From developing needs to developing solutions Kwok Lui (Konrad) Siu, P.Eng., M.Eng., MBA Director of the Office of Infrastructure and Funding Strategy City of Edmonton, Alberta
ith municipal revenues failing to keep pace with investment needs, civic leaders across Canada face the daunting task of managing scarce dollars, balancing competing demands for services, and ensuring citizens continue to enjoy a high quality of life. While the challenges confronting Edmonton are no different, the City has long understood the importance of sound infrastructure planning and has always been at the forefront of adopting innovative and strategic ways to manage resources.
The Edmonton Experience: Leading the Way The City realized over a decade ago that a long-term plan was required to sustain current and future infrastructure assets. In the absence of a clear roadmap, the infrastructure gap would only magnify as costs continued to escalate and aging assets were not repaired or replaced. To manage the issue, Edmonton was among the first municipalities in Canada to create a dedicated office to focus exclusively on asset management. One of our office’s first deliverables was to develop a comprehensive infrastructure strategy that would identify the scope of the problem and what was needed to reverse it. This effort was successful. The City of Edmonton now has firm knowledge of its asset inventory, its age, and its replacement value. The City also has the ability to 52 APWA Reporter
June 2012
optimize investment, based on an asset’s life-cycle, condition and risk exposure by using sophisticated infrastructure management tools that the municipality developed and continues to refine. Along the way, Edmonton garnered recognition as one of Canada’s leading municipalities in the implementation of advanced infrastructure management techniques. Today, Edmonton is making significant strides in managing over $35 billion worth of municipal assets, identifying funding needs and priorities, and using objective and quantitative decision-support tools to address the City’s growing infrastructure deficit. City administration and elected officials are using infrastructure management to help guide their decisions on how to best invest scarce infrastructure dollars. And even more importantly, they are using it to better defend tough funding and investment decisions. There is now a recognition that infrastructure management is evolving beyond the traditional engineering, financial and technical arena—it is playing a more pivotal role in the City’s strategic planning and policy development arena.
Entering a New Frontier The transition to a more strategic orientation is evident in how the asset management function and infrastructure management tools have in the past few years been integrated
with corporate business planning and long-term direction-setting. Some of Edmonton’s notable achievements in this area include a better capital planning process and a program to renew neighbourhood infrastructure.
Capital Planning Edmonton’s Risk-based Infrastructure Management System, commonly known as RIMS, was used successfully to develop the City’s 10-year capital plan and three-year capital budget. With City assets aging and more maintenance and rehabilitation required, RIMS is an important capital planning tool to optimize investment in existing infrastructure to ensure assets are in a condition that meets intended performance and service levels. To establish capital funding requirements, RIMS provides valuable information on how to balance the competing demands between renewal and growth infrastructure by determining renewal targets for each asset class in relation to risk exposure and current physical condition. Our analysis showed that to reduce the amount of poor and very poor infrastructure, an average annual reinvestment of $400 million was required over the next three years (2012-14) and an average annual reinvestment of $450 million over the remaining seven years (2015-2021). This level of reinvestment will ensure the City’s asset base is maintained in a good state of repair and the percentage of assets in poor and very poor condition is reduced.
