Kristen Atha, Director of Columbus Water & Power, on leading through rapid growth, stitching past to future, and why slowing down at the right moment is one of the most powerful decisions a leader can make.

Kristen Atha leads an organization of over 1,400 people providing water, water reclamation, and power services to more than 1.5 million customers across Central Ohio. Appointed by Mayor Andrew Ginther in May 2022, she brought 25 years of engineering consulting expertise into a public sector leadership role at exactly the moment Columbus began one of the most significant infrastructure expansions in its history. She is also the mother of triplets, and, as this conversation reveals, the lessons from both roles are more connected than you might expect.

When Kristen drew the Clarity card, she saw in the image a stream running through a field - clear water at the centre, muddy edges where land and water meet. It was an immediate mirror of her work: the constant effort to have clarity around source water, stormwater responsibility, environmental stewardship, and the legacy that 1,200 people are shaping every single day.

"Fifty years from now, people will be living with our decisions. I want them to say - thank goodness they did it this way. They set us up for success."

A city growing faster than almost anywhere

Columbus is in the midst of a transformation that would be remarkable in any era. Investment from the semiconductor industry, data centres, and AI infrastructure, combined with strong population and job growth, has made Central Ohio one of the fastest-growing regions in the United States. For Kristen and her team, that growth lands as both opportunity and immense responsibility.

• 5M+ customers served across Central Ohio
• 1,400+ employees across water, reclamation & power
• $1.6B investment in the new Fort Water Plant
• 26 suburban partner utilities

The Fort Water Plant, now at 95% design completion, represents the most visible expression of that responsibility. But the capital plan extends far beyond a single facility: more pipes, more treatment capacity on both the drinking water and reclamation sides, and growing stormwater challenges as natural landscapes give way to impervious surfaces. The decisions being made right now in Columbus will shape the region for half a century.

Kristen is clear that this is not an abstract point. She and her team discuss legacy almost every day - not as a philosophical exercise, but as a practical discipline. They are already the beneficiaries of great planning decisions made twenty and fifty years ago. The semiconductor fabs and data centres moving to Ohio are possible, in part, because of choices made by people who are now retired or gone. That awareness is both humbling and galvanising.

Arriving in a moment of turbulence — and slowing down first

Kristen joined Columbus Water & Power in the aftermath of Covid, a period when organizations everywhere were struggling with disengagement, exhaustion, and a workforce fundamentally reassessing what work meant to them. It was, as she put it, a moment where some days it felt like the Titanic listing to one side.

Her instinct was not to push hard and fast. It was to help people remember what they were part of. She knew the organization well from her consulting years - its history, its people, the deep pride and care that had always run through it. Her first task was to make that story louder than the noise of discontent. To give people somewhere to plant their feet before asking them to move.

"We needed to remind people that they had each other. That none of us are doing this alone. Once people feel that you have real footing."

She illustrates this with a story from 1998, when her triplets were born. One of her sons was struggling with breathing in the days after birth - the hospital had the three babies in separate parts of the building. Kristen pushed to have them brought together. On the third day, when her son was placed between his two sisters, he stabilised. He simply needed to feel their presence.

That image, of human beings regulating each other, calming each other's nervous systems through proximity and connection, became a quiet guiding principle for how she approached the organization. Remind people of their shared history. Reconnect them to one another. Then, from that solid footing, begin to stitch the past to the present, and the present to the future.

The circular economy conversation nobody expected

What has emerged from that foundation has surprised even Kristen. Columbus is now deep into conversations about water reuse and circular economy models that, as she acknowledges, people in the Midwest simply were not having three or four years ago.

The challenge is direct: with data centres and semiconductor fabs arriving at scale, the drinking water supply is under pressure in ways it has never experienced. The question Kristen and her team are actively pursuing is how to bring private sector partners to the table - not just as customers, but as co-investors in the right kind of treatment infrastructure, so that industries can use recycled wastewater rather than drawing on drinking water supplies meant for residents.

• Water reuse at scale: Redirecting treated wastewater to industrial users rather than drinking water supply
• Private sector co-investment: Bringing tech and data centre partners to the table with capital, not just demand
• Stormwater stewardship: Widening the responsibility circle across developers, city departments, and utilities
• Nature-based design: Preserving and integrating natural landscapes into industrial and residential development

There is no established template for this. The scale and speed of AI and data centre demand is genuinely new. Kristen and her team are projecting forward, making educated guesses, running scenario planning  - and doing so with the explicit understanding that protecting the long-term water supply for residents is the non-negotiable centre of gravity around which everything else must orbit.

Widening the circle, accepting the complexity

One of Kristen's most consistent leadership choices has been to widen the circle of responsibility rather than keep it tightly contained. Stormwater is a clear example: the tension between what developers are asked to fund, what the utility can absorb, and what city departments are responsible for is real and recurring. It would be easier to retreat into silos. Instead, her team has deliberately worked to lock arms with other organizations across the community, finding ways to solve those problems together rather than across the table from each other.

It takes longer. It is more complicated. But the decisions that emerge are better and the relationships that get built in the process have their own compounding value. Kristen has also noticed a shift inside her organization: more collaboration, more curiosity, and, crucially, a growing willingness for people to say "we're not ready to decide that yet." That shift, she argues, is not a sign of slowness. It is a sign of maturity, and it saves enormous amounts of time, cost, and rework downstream.

"There is not enough emphasis on slowing down at the critical points. It is not easy to balance - but giving people permission to say we are not ready yet makes a profound difference to the quality of what follows."

What an industrial park could look like

One of the most vivid threads in this conversation is the question of what growth actually looks like when legacy and humanity are genuinely placed at the centre. Kristen recently visited Mandelberg, Germany, where the river running through the city is flanked not by paved surfaces but by remediated green space and cycle paths - not a square metre of hard surface near the water's edge. It is a deliberate, long-term choice. It costs money. And it works.

Columbus has significant green space alongside its rivers, preserved through intentional decisions over decades. As the city grows faster than almost any comparable American city, those decisions become more critical and more contested. The vision Kristen is working towards is one where new industrial parks, new subdivisions, new data centre campuses are designed with natural water management woven into their fabric from the start. Not bolted on. Not compensated for. Designed in.

It is not the industrial park anyone has built before. Which is precisely why the people building it, right now, in Columbus, have the chance to make it a model for every fast-growing city that follows.

Clarity, in Kristen Atha's hands, is not a passive quality. It is an active, daily discipline of connecting people to one another and to history, of asking who bears responsibility and widening that circle deliberately, of slowing down at the moments that matter most, and of keeping the humanity of future generations visible in every decision made today. Columbus is fortunate to have her. And the water sector is richer for conversations like this one.