To sustain success the managers of the City of Columbus, Ohio sewer collection system want to better understand their resource costs. They want to understand why, how, and how much of those resources are used to perform various utility activities. Most importantly, they want to know the role of those activity expenditures in sustaining mission critical programs. This is “best practice” and an essential element of sustaining those programs. This paper describes how the Sewer Maintenance Operations Center (SMOC) used activity based costing (ABC) to help assure adequate use and budgeting of resources needed to sustain successful activities and programs. ABC is complementary to and builds upon the sustainability goals of SMOC that are in place to assure continued compliance with CMOM requirements. These goals include measurement of process performance output, and achievement of program outcomes, which provide feedback to work groups on their progress toward reaching performance targets.