Rethinking Municipal Planning: redefining long-range planning from years to decades

All right, looks like the attendees have leveled out here. So really appreciate you guys joining the webinar today. Today we're going to be focusing on rethinking municipal planning, redefining long range planning from years to decades with myself, Sam Chapin and Eddie Staley. A couple of housekeeping items before we get kicked off today. You'll notice at the bottom of your screen, there's a Q and A button and throughout the presentation you guys can submit us any questions that you have. Feel free to type those in there. At the end of the session, we'll have a live Q and A with Eddie and answer any questions that you guys submit during the presentation. We will be recording the session and we will send out the recording post webinar. So be on the lookout for that in your inboxes. And also just a heads up, there's gonna be a few polls that we launched during the presentation to get some feedback from you guys. So appreciate your participation in those. All right, so we covered a couple housekeeping items. I want to introduce myself, Sam Chapin again. I've been working primarily with government entities for about seven and a half years at Brightly Software. And today I lead the public market solution consultant team. I've been working strategically with Eddie and his team at Withers Ravanel since twenty fifteen. When I was asked to introduce and co host this webinar, truly felt honored. Eddie has been a great mentor for not only me, but also for our entire team here at Braintly. And he has an immense amount of knowledge in this industry. Eddie Staley is the Chief Client Experience and Innovation Officer at Withers Ravenel. And just a little background on him. He has conducted hundreds of asset inventory and condition assessments for public infrastructure. He's established a prioritization approach for infrastructure maintenance and provided a foundation for master planning and capital improvement planning. Eddie's worked with numerous cities across the United States to develop funding mechanisms and strategies as part of their infrastructure management programs. Eddie and the asset management team at Withers Ravenel specifically work with clients to help define and develop strategic goals and tactical approaches for managing their infrastructure. Eddie's responsible for the client experience program at Withers Ravenel, and I'm excited to have him here on the webinar today. Thank you, Eddie, and I will hand it over to you. Thanks a lot, Sam, and you'll notice we have QR codes on certain slides that will direct you to where some of the source information came from. And so maybe let's just kinda kick it off with funding sources one zero one, as I call it. There is a lot of money. There's been a lot of money put out there from the federal government to really support, the pandemic response, and in addition to that, a lot of infrastructure dollars. In fact, if we look at the three main funding sources, the CARES Act, which was two point three trillion, ARPA, which was one point nine trillion, and then the IIJA, which has been approved, but the guidance for that has not yet been released. When we total all those up, that's five point four trillion dollars. And I don't know about you, but wrapping my head around five point four trillion dollars is really kind of a big number. So I've got a graphic here I'll share real quickly. But ultimately, when we look at five point four trillion dollars that's basically about a seventeen thousand dollars investment for every human being in the United States. Population of the US is about three thirty five million. I mean, you divide that into five point four trillion, that's seventeen thousand dollars per person of investment. So this is a historic investment in infrastructure and other priorities that have been set. And, what we wanna talk about today is how are we leveraging those dollars? Where can we, as local governments, county, city, the state, how do we how do we leverage those dollars that have been put out? So let's kind of first start by breaking down where some of those dollars are going. So the CARES Act that was passed was a two point three trillion dollars You can see the majority of that went to direct payments, unemployment, some of those things. But there was about one hundred and seventy five billion dollars of those funds that were really directed towards states and municipalities. And we've seen some of those funds being leveraged. Many of those funds are still available and have not been allocated to certain projects. Many of these projects may be upgrading HVAC systems and facilities, upgrading facilities themselves. I know there's one client that we specifically work with to expand an event center with some of this funding. So be aware that that funding is out there. And as we start to go through, this this presentation today, I want you to really kinda start thinking about what types of projects, what needs you have in your community that you can tie to some of this funding. In the ARPA, the American Rescue Plan Act, that was a one point nine trillion dollar bill that was passed. I'm gonna highlight two sections here. Two hundred and sixty billion going to transportation and infrastructure, and then another three hundred fifty billion of that going directly to state and local government. We're gonna dive into that a little bit more, deeply here in a moment. But, again, almost, you know, half a trillion dollars or over half a trillion dollars really being directed direct toward infrastructure and a lot of the, a lot of the priorities that we probably had in each one of our communities. And then lastly, the infrastructure bill. Again, you can kinda see on the screen here how that funding is being distributed to to certain priorities. Again, fifty five billion toward water quality, a hundred ten billion toward roads and bridges, forty two billion towards