As Director of the Baltimore City Department of Public Works, Rudolph S. Chow, P.E., is committed to promoting the health, environment, and economy of the city.

Since becoming Director in 2014, Director Chow has made cleaning the neighborhoods and revitalizing the aging water system his top priorities. He promoted cleaner, healthier neighborhoods by distributing municipal trashcans to every residence that receives City trash service. He transformed the City’s water billing system by overhauling the water billing process and by replacing miles of water and sewer lines. New water meters and state-of-the-art billing are delivering efficiency, reliability, and accuracy to our customers.

Under Director Chow, DPW is taking historic steps to revitalize the City’s aging sewer and water mains. DPW launched a comprehensive, long-term strategy to replace or rehabilitate 1,500 miles of city-owned water mains, and a program to comply with the City’s sanitary sewer consent decree by rebuilding hundreds of miles of sewer mains and by upgrading the capacity of its Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Director Chow is committed to ensuring that the management of DPW is the best in its class. In August 2016, Baltimore City DPW was recognized as a “Utility of the Future Today” by the Utility of the Future (UOTF) Recognition Program, which celebrates the progress and exceptional performance of the nation’s best-run wastewater utilities. Director Chow is recognized nationally for his visionary leadership, serving on the board of numerous industry groups.

Director Chow previously served as the Department’s Deputy Director and head of the Bureau of Water and Wastewater. He has a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from George Washington University and a master’s degree in environmental/water resources engineering from the University of Maryland. He brings more than 30 years of executive and managerial experience from both the water industry and public works.