OHM - Making Asset Management Work for You

OHM Lunch and Learn Series

Making Asset Management Work for You

Panelist Presentations	Workshop Q&A	Small Group Discussion


Community leaders made of staff members and elected officials joined OHM for an interactive workshop on asset management challenges and opportunities, particularly related to water infrastructure. The group discussed the challenges and opportunities and exchanged best practices.

“An Asset management plan is impossible to develop without tons of information and
advanced GIS database”

Workshop Icebreaker – Greatest Challenges in Asset Management

Through group discussion, the following items were named as the greatest challenges in managing infrastructure assets:

Funding, obtaining funding, as well as coordinating funds between several different funding sources for different utilities
Education, how to educate the public and elected officials on the need for investing in infrastructure at amounts commensurate with condition
Partnership, on all levels, between communities, communities and counties, communities and private utilities
Collective Prioritization, how to ensure that all assets are considered when prioritizing and developing CIPs

Panelist Presentations

John P. McCulloch, Drain Commissioner, Oakland County
Mr. McCulloch presented on Oakland County’s collaborative asset management system. One important benefit of this collaboration process was identified as the process of transitioning from a reactive to a preventative and eventually a predictive asset management system. Among the several benefits of a collaborative asset management system are mitigation of long term costs associated with O&M and CIP, promotion of collaboration, and the maximization of Oakland County’s capital investments.

Tom Wilson, Director, Department of Public Works, City of Romulus
Mr. Wilson presented the challenges municipalities generally face with regard to adopting comprehensive asset management programs and processes, e.g. the need for large up front investment costs for software purchase, staff training, and program implementation. Challenges of how to prioritize water main improvement projects based on a variety of information were exemplified as well, for example, if a road-reconstruction is taking place, should the water main underneath be replaced? What information may be needed to facilitate making this decision?

Murat Ulasir, PE, PhD, Technical Specialist, OHM
Mr. Ulasir started his presentation with an overview of the simple principles of asset management. He then outlined a framework, which allows for the utilization of readily available water main asset information, such as field and hydraulic data in order to allow utilities to systematically prioritize water main improvement projects. This prioritization also included a simple risk management component. Finally, Mr. Ulasir generalized this framework to developing a collective infrastructure improvements model, which allows for the systematic prioritization of several infrastructure assets, including water, storm sewer, sanitary sewer, and roads.

Gary Mekjian, Director, Department of Public Works, City of Southfield
Mr. Mekjian discussed the benefits of trying to prioritize water main infrastructure improvement needs, which include ensuring that proper institutional and asset related knowledge is being utilized in an objective manner in order to make resource allocation decisions. Furthermore, he explored the need for collective capital improvements planning (including a variety of utility improvement needs) as a means to managing CIP costs. Finally, Mr. Mekjian addressed the importance of developing an understanding for and communicating to decision makers the possible funding gaps between current infrastructure investment levels and needed investments for the continued delivery of acceptable levels of municipal services to our citizens.

Download Speakers PowerPoint - PDF click on speaker's name
John P. McCulloch	Tom Wilson & Murat Ulasir, PE, PhD	Gary Mekjian

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Workshop Questions and Answers

Q. How to ‘fold’ private utilities into a community’s capital improvement plan?

Ann Arbor is sitting down with private utilities to discuss improvement plans and coordinate as early as possible.
Suggest that municipalities share its CIP with all utilities. Try particularly to connect at a higher level within the utility (regional affairs contact), to ensure planning level coordination.
Farmington Hills is coordinating projects with the private utilities. The challenge is that the private utility often has planned its improvements many years in advance, whereas the city’s improvement projects are subject to funding restrictions and the schedules for the two entities often do not mesh.

Q. Counties and cities: how do you assure the projects are coordinated?

Based on funding, townships and cities have advance knowledge of when counties are planning significant improvements.
Several great examples of inter-city cooperation were mentioned: creating equipment sharing agreements, selling or exchanging unneeded equipment between communities, sharing a GIS employee with a neighboring community, sharing knowledge between municipalities.
Communities were advised to take a regional approach to purchasing. Romulus and another city are sharing use of a pavement repair machine. Individually, neither city would be able to justify owning the machine based on projected use. Oakland County has created contracts for metering, which allows member communities to access information at lower rates.

Q. How do budget realities impact asset management prioritization?

Asset management tools are helpful for creating a CIP. The tools allow the community to plan five years or so into the future, to revisit the plan every year, meet with private utilities and with cross-jurisdictional entities.
Ann Arbor’s Eli Cooper is focused on the integration of projects and trying to obtain overviews. He’s focused on an asset management philosophy.