airports. Each one of these allocations of funding, some of that is gonna be direct funding, some of that is gonna be competitive funding. And we're gonna really focus on competitive funding today. How do you best position your municipality or your county government to be able to tap into those funds? And what are some of the processes that we use here at Withers Drive and Nail to help our clients be able to do that? So again, as I mentioned earlier, the American Rescue Plan, one point nine trillion, three hundred fifty billion of that went to the state and local governments. Some of that went as a direct allocation to each individual local government or municipality, and some of that money went directly to the state. This many of the states, are using those dollars to help fund their SRF or their state revolving fund. I know we just here in North Carolina just went through a recent cycle here back in the spring, and we're actually starting to get awards announced to date. Again, two sixty eight million of those funds were directly allocated toward water, sewer, and stormwater infrastructure. And when you read the guidance from the final rule for ARPA, the treasury considers a necessary investment in infrastructure to be responsive to an identified need to achieve or maintain an adequate minimum level of service. So again, there's a lot of leeway here, but the the main thing to to point out is if you're gonna put in a competitive application for these dollars, you have to be able to identify that ability to address a specific need in a project and that you're going to be able to obtain and sustain a minimum level of service moving forward. So this is just a quick graphic. Again, there's a QR code that's there that can take you to deeper information if you want to dive into this even more. But this is just a great graphic that kind of shows how much each individual state, how much they receive. In fact, it's about one hundred and ninety five billion dollars in total. And then again, of that one hundred and ninety five billion dollars the remaining went directly to local governments based on population from the census data. So let's kind of take a little bit of a dive here. And again, this is just kind of setting the stage. A couple of things I want to point out, just pulling out of the out of the chart the state of Maryland. And so if we look at Maryland with the six billion dollar allocation that they received at the state level, this chart kinda shows how they are planning or how they are allocating those dollars. And in fact, in this case, about six percent of that six billion is directly being funneled toward infrastructure. It's also worth noting that fifteen percent of that six billion is still to date unallocated. And, will some of that funding actually move down more into the infrastructure area? I think that's a possibility as time moves forward. Again, here, if I look at Pennsylvania based on their population, the state received fourteen billion, but the city of Philadelphia received nine point two billion. And this chart below shows how Philadelphia has chosen to allocate their local dollars that come from the ARPA fund. In this case, forty three million, still a substantial amount of money, but only a half a percent of that is going to infrastructure, being water and sewer. Transportation is receiving eight point five percent. So the main point of sharing this is every state is doing things a little bit differently, but there is, generally speaking, a rather large sum of money that is available through competitive applications to be able to address some of those needs at the local level. And I'm going to stop here for a moment. I believe we have a poll question here, Sam. Is that correct? That's correct. So is that poll question posted? Working on it. Hold on, sir. Yep. That's fine. I'll go ahead and move forward. Just post it whenever you're ready. So when we talk about the needs that are in the community, the communities across the United States, ultimately, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the ASCE, does a report card basically about every oh, about, you know, four to seven years, somewhere in that range. And this is sort of that report card for the since nineteen eighty eight. And as you can see, in most cases, our scoring has continued to decline over time, and that is from a lack of investment in a lot of this infrastructure. And in fact, right now, ASCE is predicting back in twenty seventeen about a four point five nine trillion dollars backlog of investment that is required across each one of these categories. And today, kind of focusing on drinking water, wastewater, stormwater roads, and schools, these are specifically the infrastructure that is addressed through ARPA and IIJA in particular. We can see that our average GPA is about a C minus. And so when we talk about a C minus, I do want to dive into that and kind of understand what does a C minus mean. Again, I don't know about you, but if my children come home with a C minus, I'm probably looking for some ways for them to be able to improve that grade moving forward. My expectations would probably be a bit high. And it looks like we do have some results from the poll here. Again, it looks like most people are not really sure how that infrastructure funding is being targeted in your community. And so that's really important. That's something that we need to dive into in each one of our communities to understand what opportunities are out there and how can we best position ourselves to tap into those dollars. And ultimately, for those dollars that are unallocated, how can we go and communicate with the stakeholders to say, let's put more of those dollars towards the infrastructure because obvious obviously, the need is there. So when we look at the report card, I'm gonna kinda focus in this c and d area because that's where the majority of our infrastructure the majority of that infrastructure was placed. And