William “Bill” Gilmore is a distinguished utilities, infrastructure, and public-sector executive whose career spans more than four decades of leadership, management consulting, organizational transformation, fiscal stewardship, and community service. His professional journey has placed him at the intersection of essential infrastructure and effective leadership, where decisions about water, wastewater, power, municipal services, capital investment, and organizational performance have lasting consequences for communities. From serving as a municipal executive and utility CEO to advising some of the nation’s largest public utilities, Bill has built his career around solving complex problems, improving organizations, and helping leaders turn ambitious strategies into sustainable results.
Bill’s career began in public policy, government planning, and finance, providing him with a foundation that would influence his leadership philosophy for decades. He served in policy and fiscal analyst positions with the State of Kansas before becoming a Senior Budget Analyst for the City of Kansas City, Kansas. There, his responsibilities encompassed departmental budgeting, fiscal and operational assessments, and development of a multi-year capital improvement program. These formative experiences taught him to see budgets not simply as financial documents, but as strategic instruments that reveal an organization’s priorities, capabilities, risks, and opportunities. That perspective would later become particularly valuable as Bill assumed responsibility for increasingly complex organizations and infrastructure portfolios.
His progression into executive leadership included serving as Executive Director of the East Windsor Municipal Utilities Authority in New Jersey, where he was responsible for the administrative, financial, contractual, operational, and community-facing dimensions of an independent water and sewer utility. Under his leadership, the organization advanced its approach to rate structures, development impact fees, financial management, infrastructure reserves, budgeting, and preventive maintenance. Among the organization’s achievements was the establishment of an asset-management preventive-maintenance strategy that ultimately provided 95 percent coverage of its capital systems. Bill also served concurrently for a period as Interim Township Manager for East Windsor, giving him direct responsibility for municipal administration, budgets, labor relationships, contracts, technology modernization, and community relations.
Bill subsequently expanded his influence through management consulting, serving as a Principal and Senior Project Manager with CDM Smith and leading significant engagements involving utility operations, infrastructure investment, asset management, organizational assessments, financial performance, and executive advisory services. One of his most consequential assignments involved leading a capital prioritization and asset-risk mitigation initiative for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. The engagement addressed more than $100 billion in assets and introduced an asset risk index methodology to help maintenance and project-management professionals systematically prioritize investments. The methodology received support from key oversight stakeholders, and the work contributed to securing $7 billion in new funding for the subsequent 10-year capital program.
His consulting career also demonstrated Bill’s ability to translate analysis into measurable operational improvement. As Project Manager for a management and operations study involving the Chicago Department of Water Management, he helped identify approximately $30 million in operational savings from a $237 million budget. His recommendations and leadership also supported modernization initiatives involving automated meter reading, maintenance-management technology, SCADA implementation, organizational restructuring, and workforce efficiency. On other assignments, Bill served as an interim utility executive and as an executive advisor and mentor, helping organizations rebuild stakeholder relationships, strengthen financial and administrative systems, improve communication, and guide newly appointed leaders through organizational transitions.
Bill’s leadership has also extended well beyond the continental United States. As Deputy Executive Director of the Commonwealth Utilities Corporation in the Northern Mariana Islands, he helped lead an organization responsible for power, water, and sewer services across Saipan, Tinian, and Rota. His responsibilities encompassed water and wastewater operations, engineering, federally funded infrastructure programs, regulatory initiatives, and executive leadership across the broader utility organization. During his tenure, the organization advanced strategic planning across all three utilities, developed a five-year capital improvement program totaling approximately $602 million, secured federal funding for an asset-management program, and made substantial progress toward regulatory and infrastructure objectives. One particularly meaningful operational achievement was the establishment of permanent 24-hour water availability across Saipan, an important milestone for the island and its residents.
International exposure has further shaped Bill’s ability to work across organizational and cultural boundaries. His experience includes work in Southern Africa, where he served as a financial advisor and administrative specialist on a major program-management assignment in Lesotho. Faced with strained relationships between government executives and the program-management team, Bill worked to improve transparency, communication, financial processes, document management, and project reporting. His broader professional experience has also taken him into international industry forums, where he has shared lessons in asset management, risk prioritization, utility transformation, and organizational change. These experiences strengthened a leadership approach based on listening carefully, understanding the institutional environment, establishing trust, and creating systems through which people can work toward common objectives.
