Notre Dame has some attributes that make it a little different. Its religious character is of course central; more than once, a student meaning to address me as “Mayor Pete” has absentmindedly called me “Father Pete” instead. The students and faculty, on average, are more conservative than at most colleges. And the university campus technically sits outside the city limits. Still, for as long as I could remember, these basic patterns of traditional city-university relations held up. If the city thought about students, it was mainly with regard to their spending habits and their likelihood of getting into danger or trouble. And if students engaged the community, it was likely to be as a place to occasionally eat, drink, or shop—or volunteer. At most, we might hope that a student would take a little time to serve food at the homeless shelter or tutor local students, just as I volunteered once a week to teach fifth-grade civics in Cambridge.
This was the framework I carried into office at first: the university as a large employer, students and other members of the university community as warm bodies, like any other resident except for a somewhat distinct economic and political profile. To be sure, Notre Dame was getting more engaged by the time I left for college. It supported a community organization that oversaw the transformation of neighborhoods south of the university without succumbing to fears of gentrification, working to make sure neighbors felt empowered rather than threatened by the school’s territorial growth. Under Mayor Luecke, the city had partnered with Notre Dame to build a mixed-use development south of campus with restaurants, bars, shops, offices, and apartments that were a short walk from campus but technically in the city limits, creating more options for students and employees while also adding to our tax base. And students volunteered abundantly on worthy community causes, from the Center for the Homeless to neighborhood cleanups.
All of this was meaningful, but it didn’t distinctively reflect the fact that Notre Dame is a university, not some other large organization. The volunteerism, the economic development, and even the neighborhood engagement could plausibly be something that any large organization, such a hospital or major corporation, might do on and around the campus of its headquarters.
But a university is not like any other large organization. Its students, faculty, and staff have characteristics different than any other community-within-a-community. However important their presence as residents, taxpayers, employees, and voters, the unique thing about them is the substance of their work. And if their intellectual endeavors are connected in the right way to the life of the community, the results are so profound that I now believe that a mayor who is granted one wish for any feature to add to her city—a stadium, a major corporate headquarters, a state capitol—should find the answer obvious: pick a world-class research university.
Our classic example of this was a collaboration that began before I took office, whose fruit today is my rightful boast that South Bend has the smartest sewers in the world. While wastewater management is not known for its power to fascinate, our city’s experience with innovation in the field is among the most important local developments we’ve seen—and a model with implications for other cities across the country.
It happened because Gary Gilot, the public works director under my predecessor, understood that things going on at the university had yet-unimagined potential to solve some of the problems on his plate. Tall, soft-spoken, and deferential, bald with a crown of gray hair and a beard that he shaves below the lip, he resembles nothing so much as an engineering professor. He was a civil servant for as long as I had been alive, an exception to the norm in his field of spending perhaps half your career in the public sector before transitioning to the more lucrative realm of an engineering firm.
Impressed by his creativity and decency, I pleaded with him to stay on as my public works director after taking office. But he was ready to spend more time with his wife and focus on mentoring young engineers and community volunteers, so he declined—only to stay in the position for several months, unpaid at his own insistence, while we searched for a successor. Only once do I remember him being late to a meeting, explaining that he had come from taking the second in a series of rabies shots after being bitten by one of the many stray cats he feeds outside his home. It was a fitting metaphor for his career-long endurance of the various indignities of public service. Once, at a neighborhood meeting in someone’s living room, I saw him absorb a sequence of dressing-downs by fussy residents who were demanding an unworkable gauntlet of speed bumps on their street. I observed him politely nodding while another neighbor launched into him, beginning: “Well, I’m not an engineer, I’m just an ordinary scholar of international law, but I can’t understand why the city won’t . . .” And that was when I realized that the patience of a consummate public servant can be saint-like.
Somehow, rather than being beaten down by his job, Gary seemed unfailingly energetic and optimistic, always searching for interesting new ideas and engaging with a younger generation of people that cares about civic innovation. This must be what made him eager to cooperate when some researchers at Notre Dame began to develop a technology for sensing water levels in sewers. Recognizing the potential value for a city that still had employees manually checking water levels under manholes full-time, he worked with the researchers to place Wi-Fi-enabled sensors across the city’s sewer network. That would allow the system to automatically detect blockages, alert operators, and send instructions to smart valves that would redirect the flow of wastewater from overflowing pipes to empty ones. It was the Internet of Things, a few years before the term became popular.
The significance of this effort, Gary knew, was far greater than just relieving a two-man crew of manually checking our sewer overflows every day. South Bend, like many other Midwestern cities, had a “combined sewer” system, which means that wastewater and stormwater go through the same pipes. Under normal conditions, the system works well, but when high volumes hit the system, such as during a major snow melt, the combined sewage cannot fit through all the pipes, leading to backups that send untreated sewage into the river. This violates the Clean Water Act, which prompted the EPA to pursue several such “combined sewer overflow” cities beginning in the late 1990s. South Bend was one of those “CSO” cities, and Mayor Luecke signed a consent decree a few days before leaving office in 2011 committing the city to a series of upgrades to reduce the overflows, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. It was a political no-win: inaction meant continuing to violate the Clean Water Act and courting federal penalties, but signing up for the deal meant promising that the city would accomplish unprecedented infrastructure upgrades and enact the rate increases to pay for them. By finalizing terms of a deal just before I took office, he had jumped on a political grenade for his successor.
Sewer management was not on the syllabus of my History and Literature program in college. But by the time I took office, it was clearly going to be a major part of my job. Just to comply with the consent decree, I would have to preside over the largest and most expensive public works project in the city’s history. But the mandate came without funding: we were required to find the money locally. Forced to look for new ideas and better answers, our administration used the smart sewer network to get a better understanding of the situation. Using real-time data from the sensors and sophisticated models to simulate different scenarios, we were able to game out how the planned upgrades would work—and what it would take to fully implement them.