by the way, it looks like Annie Johansson said, we plan to use the whole amount for infrastructure. That is fantastic. I'm not hearing that a lot, but that is a fantastic answer. So thank you for sharing that. Would love to know what community you're in as well. When we look at that c or d, mediocre is c. So we're in that c minus kind of in between where it's in fair to good condition but shows deterioration and requires attention. Significant deficiencies in conditions of functionality, and again, it's increasing its risk every day. When we get down into the D, it's in poor to fair condition, below standard, approaching end of service life, exhibits significant deterioration, and again, it's a serious concern with a strong risk of failure. So again, think about those grades as it pertains to the drinking water that we all depend on every day, the wastewater that we depend on every day, the streets that we drive on, the bridges that we drive on. Again, this is not a sustainable place to be able to live. Again, the good news is there is a lot of dollar there are a lot of dollars out there right now that can help address a lot of these issues and start to bring our grade up closer to that b range. Again, when you look at the, infrastructure report card, this is from some of the latest. Again, what is being projected is about a two point five nine trillion dollar ten year investment gap that needs to be closed. So, again, how do we close that gap? So, again, I think we have a polling question that's here. What grade would you give the infrastructure in your community? Just kind of a general you know, across the board, where do you think your infrastructure is living today? And while that's being answered, I'll go ahead and continue on. So one of the results we see from this sort of reactive type capital improvement planning and long range planning is really we're living in this moment of where we're just responding to the things that have ultimately already reached end of life, and quite honestly, at very high risk. This is what we typically see when we're working with municipalities, really about a five year capital improvement plan that's really addressing urgent needs. There may be a ten year plan that's in place generally past that five year mark. Those things are really, you know, really kind of more pie in the sky, not really defined. And again, therein lies some of the problems that we deal with is that these projects take a very long time to develop. And if we're not able to see beyond that five year mark, it makes very difficult to do any type of financial planning or even, you know, engineering type work to be able to address those needs. So I'm looking here at the results from the question. Again, it looks like majority of the folks are in that c, requires attention mediocre. The next biggest category is d. So, at least the participants on the on the call today line up pretty well with where we are nationally. So, again, we're probably kind of all in the same boat together. So what I want to kind of shift the focus to is we've identified the problem. We have aging infrastructure, critical infrastructure of this aging. We have an opportunity with this large sum of dollars that are out there dedicated to this type of investment in this infrastructure. How can we best leverage that investment? How do we get those investment dollars put into our communities at the right on the right project, in the right priority level, and making sure that we're making the correct investment? So, again, this is from the American Water Works Association. I use this graphic quite often when we talk about strategic asset management plans. And, again, one of the first things that we talk about in a plan is what do I own? Just kinda understanding what is my current state. And this is an area where a lot of people really get stuck. They will kind of really dive into condition data, condition, condition, condition, and ultimately never get off of this path. They just kind of get stuck here. We have the ability to be able to make some general assumptions based on age and material and other typical factors that are known to be able to predict where we are in that asset class, much like you just did here. Hey, we think it's probably a C. We think it's a D. That actually is good enough to begin this type of planning. We don't have to know everything about every pipe, every pump station, every road. We can use some of that general knowledge that's been gathered for decades about how things degrade, how long they're expected to last, and a and a pretty good prediction of where they will be in the future. The second thing is what is that required level of service? And this is sort of a mind shift here, a paradigm shift to say, instead of I need this much money to go do something, let's talk about what is the vision for that community. What is that minimum level of service or that required level of service? Again, one community may say, hey, if we take streets, for instance, an average PCI rating of a sixty five, that's okay. Our residents think that street is good enough. Other communities may say no, our average PCI needs to be an eighty, our pavement condition needs to be an eighty or eighty five. Again, some communities may say if we have a couple of water main breaks a month, that's okay. Maybe folks are without water service for an hour or two, and we respond to it and fix it. If that's your desired level of service, that's okay. Other communities may say no. You know, we have to have a ninety nine point nine percent uptime on all of our critical infrastructure. Then that's a totally different level of service. Once we can understand that target and have that communication, then we can really start to understand our risks, how assets fail, where they currently live on their life cycle, and we can start to do a lot of really good financial planning to say, is that needed investment? What are the needs that are out