Q. How do we help elected officials and the public see public works spending as a good thing?

With regard to rates and the need for increases to fund maintenance and improvements, educate officials with constant updates. It’s important that the political side understands the value of the assets owned by the municipality – in the City of Southfield, the water system is valued at $1.5 billion. Operations and maintenance must be emphasized. Use asset management tools as a way to explain rates. Some community leaders use a car ownership analogy to persuade elected officials to support funding needed improvements.
Funding legislation note: SEMCOG has sponsored Senate Bill 1249 to enable communities to create a utility to fund storm water improvements through a user fee.
SEMCOG University will offer a program July 15th, 9am-12pm, SEMCOG Offices, “Penny Wise and Pound Foolish – Better Ways to Manage Our Community Assets”, targeted at communicating the value of an asset management approach to elected officials.

Q. Are communities collecting data on friction loss in water main to make determinations?

These are normally estimated when the water main is modeled. This is not a necessary element for water main prioritization; however, it is a valuable indicator for assessing fire protection capabilities of certain water mains.

Q. How do communities account for the impact of multiple funding sources/timing for collective prioritization?

Southfield lets roads be the driver. These are the scarcest funds, so when/if those funds are available, the city works to move ahead with those projects quickly.
Other communities have used Drinking Water Revolving Fund (DWRF) low interest loans to rehabilitate water mains, while roads were being reconstructed with bond funds.

Q. What will be the impact of gas tax cuts on Act 51 funding?

No answer.

Small Group Discussion Questions

Q1. Is your community practicing any asset management today? (For example, mowing right-of-way, creating water main break push-pin maps, cleaning catch basins, et cetera.)

Practices differ greatly, depending on community, size, and resources. For example, Independence Township is practicing asset management on a shoestring – the township has no GIS, but staffers are scanning hard copies of reports and using an Access database to organize the information.
Rochester Hills is using GBA Master Suite, but is also keeping hard copies.
Ann Arbor is using City Works program.
Auburn Hills is scanning daily job reports into its system, televising its sewer system, and scanning permits. The city has also issued a few field laptops to inspectors for direct entry of inspection reports.

Q2. Where in your community do you think that you have the opportunity to save money with a better approach, or improved management of infrastructure?

Reduce political influence on CIP
Increase field staff, decrease office staff numbers
Prioritize resources, needs
Create a 3-5 year Capital Improvement Program
Money can be saved throughout the community. The key is to find a systematic approach to asset management.
Recommend that the community conduct interviews with infrastructure heads to learn issues.
One city organized a Citizen Task Force to evaluate projects and priorities; the result is that the number of rush projects decreased.

Q3. Do you feel current rates are adequate to address the rehabilitation/reconstruction needs of your systems? How is your administration/department trying to educate your governing body on the need for rate increases to fund infrastructure improvements?

Resounding NO. Independence Township is a growing community. There is a consultant study every 3-4 years identifying needs, but little is done with the information.
Educate on enterprise account funds.
Some communities have concerns about spending money on the wrong asset. · Rochester Hills uses a pavement management program, which takes most of the politics out of decisions.
In Farmington Hills, council is very engaged in rate needs. Frequent study sessions are held on the issue.
With rates, there is always the question, how to program needs? This is put in focus for SOCWA with its partnership in DWSD’s 50 year Master Plan.
Focus on education. Understand, relate to the elected official.
No community wants to be seen as having the highest water/sewer rates.

Q4. In your CIP, how do you integrate the needs of the various infrastructure systems?

Based on available funding.
One community set its priority to use the Pavement Management System, and to look at the associated water system condition.
Another community starts with roads, prioritizing those, then considers the underground infrastructure. It makes sure to coordinate and communicate between departments and compare priorities.
City representatives would like to improve their ability to prioritize projects, and to better understand how to collectively select improvements each year.

Q5. What are the most important pieces of information or results you’d like to get from an asset management system?

To have a clear record and understanding of all the infrastructure assets and the attributes associated with those assets. A comprehensive condition assessment.
Tabular summary
Prioritization of assets and needs. Evaluating water main breaks with road repair plans. Question is how to balance funding levels…a community may have to move money to finance the needed projects.
Risk assessment. To know the remaining useful life of underground infrastructure, the remaining useful pavement, drive quality, remaining useful life of infrastructure in order to prioritize improvements made in an objective rather than a subjective manner.
Create a map of future projects to take to council.
Collect valuable institutional knowledge before it’s lost through attrition, retirements. ·
Models for predicting the impacts of repairs.
Know how to incorporate private utilities into overall condition assessments.

Q6. What aspects of asset management would you like to learn more about? What are the priorities?

A substantial number of the attendees responded that they would like to know how to integrate all assets in a single program.
One small group prioritized the information needs as follows: