City to spend $200,000 to evaluate maintenance needs

You will soon be seeing this state of the art, high tech van traveling through the streets of South Lake Tahoe. Equiped with lasers, GPS, digital measuring tools and cameras, the van will be able to record the conditions of the city's infrastructure, thus allowing the gathered data to be evaluated to priorizie all maintenance.

Nationally it is estimated that there are $2 trillion of backlog mainenance to roads and other items in the infrastruce of cities and counties. Locally the number is estimated at $26 million.

John Pregler, Director of Implementation for DTSGIS, gave a presentation on what his company can do for the city during Tuesday's Council meeting. He explained that the van would travel the 200 miles of city streets, recording all curbs, signage, manhole covers, roads and other items in the City's infrastructure. DTSGIS's product "vueworks" would then take that data and provide six key results:

1) Create efficiencies by integrating Strategic Asset Management with Work Management
2) Position the City to better protect public infrastructure assets
3) Allow forecasting of capital and maintenance needs based on historical condition data and a clearer understanding of the risks associated with asset failure
4) Facilitate funding of maintenance and CIP budgets at an optimal level
5) Provide a return on investment that can be leveraged in other key assets like the City's recreation amenities
6) Support a sustainable economy

The initial filming and software will cost $205,670 with annual license fees of $11,700. The vote of City Council was 4 to 1 in approval of spending the money with Councilman Tom Davis as the loan dissenter.

"We have already rated our roads and their condition can change daily," said Davis. "What the software doesn't tell us is how we will pay for it."

The computer modeling of the condition of the roads will show the Public Works department what should be repaired or replaced, and when it should be done. Human evaluation can be subjective and not as reliable as the VueWorks system according to Pregler.

"I wish we had this years ago so we could hve prioritized the $7 million in road maintenance already budgeted," said Mayor Hal Cole.

The software will enable Public Works Department to be proactive instead of reactive and spend money where it will be best put to use. Ray Jarvis, Director of Public Works for the City, told Council that this process of the filming and evaluating all city streets will take a few weeks where it would take staff years, thus saving the City time and money.

The four Councilmembers in favor of the expense said that we need good tools to make the right decisions and not only is their decision a committment to buy software, it is a committment of change the future. The result is smarter spending and investing in the community.