Cotati City Council
Agenda Staff Report
Item type: CONSENT CALENDAR (ACTION)
To: City Council
Subject: Authorize Implementation of a City Wide Asset Management System Date: June 27, 2023
Written by: Damien O'Bid, City Manager
Recommendation
It is recommended that the City Council adopt a motion authorizing the City Manager to execute a license agreement with NexGen for implementation of a city-wide asset management system.
Background
At their core, asset management systems are programs that allow for the inventory of physical assets (roads, signs, manholes, pumps, etc.), service and work orders and tracking their condition and scheduling maintenance and repair (work orders) based on predetermined or dynamic criteria.
Systems such as NexGen also include the ability to track and project costs and feed potential projects into the capital improvement program.
Currently, the City performs regular maintenance and repairs primarily based on visual inspections or complaints received. The City’s financial system currently does issue work orders for water and sewer related issues (meter turn on/offs, etc.), but is very limited in scope. Comments or complaints from the public or internal staff are routed through a variety of methods (text messages, emails, verbally, letters, etc.) to public works. This can be overwhelming for public works to manage and track, difficult report on in any meaningful way at the end of the year, and requires awareness to follow up with the requestor, sometimes months after the request was made. At a departmental level, it is difficult to assess work performed and status of outstanding work. For the physical infrastructure, physical asset information and maintenance routines and histories are not readily available, which is critical for succession planning to ensure we capture as much information as possible before longtime staff retire.
The City does contract with the City of Santa Rosa to host a GIS system. This system is currently used to host available asset information, such as water and sewer system information (pipe sizes, manhole and valve locations, fire hydrant locations, etc.), street light locations, and scanned copies of available record improvement plans that created the city infrastructure. In essence, it acts as a spatial library of assets. Recently, the City also inventoried all regulatory and informational street signage.
Analysis/Discussion
Over several years, the City reviewed several leading asset management systems, in terms of functionality, ease of use, cost of licensing, and ability to meet current city needs and grow to meet expected future needs. Based on this assessment, NexGen was the leading asset management program that best meet all of these criteria. Follow up with every reference in comparable cities provided positive feedback.
The goal of this implementation is to import all existing asset information to establish a baseline of city infrastructure and set up simple service orders and workflows without getting too fancy initially. This will promote use and familiarization initially and set the stage for growth into higher level functions such as capital planning and cost tracking in the future. In the initial set up, a key module is the service order interface. This will be used by the public and staff internally to request maintenance, repairs, etc. on public infrastructure. This is then routed to public works for review and if applicable, converted to a work order and assigned to staff. If the requestor leaves contact information, the program will keep the requestor appraised on the status of the request. On the City side, it will be possible to see all outstanding service orders and work orders and easily determine status and provide aggregate reports of work to the public or as needed for regulatory or other reporting.
Financial Considerations
The adopted Fiscal Year 23/24 budget includes $75,500 to implement this program, so no additional appropriation is requested. The implementation cost is a one-time expense, but the software license will cost $20,000 per year plus an annual CPI escalator not to exceed 5% in future years, which is allocated across the city funds.
While this has a significant on-going cost commitment, in staffs’ opinion, it is a long planned and critical system needed to comprehensively inventory and manage city infrastructure.
Environmental Issues
This action is exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) because it is not a project which has a potential for resulting in either a direct physical change in the environment, or a reasonably foreseeable indirect physical change in the environment, pursuant to CEQA Guideline section 15378.
Attachments:
NEXGEN AM Software License Agreement (DOCX)