Director, Government Relations and Public Affairs

The role supports the President's effort to oversee all aspects of the Company's strategy, advocacy, funding, regulatory clearance, coalitions, communications, and community engagement — as one integrated effort rather than running any single department.

Core Responsibilities

1. Develop Strategic Annual Plans

• Translate the Company's operating and business priorities into a prioritized government agenda, ranked by impact, urgency, feasibility, and return, drawing the facts behind each position from the legal, finance, engineering, operations, and communications teams.
• Develop the path for each priority — legislation, regulation, funding, coalition, or local action — on an annual basis with the President and external consultants.
• Monitor legislation, regulations, budgets, agendas, hearings, and the Company's key relationships, ensuring a deep understanding of the agencies and public officials impacting the Company's initiatives.
• Identify and surface emerging risks, alerting leadership when proactive action is needed.

2. Advocacy, Government Relationships, and Coalitions

• Build and sustain the relationships that carry the Company’s standing with officials, agencies, regulators, and relevant government agencies.
• Educate officials on the Company's operations and public benefit, secure support for target legislation, funding, and permits, and oppose or amend what threatens its operations, finances, or community standing.
• Mobilize third-party support: recruit aligned cities, counties, agencies, business, labor, environmental, and community partners into coalitions, joint letters, and project tours, and address opponents early.
• Identify public funding matched to the Company’s capital, infrastructure, and program needs, and package each project around need, cost, public benefit, urgency, and readiness.

3. Regulatory and Permitting

• Identify and define the legal, regulatory, and permitting barriers to project delivery, working with legal and technical staff.
• Develop and run a strategy to clear each — approval, faster timeline, clearer requirements, or a rule change — engaging agencies early to prevent surprises.
• Escalate when agency delay or ambiguity threatens delivery.

4. Communications, Community, and Public Affairs

• Convert technical engineering and operational detail into plain-language policy narrative, produce the materials that carry it — fact sheets, briefing papers, talking points, testimony, executive summaries — and match each issue to the right messenger and vehicle.
• Coordinate the Company's community engagement, charitable giving, and sponsorships as part of its civic footprint as well as its government relations efforts.
• Direct the public relations and earned-media efforts that build the Company’s public standing and reinforce its advocacy.

Essential capabilities

• Strong political judgment including the discipline to know how to engage on the Company’s behalf at the right time at the right place.
• Command of legislative, regulatory, budget, and agency processes.
• Ability to translate technical infrastructure and operational detail into policy argument and government relations action plans.
• Credibility with officials and agencies, and the instinct to build the relationships behind it.
• Experience with public communications and community relations.
• Excellent writing and communications skills.
• Capacity to run many issues, stakeholders, and timelines at once across internal departments and senior leadership.