Frequently asked questions

Water Hawk is the analytical workspace for the U.S. municipal water sector. We score every U.S. utility on composite Infrastructure readiness, benchmark chemical procurement at the lane level, surface the rebid calendar, and prepare dossiers for Infrastructure developers, chemical suppliers, water utilities, and capital partners. The product is the result of years of corpus building across federal and state agency records, consent decrees, audited financials, bond disclosures, primary-source procurement filings, and tens of thousands of source-document PDFs that we normalize ourselves. Most of the underlying material is technically public but poorly indexed, scattered across hundreds of jurisdictions, and inconsistent in format. The work is the cleaning and cross-referencing.

Public-private-partnership developers sourcing infrastructure deals. Chemical suppliers tracking utility procurement cycles. Water utilities benchmarking themselves and their peers. Capital partners doing diligence on water-sector exposure. Investment-Grade Reports under separate Statement of Work serve LPs and bankers.

Each underlying source has its own cadence. Enforcement and SDWA data refresh monthly. Permit cycles and chemical procurement refresh quarterly. Bond disclosures and audited financials refresh annually. We surface a freshness indicator where reasonably possible. Forward-looking aggregates carry a 90-day delay so contributor-aggregated outputs cannot be used for real-time price signaling. See Disclaimers.

Public-record sources, primary documents, and operator-validated overlays. The underlying corpus spans federal compliance and enforcement records (SDWA, ECHO, NPDES, EFAS), federal designation overlays (HIFLD, IIJA, Opportunity Zones, CEJST), state-agency filings, consent decree archives, audit reports, EMMA bond disclosures, U.S. Census ACS, and a long tail of agency-issued PDFs and filings that we normalize ourselves. The corpus is the work; most of these sources are indexed poorly or not at all, and the value sits in the cleaning and the cross-referencing that turns scattered filings into a single coherent record per utility. Where we surface contributor-aggregated data, the aggregation is subject to a minimum cohort size, a single-contributor concentration cap, and a forward-looking time delay (operational defense, not customer commitment).

A dossier is our analytical opinion on a single municipality, built on a per-utility record assembled from primary federal and state filings, audited financials, consent decrees, NPDES and SDWA permits, procurement disclosures, and operator-validated overlays. Three formats are available: a baseline dossier on any U.S. utility in the index, a custom dossier prepared by an analyst on engagement, and the Investment-Grade Report (a separately scoped deliverable under a Statement of Work, starting at $5,000). Each format carries the same per-utility record underneath; the difference is the depth of analyst time, the scope of the questions asked, and the deliverable format. None of the three is investment, legal, financial, or engineering advice.

Yes. We publish four free quarterly reports, one per product line: Chemical Procurement Quarterly, P3 Readiness Regional Quarterly, RNG Intelligence Regional Quarterly, and Data Center Intelligence Regional Quarterly. Each free edition carries the executive summary, headline stats, regional rollup, and three to five top-line findings. The full edition (named entities, per-state and per-cluster scoring, the trigger-event watch list, and the Tier-1 alert layer) is gated to subscribers. Read the free editions at /reports.

Once per quarter, roughly 5 to 8 weeks after the quarter closes. Subscribers receive the full edition first; the free edition publishes shortly after. Tier-1 alerts inside the live workspace fire continuously, not just at quarterly cadence.

H2bid lists bids; we score the underlying utilities, benchmark the bid prices at lane level, surface upcoming rebid windows, and produce a dossier behind every name. H2bid is a bid feed; we are an analytical product. Full editorial comparison at /topics/vs/h2bid. GovWin is generic government contracting intelligence, not focused on water. We go materially deeper on water-utility specifics (compliance trajectory, capital plan, federal designation overlays, statutory P3 framework) than a generalist could. Full editorial comparison at /topics/vs/govwin. Bluefield Research publishes quarterly research reports. We publish the same kind of quarterly reports for free at /reports, but the subscription unlocks the live workspace, named-utility scoring, and the bid library that Bluefield does not maintain.

Yes. The public /p3-readiness-sample page shows the analytical depth of the scoring (composite score, all ten components, federal designation count, top-component contribution) on the top 30 utilities with identifying fields redacted. The redactions are applied before the page is sent to your browser. The full subscription returns the named entities and the full national run.

Three audiences: Municipalities (free), Chemical Suppliers (paid, monthly, three-month minimum), and Infrastructure (P3 and data-center investors; paid, monthly, three-month minimum). Three optional addons (RNG Intelligence, Data Center Intelligence, and the Water Nexus bundle). Investment-Grade Reports are bespoke engagements from $5,000 (single dossier) to $15,000 (with remote presentation). See Pricing for the current schedule.

Yes. All sales are final. Subscription fees, annual prepayments, addon fees, custom-report fees, and Investment-Grade Report fees are non-refundable. This applies whether you used the Service during the period covered or not. You may cancel auto-renewal at any time from the billing surface; cancellation stops future renewals but does not refund the current period. See Terms Section 2.

You can cancel auto-renewal at any time from the billing surface. The cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid period. If you are within a minimum-term commitment (six months on entry tiers, twelve months on mid and upper tiers), the remaining-term fees become immediately due as liquidated damages. You waive any right to dispute the charge through chargeback.

A 14-day evaluation trial is available on the entry paid tiers (Chemical Suppliers and Infrastructure). Card on file is required at signup (we authorize a small amount and immediately void the hold). The trial provides a representative subset of the workspace so you can evaluate fit: three preview dossiers on operator-selected utilities, a curated sample of the bid index, and read access to the public surfaces. Full search, exports, watchlists, alerts, analyst time, the bid-calendar export, and named entities on the broader national run are gated to the paid tier. The trial converts automatically to the paid subscription unless you cancel during the trial window. One trial per organization, per cardholder name, per business email; signups from disposable or free-provider email addresses (gmail, yahoo, outlook, icloud, and similar) are not accepted on the paid tiers. We also rate-limit trial signups by source IP. The trial is a sample of the workspace, not a path to extract the workspace.

Credit and debit cards via Stripe. Annual invoicing and ACH are available on the upper-tier subscriptions and on Investment-Grade Report engagements; contact [email protected] for the invoicing flow.

Pricing may be increased at renewal upon at least sixty (60) days written notice. Customers in an active minimum-term keep their original price; the new price takes effect at the next renewal.

No. The Service is provided "as is" and "as available." It is continually improving and may be unavailable from time to time for maintenance, upgrades, infrastructure migration, security work, or for reasons outside our control. We do not warrant any specific uptime, latency, or freshness, and we do not credit or refund fees for any period of unavailability. See Terms Section 3 and Disclaimers.

Email [email protected] with the URL, the action you took, and any error message. We will investigate and correct where reasonable. Reasonable correction does not entitle you to retroactive damages.

Formal Service Level Agreements (uptime targets, response-time targets, credits for missed targets) are negotiated separately and attached to your Order Form. They are not standard on self-serve tiers.

Yes. The Service is a continually improving product. We add features, revise methodologies, change layouts, and adjust pricing as the platform matures. Changes apply prospectively. Material changes to the Terms or Privacy Policy take effect at least 30 days after we post them.

No. Output is licensed for the internal business use of your authorized users only. You may not redistribute, resell, republish, sublicense, share, post, or forward Output outside your authorized users. This includes posting to a public web page, attaching to an outbound deliverable, sending to clients or partners, or letting any third party view Output you have rendered. See Acceptable Use.

Yes. Every paid Output is watermarked. The watermark is a visible diagonal mark with the user identity and the time of render, plus a steganographic per-section fingerprint that is not visible to the eye. Removing or tampering with the watermark is a federal violation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in addition to a material breach of the Terms.

No. Using Output as training, fine-tuning, evaluation, or retrieval material for any automated system is prohibited. This includes machine-learning models, embedding indexes, vector stores, knowledge-base retrieval layers, and any process that ingests Output for the purpose of producing derivative analysis at scale. This is a hard rule, not a price negotiation.

No. Output is opinion-based analysis of imperfect public data. It is not legal, tax, financial, investment, accounting, or engineering advice. You make your own decisions and are solely responsible for them. Consult your own qualified advisors before any transactional, regulatory, or operational decision.

No. Calendar entries are estimates. Due-dates may move, be cancelled, be re-posted under a different reference, or be unilaterally modified by an awarding agency at any time. Verify any due-date with the awarding agency before relying on it.