there that need to be addressed? How do we start to tackle that backlog of work over the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years? And again, what is my best long term funding strategy? So let's kind of walk through that very quickly and see what that might look like. So here, again, if I know simple things like age of my infrastructure or the material, that gives me a pretty good indication of how long I would expect the asset to last. So if we think about an eight inch AC waterline that's sixty years old, well, it's already at or beyond what the manufacturer's anticipated service life is. We know that those pipes have a high tendency for breakage. And, again, we know at that age is when most of those failures start to occur. Again, we can pull in other data like past work orders, maybe condition assessments. Those are all things that can be fed into a model to help us better understand. But even with just these two pieces of data, we can start to build a pretty high confidence model of where we're gonna be in the next ten, fifteen, twenty years, and what that financial need potentially will be. The next piece that comes into this is consequence of failure, what we would call a COF. And again, this is how you prioritize your projects, and this is where getting elected officials involved and stakeholders like Matt involved is really important. What matters most to you? Is it customers impacted? Is it the environment? Is it critical infrastructure like medical and school facilities? What are your priorities? What is what is the purpose of that asset that you're trying to manage? And, again, when it fails, how does that affect the outcome that you expect from that asset? Once we start to put those two products together, the likelihood of failure and the consequence of failure, we can ultimately start to develop a risk score. And that risk score kinda goes across all asset classes. So this really builds a great way for us to compare water, sewer, maybe our parks, our streets, our treatment plants. Everything kind of ends up on that same level playing field. So I'm gonna stop there for a second and kinda make an interesting point. Again, in many communities, your water and sewer may be funded from an enterprise fund. So you're not necessarily competing for internally competing for dollars that are coming out of the general fund, which may be used for parks or for streets or other assets that are being maintained like facilities. So again, this is one great way to be able to put all things on one level playing field and start to be able to prioritize projects, not based on, you know, not based on what we think is the best prod best project or where we think the highest need is, but really kind of doing that based on risk. The other thing I want to point out here, as I mentioned earlier, when we look at most CIPs, this is the area of focus that most people tend to work inside of. Not every community, but many communities are really working inside this four box area, the highest risk and the highest likelihood of failure. And again, this is what we might would call a worst first approach. The downside of doing this, this is one very reactive. Again, this is generally the most costly solution to be able to resolve or repair that, that utility or asset that's out there. The other thing is as well, and we'll kind of touch on this in a moment, because we don't have the luxury of time to responding to those, it really makes it difficult to go try to find external funding to pay for those types of projects. So if we start to take on more of an asset management approach to strategy to how we fund projects and how we identify needs and build projects from those needs, we really start working in this area here. We're starting to identify those needs much earlier, understand how big that need is. So for instance, in this area right here, forty four thousand two hundred sixty two, that's linear feet of sanitary sewer that is quickly approaching this high risk area. Over the next five to ten years, this forty four thousand will actually be up in this square here. And so, again, we can see this large investment that's gonna be needed ten years out. How do we start planning for that now? How do we start looking at external funding, or are we doing some type of rate increase? What are the steps that we're taking to prepare for this infrastructure to move up into this area over the next ten years? Again, two as well. You'll notice the color coding here. Orange is significant risk. Yellow is medium risk. Even though each one of these assets has the same risk score of thirty six, we're focused really more in this area of extreme consequence of failure or extreme likelihood of failure, prioritizing that over the assets that are in this medium area of consequence and likelihood of failure. So what's really happening here is we're understanding where each one of our assets are individually, each pipe segment, each pump station, each segment of road, whatever that asset is, where it is living on its individual degradation curve. So again, think about a brand new pike that was put in the ground or a new street that was just built. It has a very low risk. Its its service state is very high. Over the years, it continues to deteriorate. And in somewhere in here, this is probably the right time to perform some type of treatment. So if we think about streets, maybe way up here, we start doing crack seal. Maybe down in this area, we're doing things like mill and overlay. If we think about a sanitary sewer pipe, this might be the perfect moment where the pipe has deteriorated, but the structural integrity of that pipe is good enough that now we should start looking at CIPP, a cured in place type liner, or maybe we slip line, or maybe we start the pipe first. The biggest difference is we're not managing down in this lowest area. At this lowest area, one, our risk is the highest for the greatest amount of time, and