The relationship ran continuously from October 1999 to January 2024. That is not a long engagement; it is a quarter century of the same operational estate, seen from two sides of it.
Why the boundary is unusual
JEA is an authority under the city charter. So the utility whose SCADA network, substation estate and power quality metering were built as a consultant later sat inside the estate held under architecture governance from the City side. Most consulting relationships end when the engagement does, and most governance relationships begin with someone reading documentation about a system they have never touched. This one had neither discontinuity.
What it consisted of
1999–2005, from the consultancy. Utility SCADA across 24 water and wastewater treatment sites, the redundant control sites behind it, the substation network across Duval County, the power quality metering fleet, and the change management process written for the utility before it was ever a City standard.
2005–2024, from the City. Counterpart and subject-matter expert to the utility on the things two public bodies in the same city have to hold jointly: shared infrastructure, the regional fiber consortium, and the change management standard both organizations ran — the same process, carried across the boundary with the person who wrote it.
Why it is worth stating as its own entry
Twenty-five years of watching one operational estate evolve is a different kind of knowledge than an engagement produces. An engagement teaches how a system was built. Two decades on top of that teach what the system became, which of the original decisions held, and which ones the organization quietly worked around — and that is the knowledge a utility actually calls someone back for.
It also explains something the timeline would otherwise make look like coincidence. The operational technology thread on this record is not a specialization added mid-career. It is the reason for the first hire in consulting, and it never stopped running.
Outcome
Institutional knowledge of an operational estate measured in decades rather than engagements — held across a change of employer, and across the boundary between building it and governing it.