Throughout his career, Bill has developed particular expertise in asset management, strategic planning, capital prioritization, organizational effectiveness, change management, budgeting, utility operations, performance management, risk assessment, contract management, project management, infrastructure investment, and executive mentoring. He understands that successful infrastructure organizations cannot rely exclusively on engineering solutions or financial resources. Sustainable improvement requires alignment among people, processes, technology, governance, capital strategy, and organizational culture. This ability to connect strategic objectives with operational realities has enabled him to advise organizations confronting everything from aging infrastructure and regulatory requirements to financial constraints, workforce challenges, technology modernization, and organizational change.
Bill has also contributed to his profession as an author, educator, and speaker. His published work includes articles addressing capital prioritization and asset management, and he has delivered presentations on topics including organizational change, asset-management implementation, utility rate structures, risk assessment, utility reorganization, infrastructure finance, and effective utility management. His speaking engagements have included professional conferences and industry forums in the United States and internationally, demonstrating his ability not only to develop sophisticated management concepts but also to communicate them effectively to executives, technical professionals, government leaders, and other stakeholders.
Service and community improvement have remained equally important dimensions of Bill’s professional identity. His governance experience includes board and committee leadership as well as many years of community involvement. He served as Board President of Rise, Community Action Service Center, supporting an organization dedicated to helping individuals and families facing poverty, unemployment, immigration challenges, and other difficult transitions. His board experience has also included community improvement and economic development organizations, complementing a career devoted to strengthening the institutions upon which communities depend. Whether working on a billion-dollar infrastructure portfolio or supporting a local community initiative, Bill has consistently approached leadership as a responsibility to leave organizations stronger and more capable than he found them.
Academically, Bill combines training in public administration with expertise in regional and community planning. He earned a Master of Public Administration from the University of Kansas and a graduate degree in Regional and Community Planning from Kansas State University. This combination of government administration, planning, finance, infrastructure, and hands-on executive experience has enabled him to evaluate organizational challenges from multiple perspectives. Rather than treating operations, finance, governance, workforce development, infrastructure, and community impact as separate concerns, Bill approaches them as interconnected components of sustainable organizational performance.
Now in a semi-retired phase of his career, Bill is seeking opportunities to bring this accumulated knowledge to boards and advisory organizations where experience, judgment, and perspective can make a meaningful difference. He is particularly interested in organizations connected to utilities, water and wastewater, power, infrastructure, construction, engineering, community improvement, and management. For Bill, board service represents a natural continuation of a career centered on helping organizations solve difficult problems, manage change intelligently, prioritize resources responsibly, and build sustainable capacity for the future. He offers boards both strategic perspective and practical understanding—the ability to ask challenging questions while appreciating what it takes to execute decisions in complex operating environments.
Beyond his professional commitments, Bill enjoys collecting art, attending Broadway productions, traveling, swimming, and cooking. These interests reflect the curiosity and appreciation for people, places, culture, and creativity that have accompanied his professional life. At the core of his leadership philosophy is a belief that organizations succeed when knowledgeable people work collaboratively toward clearly understood objectives and when leadership balances fiscal discipline and operational excellence with responsibility to employees, customers, stakeholders, and the communities being served. As he enters the next chapter of his career, Bill is motivated by the opportunity to continue contributing that perspective, helping organizations scale responsibly, navigate complexity, and create positive and enduring impact.
Character:
Bill leads with a strong sense of responsibility, service, integrity, and commitment to the communities and organizations entrusted to his leadership. His decades of public service, executive responsibility, mentoring, and community involvement demonstrate a willingness to tackle difficult challenges while remaining focused on sustainable outcomes and the people affected by them.
Knowledge:
Bringing extensive knowledge of utilities, infrastructure, municipal government, financial management, asset management, organizational effectiveness, capital planning, and operational transformation. His experience ranges from hands-on organizational assessments to executive responsibility for complex utility systems and advisory work involving multibillion-dollar infrastructure portfolios.
Strategic:
Bill consistently connects immediate operational decisions with longer-term organizational, financial, and community objectives. His work in capital prioritization, strategic planning, risk assessment, infrastructure modernization, and organizational change demonstrates an ability to identify what matters most and establish practical pathways from strategy to implementation.
Communication:
An experienced communicator who has worked with governing bodies, employees, unions, regulators, elected officials, executives, engineers, consultants, community stakeholders, and international audiences. His extensive speaking, teaching, advisory, and executive experience enables him to translate complex technical and management issues into clear conversations that support informed decisions and organizational alignment.
