Infrastructure Asset Management Update

I’m back with an infrastructure update, and it’s actually positive! This past fall, I wrote about a new program here at SEMCOG aimed at gathering water infrastructure data in our region. We’re full steam ahead with this program, and we recently awarded over $800,000 to communities throughout Southeast Michigan.

The Southeast Michigan Infrastructure Asset Management Program is a collaborative effort between SEMCOG and water infrastructure asset owners – communities like yours. We want to develop an understanding of the overall state of our underground water infrastructure. If we can start to accurately evaluate the general condition and estimate the actual dollars it will take to fix the issues that exist.

We can also help communities prioritize efforts and funding, encourage maintenance collaboration with private utilities like your cable, gas, and electric utility providers, and minimize the impact to convenience that it has on the street you live on.

Participating communities and other asset owners like the counties or road commissions submit any data that they have on their drinking water pipes, wastewater collection pipes, or stormwater collection systems. We can pair this information with the condition of the roads that lie on top of this infrastructure.

How funding is distributed

Tier one of our funding for this program is to reimburse communities for the time they take to submit their existing data in a digital format.

If the asset owners don’t have any information digitally, we also offered funding to take the information they may have on paper maps or in file cabinets-or even institutional knowledge from the most senior employee-and put it into a digital format. This is tier two of our funding.

Finally, we know that not all communities have good records, but we wanted to be able to help those communities as well. Tier three of our funding was awarded to those communities who need to go out and physically collect location data on their pipes.

Under these three tiers of funding, $800,000 has been spread over 58 communities and organizations. We’re excited to be able to offer assistance to communities in creating a holistic asset management plan. The next few months will be spent collecting data from the participants and beginning an analysis on the state of our water assets as a region.

If your community didn’t apply for funding this time, we hope you will consider being part of this program going forward and providing your asset information. The more complete our picture of the region’s infrastructure is, the better our analyses and options to improve it will be.