the necessary spend to get it back to like new state requires some of the most expensive treatment, like dig and replace or full depth reclamation of a road. So ultimately, if we can build a model that shows where the right time is, that ultimate time to make that investment to get the highest return on investment, that's really the value of the model that we use. And all of that rolls up into one kind of overall view. And again, we can drill down to each individual asset, but it is really great that we can kind of look at it this way. And so one of the things I'll often do when talking about this is, without any description at all, I can ask you, would you rather be on the top chart, or would you rather be a community in the bottom chart? And again, this is a great way to be able to start to communicate what your vision is for the community and what that necessary investment's going to be. Again, this is our average service state. We're maintaining service state. We're not having anything in the very poor or end of life, that high risk condition in this chart. The lower chart, we have a lot of risks. So how do we create these? Well, one of the softwares that we use internally quite a bit and use this to help a lot of our clients, and we actually help a lot of our clients build this program and implement internally inside their own organization, is a software called Brightly Predictor. And, again, there are multiple softwares out there that do this, but I really have found this one to be a very powerful tool. Again, that chart that we just looked at is a a roll up of each individual asset. And so kind of interestingly enough, you can see in this particular funding scenario, some of these items are running at a very high risk for some amount of time. This is an underfunded model. But then you'll notice some of the critical assets are actually getting replaced or rehabilitated before they reach that highest level of risk. A good example of that difference here is some of these air compressor solids for the solids basement in this treatment facility. That is a very critical piece of equipment Versus the aluminum boat, again, every asset they own, that's not critical. That's what they do their inspections with. If they have to put a patch on it to keep it going a little bit longer than it should, it's not a critical asset. So that is being deferred over time just because, ultimately, that is an underfunded utility. The other thing to kinda look at, again, is how does it understand how much money is being spent and when it's spent? So this is a really good example here on the street scenario. This is North Pugh Street in a city. There over the life cycle of that of this model, which is running, I think, about twenty years, A total spend on this segment of street is eighteen thousand dollars and average annual cost of nine zero eight. And based on the defects that are being seen and what's predicted, we can see what types of treatments are being triggered in each individual year, and we know the unit cost of those treatments. And that is how the model is basically calculating that cost and ultimately looking at how much improvement do I get for that dollar. Where am I getting my highest return on investment? The ability to be able to do this outside of some type of life cycle modeling software is almost impossible. There are things you can do in a spreadsheet that kind of make this happen. There are things you can do in GIS that can kind of make this happen. It is a very labor intensive process. But by leveraging the power of some of the software like Predictor that has some very complex algorithms that can run hundreds of thousands of simulations in a matter of moments to come up with that best solution, This ultimately really gives us a lot of power at our fingertips, and quite honestly, gives us the the outputs to be able to tell that story to both our internal stakeholders, to the general public, and then as we transition here in a moment, to the funding agencies that are looking for the right projects to invest in with the ARPA and the IJA dollars. So once we can start to build that type of life cycle model, now our capital improvement plan starts to look a lot different. We're not living in that upper right hand corner of the riskiest things. We're actually looking well out into the future, and we're starting to prioritize projects based on risk and based on the community needs for that desired level of service. The other thing we can start doing is understanding what that investment gap is. Right now, again, we've kind of focused in this area, optimize optimization of the existing funds that we have. How do we minimize risk? Where do we get the highest return on investment with the dollars we have available today? I didn't mention this, but we can also better coordinate coordinate across departments. And so when we look at coordinating across departments, for instance, why would I go pave the street in two years, mill and overlay that street, when my model is showing me that the water and sewer under that street is aged and high risk and should be scheduled for replacement in five years? It would not make sense to go repave that road and rebuild that street only to go dig it up two to three years later. Again, being able to work across those multiple part departments in a common corridor approach really adds a lot of value. The second part of that is, again, successful external funding. As we've already identified, there's a large amount of funding available. How do we communicate those needs to the funding agency to show that your project that you're submitting is the highest return on investment is gonna be the best investment for those dollars? Again, how do we look twenty years out and develop that needs list? Again, not trying to work in just that five year window, but well beyond that. How do we start to plan well out and start to build a long term investment strategy utilizing those