Director, Government Relations and Public Affairs

Founded in 1866, San Jose Water Company is an investor owned water company headquartered in Silicon Valley. With a service area of 140 square miles, it is one of the largest and most technically sophisticated urban water systems in the United States. We serve over 1 million people with high-quality, life-sustaining water, with an emphasis on exceptional customer service.

About the Role

The Director, Government Relations and Public Affairs will serve as the President's strategic bridge and advisor across the Company's departments to ensure the Company is best positioned with all relevant public agencies and to advance the Company's standing in the public arena with its public constituencies. 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• Strong political judgment including the discipline to know how to engage on the Company’s behalf at the right time and 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.

Pay

Compensation range: $199,000.00 - $243,000.00 annual salary.

Benefits

We offer a challenging and rewarding work environment along with a competitive salary and an excellent benefits package.