sanitation is creating a system at the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant to help fulfill the city’s long-term water management objective of fully reusing its water supplies. She also leads on a P3 plan for the Department of Public Works: the design, construction, operation and maintenance over a 30-year term of a Clean Water Campus project. She’s overseeing the procurement of two design-build-finance-operate-maintain contracts for the city’s Bureau of Sanitation’s Central Los Angeles Recycling Transfer Station.

Cousins said the Biden administration’s infrastructure proposals could include funding for the kind of work she does, including money for the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act, a 2014 statute amied at providing long-term, low-cost loans for regionally and nationally significant projects.

“We know that other agencies are looking at what we are doing in San Diego and Los Angeles as models. There are plenty of other wastewater agencies that could use these technologies nationally,” Cousins said.

— John Roemer