dollars that are available through SRF, State Revolving Fund, USDA, CDBG. In the state of North Carolina, we have Golden Leaf. Every state has a wide array of funding mechanisms out there, it's really about understanding the right needs that line up with that funding source. Again, how do we combine multiple funding sources together to be able to fund a project? And again, ultimately, developing projects that really align with that funding program priority. Again, Sam, I think we have another poll question here if we want to post that up. Yeah. And my question yep. So curious, from the group here, does your community leverage external funding for your infrastructure? Yeah. So as folks answer those questions, we'll kind of roll forward again. But again, really using that life cycle model approach, It's about having the right information available and that understanding of target level of service. Once we can have those two things in place, we can really start to build a very comprehensive strategy of how we close that funding and investment. So this is a screenshot here, of the North Carolina, Division of Water Infrastructure, the state revolving fund. And, again, kinda looking at the funding, does your community leverage exist external funding? I see the majority do. Yes. Some are unsure. Again, how do you leverage that? Are you putting the right projects forward? Are you getting the results from those applications that you turn in? So, again, I wanna focus on North Carolina. We actually have experts that kinda work across multiple states. I think in the state of North Carolina alone over the past decade or so, we've acquired almost nine hundred million dollars in funding for our clients. And again, we use the tool like Predictor to help us build those strategies to be successful with those applications. One of the applications that I just got word back on here in the last day or so is this asset inventory and assessment grant. This is a fantastic program in the state of North Carolina. I think that funding now is almost up to four hundred thousand dollars That grant, dollars four hundred thousand grant, is to do exactly what we're talking about today, to build life cycle models, to develop an asset management plan, to build a long term strategy. Again, the state of North Carolina has determined that that is a good investment of their dollars that they're putting out there because it's helping communities better understand how to build sustainable communities, how to build a financially stable utility, how to leverage the dollars that are available. Also want to mention, was talking with some clients down in Florida, a few weeks back, and Florida has done something very interesting. It's called House Bill fifty three. And House Bill fifty three really is requiring each one of those communities in Florida for their water, sewer, and storm water systems to show that twenty year investment plan, what those twenty year year needs are, and how they're going to address those needs. So, again, we're seeing more and more communities really start to take advantage of this asset management planning approach. Last kind of point on that as well. Asset management planning and programming is not a new thing. It has been kind of at the core in the country of Australia, in Europe, also in Canada. It's just now really starting to to take hold in the United States. Again, a lot of resources that are out there, something we'll be more glad to to share with you and and talk with you about if you have more interest, but certainly go out there and take a look at really asset management planning. It's a really great way to be able to manage your infrastructure. But again, coming back to North Carolina, again, state revolving fund already has dollars that are allocated annually for projects. With the ARPA funding, there has been a huge influx of dollars dedicated from the state level to even further bolster the state revolving fund. Again, in North Carolina, projects up to thirty million dollars can be funded. Again, some of that will be low interest loans. Some of that will be loan forgiveness. Again, a fantastic opportunity to be able to look at your long term needs, build those into a project, and start submitting those applications. Applications have already gone in for the spring, but there is a fall cycle that is coming here in North Carolina. Again, in your state that you live in, you're gonna see very similar type, programs in place. There will be slight differences in each one of those, how they prioritize, what they're what types of projects they're looking for, that is where you really have to dig into the guidance that's coming from that grant agency or that funding agency. What type of projects are they really trying to prioritize? Is it treatment? Is it storm water? Is it reclaimed water? What is it that they're really going how they're going to score that application, make sure that we have the right project or the right needs lined up and built into a project that address those priorities. So kind of think about it this way. If we look at maybe just a typical community, and we do this often with a lot of our clients, They may have identified that these are their eight main priorities. These are the projects that have been kind of identified, that are being supported by the public and by the elected officials. And many times, we'll see somebody come in and say, well, hey. Our number one project is a wastewater treatment plant, and so I wanna go try to get that funded at SRF. Well, that project may not be the highest priority project for SRF. And, we can certainly turn that application in, but that may not actually get funded because other projects that you're competing against address more of the priorities that that agency is trying to address. So when we start to look at kind of the way things are laid out, how do we start to make these projects line up? And so this is sort of a really good way to kind