Not in identifiable form. We may include de-identified, aggregated cohort outputs that contain your data subject to a minimum cohort size, a single-contributor concentration cap, and a forward-looking time delay. See Privacy Policy.

No. We do not sell or rent personal information. See Privacy Policy.

No. One natural person, one account. Account sharing is a material breach. We monitor for coordinated multi-account access through technical and operational measures, and confirmed sharing is grounds for immediate suspension or termination.

Yes. Multi-factor authentication is offered through the auth surface and is required for accounts with administrative privileges.

We process personal information consistent with GDPR, the UK GDPR, the Swiss FADP, and U.S. state privacy laws (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and similar). Send rights requests to [email protected].

A long-dated contractual arrangement in which a public utility transfers operational or financial risk to a private partner in exchange for capital, operating expertise, or both. Structures range from concession agreements (private operator runs the system for a term) to design-build-operate (private partner builds and operates a discrete asset) to operating lease (private operator pays for the right to run the system). Water Hawk scores every U.S. utility on composite Infrastructure readiness across ten weighted components.

The 2024 federal rule mandating that public water systems inventory every service line and replace all lead and galvanized-requiring-replacement (GRR) lines. The replacement obligation creates a structural multi-decade contractor pipeline, especially concentrated at the largest urban systems. See the Insights essay on the 20-year contractor pipeline.

The physical work of digging up and replacing the service-line pipe that connects a building to the water main. Under the LCRR every U.S. public water system must replace all lead lines on a structured timeline. The largest single replacement program in the country is approximately 388,000 lines.

The federal maximum contaminant level for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in drinking water, finalized in 2024. Compliance requires source-water testing, treatment design, and capital investment that concentrates at utilities with high source-water exposure and investment-grade financial capacity.

A federal-state program that lends to public water utilities at below-market rates for capital projects, with a meaningful principal-forgiveness layer for distressed systems. SRF capacity is a structural input to a utility's funding posture and is one of the ten composite components in the Water Hawk methodology.

A combined sewer overflow (CSO) long-term control plan is a federally enforced multi-decade capital schedule for utilities whose sewer systems combine sanitary and stormwater flow. LTCPs are typically enforced under federal consent decree and represent some of the largest discrete capital programs in the U.S. water sector.

A utility's outstanding debt divided by its service-area population. A directional indicator of leverage when read against the cohort. Used inside the financial-distress component as one of several inputs.

A specific chemical-procurement category (ferric chloride, sodium hypochlorite, aluminum sulfate, polyaluminum chloride, orthophosphate, GAC, etc.) tracked by Water Hawk with a regional price benchmark, supplier-share concentration, and rebid cadence. Water Hawk tracks 17 lanes across disinfection, coagulation, corrosion control, PFAS treatment, and advanced oxidation.

The forward-looking period during which a chemical procurement contract is expected to come up for re-competition. Water Hawk surfaces the rebid calendar across the cohort so chemical suppliers and water-treatment OEMs can plan capture activity well before any RFP is posted.

A site (RNG candidate or data center cluster) that crosses the Water Hawk top-tier scoring threshold on the relevant readiness composite. Tier-1 candidates trigger structured alerts to addon subscribers. The threshold is reviewed quarterly.

A bespoke analyst-prepared deliverable under separate Statement of Work, typically requested by LPs, banks, and acquirers for diligence on a specific water-sector exposure. Pricing starts at $5,000 and scales with scope. See Pricing.

Every paid render (dossier, brief, candidate detail, cluster detail) carries a per-customer watermark and a forensic per-section fingerprint. The watermark deters redistribution; the fingerprint lets the operator trace leaked artifacts back to the originating customer.

See /contact for the full list of inbound channels. Quickly: [email protected] for product issues, [email protected] for purchasing, [email protected] for legal and intellectual-property matters, [email protected] for privacy requests, and [email protected] as a catch-all.

We aim for a first response within one business day on standard support requests. Privacy and legal requests are handled within thirty (30) days, subject to extensions allowed by applicable law.

Yes. Customers on the upper-tier paid subscriptions and Investment-Grade Report engagements have access to analyst time as part of the engagement scope. Other customers can book a paid analyst conversation through the Pricing page Talk-to-an-analyst link.