Project planning, engineering priorities and political decision making Dennis Randolph, P.E., Director of Public Works, City of Grandview, Missouri, and member, APWA Engineering and Technology Committee; Joanna Johnson, Managing Director, Kalamazoo County Road Commission, Kalamazoo, Michigan
or most public works professionals a major task is to provide ranked lists of recommended projects to governing and policy boards. Because there are always far more needs than funds, the public works profession has developed sophisticated methods to help us to make these lists. Often we base these methods on the best engineering tools we have and try to inject a high degree of rational thought into them.
prioritization methods that we use vary widely. In particular we find a wide variation in the way in which we assign value to different characteristics. For example, some systems may look at the cost of building a project to bring it back to a specific condition. Here we would highlight the existing condition of a particular infrastructure component (a street for example), and cost of various “fixes” to restore that component. We can then rank projects using the cost of the fixes.
While we currently label many of these processes asset management, we have been using similar techniques for many years. Long before the term asset management came into being, and predating the sophisticated computer supported systems we use today, public works professionals have been weighing alternatives (refer to Figure 1).
Another way to rank projects might take the preceding example and advance it a step by incorporating an analysis of maintenance and upkeep costs for the street over some time period. We can then use the resulting life-cycle cost for each project as the basis for ranking a group of projects. By including maintenance and upkeep cost, we have a different view of a set of projects, and a different order of projects in the resulting prioritization lists.
Because of the wide range of organizations that develop and support infrastructure, the types of
As we include more and more technical factors in our prioritization consideration, the resulting prioritization lists change. While we often disagree about the value or validity of including some of these technical factors, as long as they have some basis of rational, empirical thinking we usually come together and agree on the results. This example of multiple versus narrow perspectives within the public works community is a frequent and accepted event. More importantly, it reflects a more general situation, one that members of the public works community do not often accept. Because the policy bodies that must accept and approve the ranked lists we prepare must consider other factors besides technical ones, there is a further set of considerations that they insert into the final prioritization process. Many of these “considerations” do not have a firm—or sometimes no—engineering basis, but represent community, humanistic or political ideals. Often, these considerations can drastically change the order of priority lists (refer to Figure 2). With changing priorities, conflict between the public works professionals who must live daily with the results of the prioritization process and the policy makers who must deal with the electorate often results.
Figure 1 – A Rational Approach to Decision Making
38 APWA Reporter
June 2012
Occasionally the change in priorities may involve many projects in the final priority list. But usually changes only involve one or two projects. However, whether it is the entire list that is