of look at it, and this is what we do in a lot of communities. If you look at these particular projects, this is how they should really line up with each one of those individual funding. So CDBG, this isn't a low to moderate income area. There's a lot of upgrades needed in that area. CDBG is the right vehicle for that. Many communities get a direct allocation. Some have to actually go compete for those dollars. If you're competing, you gotta have the right project in order to be able to be funded. If we look at IIJA, again, the guidance is not out there, but the preliminary guidance that's out there is gonna address things like paving projects, road improvements. Green streetscapes is gonna be a priority. So looking at stormwater, particularly when we're doing in right of way stormwater treatment. SRF in the state of North Carolina in particular, sewer re rehabilitation is, like, one of their number one priorities. So while that sewer rehabilitation project may have been number seven in your list of priorities, in this case, it becomes the number one priority for our SRF application. Water main replacement is a close second. Storm water is a close third. But if we're having to basically apply for applications, this is the order in North Carolina of how we would probably wanna do that. And then the wastewater treatment plan, a new water tank, those are probably best funded by those local ARPA dollars that were that were sent directly to that community. The other thing to look at, as I mentioned earlier, is asset management programming itself. That can certainly be funded through ARPA, but again, in the state of North Carolina, that is actually an AIA grant underneath the SRF program. And, again, that's up to four hundred thousand dollars to be able to go collect the data, build the life cycle models, develop an asset management program, identify projects, which then ultimately is positioning you to be able to go pursue these other dollars in the future. So when we look at that, this is what some of that output looks like. This is a ten year capital improvement plan prioritized by funding and risk. And so, again, this is a Power BI dashboard that's an output from, the life cycle model. This is showing how much that project is gonna cost, what assets are being addressed. Again, you notice the the common core. We're not just focused on one asset, but many assets. We can also see what the risk of that project was before and what the post project risk is as well. We can see that, again, it includes buildings, sidewalks, roads, water, sewer, all the different assets that are being maintained and managed inside that one portal. This is how we're gonna get our highest return on investment, how we phase these property projects, and ultimately, how we leverage multiple funding sources to be able to achieve those goals. The other thing that happens is the life cycle model is tied back to the GIS. So, again, it gives us the great ability to be able to show a long term vision of if we start making these investments today, this is what our community or this asset will look like ten, fifteen, twenty years down the road. We can really start to cast that vision and show the value of that investment this team made. This is the city of Sanford, another great example here. With the city of Sanford, we went through a ten year analysis here, twenty twenty one to twenty thirty one. Each one of these purple dots represents a need. And in this case, this is, specifically to sanitary sewer. The color that you see is kinda showing the risk of that sewer. Well, in this area here, notice we've got some orange and some yellows and, you know, a little bit of green too as well because they've been doing emergency repairs. But this area happens to be a low to moderate income area. The city was using local dollars out of the enterprise fund to fund these projects. But because we can look at all these needs together, we can group them into one project, and that became a two million dollar grant from CDBG. So literally, that was two million dollars that was coming in directly from the state to help fund these needs that did not come out of the enterprise fund. Ultimately, that frees up two million dollars from the enterprise fund to go address other needs. The other thing that we can look at is this area here is a prime SRF project. The total is about four million dollars. So, again, this is how we start to leverage those outputs to really drive some outcomes that pull money back into that into that, enterprise fund to help address some of these long term needs. This is a really good project too as well and really speaks to how being agile and having this information available quickly is so important. In North Carolina SRF, Hurricane Matthew, there was a pot of money that was kinda dedicated to helping respond to that natural disaster, and it was the acronym was ASADRA. And that stood for additional supplemental appropriations for disaster relief act. And really what it sought to do is to pull high risk infrastructure like water and sewer out of the floodplain. Those grants were up to three million dollars total grant. It could be partial loan or partial grant, but again, up to three three million in grant. Well, this particular pump station that was located here is actually in the floodplain. This is not the worst pump station in this town. It had needs, but it was not number one priority. It was not listed on their CIP. But because this funding stream was made available, we were able to put those criteria in and start to pull these projects out of the life cycle to say, hey. I've got a funding vehicle to address projects that look like this. And so ultimately, this was to basically move or raise this pump station out of the floodplain, and we were able to tag on that to that project rehabilitation of all these lines in these yellow highlighted areas. Now this project would not have necessarily been a high priority project for