Technically Speaking

By Pam Broviak, City Engineer/Assistant Director of Public Works at City of Geneva, Illinois. When my past employer, the city of LaSalle, installed an automatic meter reading (AMR) system, I was excited about the technology and looked forward to improving the efficiency of our meter reading and water billing system. Some of the benefits included tracking and notifications to staff of customer leaks, immediate final reads, high/low water usage, and tampering alerts. Yet, as an engineer, I also planned on using the data for designing, monitoring, and operating our water system. My vision had been to link the data to a digital map created from our GIS where dots represented meters. Colors and other indicators would tell us of real-time reads, flows, pressures, and all that good stuff allowing a visualization of how our system was functioning using real-time actual data. Unfortunately, once I saw the software and asked about the ability to extract data from the database, not only did the vendors seem surprised anyone would even want this information, they made it clear their system was designed for billing only. If we wanted to do anything more with the data, we would have to hire our own programmer and create our own setup.

In a recent guest article, Bryan Cowles, an Applications Specialist at IMAGINiT Technologies, observed that while more and more government agencies are moving ahead and incorporating Building Information Modeling (BIM) into their workflows, “…some are yet to be convinced of the benefits that an intelligent model can provide.” In his article - Teardown or Retrofit: A BIM Evaluation Gives the Answer - Bryan goes on to provide an excellent example of the time and cost savings achieved by retrofitting two existing structures into one larger structure, as opposed to going the demolition route – thanks to a BIM-based feasibility study. A study which also won over a team of doubtful engineers who thought demolition was the best option.

This article was guest-written by Nancy Mann Jackson City and county budgets have been slashed over the past few years, but residents still expect the same level of service they enjoyed during more prosperous times. Public works departments still must pick up garbage and recyclables, repair potholes, and maintain other services, but with less money. In some cities, public works departments are finding ways to go beyond the status quo, creatively using technology to improve services in an affordable way. For instance, a new city administration in Chicago recently initiated a 10 percent budget cut across all departments, but services continue to improve, thanks to creative solutions implemented by Thomas Byrne, commissioner of the Department of Streets and Sanitation. One ward supervisor oversees each of the city’s 50 wards, and those supervisors once spent many hours driving around their wards, keeping up with the sanitation trucks assigned to them and making sure they stayed on schedule. Byrne and his staff recently installed GPS devices in each sanitation truck, and connected those devices to Blackberry devices provided to the ward supervisors. “Now a ward supervisor can go to the [Chicago Mobile Asset Tracker] CMAT database with his Blackberry anytime and it shows him where each truck is that is assigned to him,” Byrne says. “They know exactly where all their trucks are all the time.”