SRF, but it aligned perfectly with Assadra. And, again, Assadra would not have just funded these pipe replacements and rehabilitations alone, but because they were coupled with this pump station, it made that project score very high. And, again, this project was funded, and this work is underway as we talk today. So, again, when we look at this, it's about developing a strategy using the right tools to to understand what our long term needs are. And, how do we align those needs up into projects that directly align with the priorities of funding and those and those funding vehicles that out there? So, again, that's really the message that I wanna share share today is make sure that you're leveraging all the tools that are available. Make sure that you're pursuing those external dollars, getting your share of the wallet, not just looking at the short term needs that you have, but look at the long term needs. This investment is being made through ARPA and IIJA. That money will not probably ever come around again in our lifetime. This is a once in a lifetime historic event. We need to be able to need to be able to maximize our ability to go gather those dollars and address those needs that are in our community. Again, I kind of close here with that triple bottom line for your organization. Again, that common corridor, really big return on investment if we can start to layer these, assets on top of each other and make sure we're doing them at the right time. Really communicating with our elected officials, building that long term program of asset management so we're not just responding to the things that are broken today and not looking beyond that, beyond tomorrow. Understanding that real twenty year capital improvement plan, what are those long term needs? How do I start lining up a funding strategy for that well in advance before the project ever goes to design? Maximizing the return on investment for our current investments that we have available. Again, if I've only got a million dollars, I need five, but I've only got a million today, how can I best spend that million to get the best results? And then again, how do I line up for those external funding opportunities? How do I understand? How do I leverage that software like Predictor to be able to build those projects out and have the most successful application? And ultimately, do we understand what our desired level of service is and what that investment's gonna be? If we can answer those questions, we can really build a sustainable, equitable, viable system that can last for decades and decades to come into the future. So with that, Sam, I think we're about ten minutes. I'm pretty close on time here. I think we wanted to be able to open it up for question and answer. Feel free to drop those in the Q and A. I would love to hear from you. Yeah, we actually had a couple questions come in, Eddie, while you're speaking there. Could you discuss how to push forward sustainability projects, making them a priority in searching for funding? Yes. So, again, that was a high priority with some of the ARPA funding and the IIJA. So when we talk about sustainability, again, that can go directly to stormwater. It can go to the types of materials that we use. Again, all those things need to be in the narrative when we're pulling together those applications to make sure that we're hitting all those priorities with those funding agencies. Again, when we look at sustainability, one of the things that we do quite a bit of is doing in right of way stormwater treatment. So if we're going to go in and repave or remill a road and redo that road, what do we do with the stormwater at the same time? Instead of just piping it into the nearest creek, can we do things like tree wells or, you know, infiltration basins or, you know, curb cuts that go into into an infiltration swale? What are some of those kind of green technologies that we can leverage so we're not just building back the same, but we're actually building back for a more sustainable utility moving forward? And those projects are highly fundable. Those are the kind of things that the funding agencies really like to see. Looks like we have another poll up as well, Sam. I guess this kind of if others would if you'd like more information how to reach out to us, So certainly feel free to check that box as well. Yep, absolutely. Thanks for filling out that poll folks. There were a couple other questions that got dropped here in the chat. How do I know the right amount of infrastructure investment for my community? Yeah, so that lifecycle model is a really good way to be able to do that. You know, sometimes people will say, well, you know, the national average is the national average, I think, is a half a percent investment per year for, like, sanitary sewer. So if you think about your sanitary sewer system as a hundred million dollar system, then you should be putting back a minimum of a half a percent. Well, that's true if your system is new today, but if your system's already forty or fifty years old, that's probably well underfunded. And in fact, many people would say it needs to be at least one percent to be able to reach that goal of sustainability. If you're already further down the road, it's almost more like two percent. A great analogy I use all the time is, if I'm twenty years old and I start start saving for my retirement and investing in my four zero one k, then my annual investment does not have to be as as, as high or as large because I've got many years to be able to build up that fund. If I wait until I'm sixty years old to say, wait a minute, I need to start a retirement fund, then my investment is gonna have to be pretty high because I only have a limited amount of time to be able to build up that necessary fund balance that I'm gonna need for my future. The same thing applies here. And, that's what the life cycle model is really helping kind of point out. We have one more that dropped in here. How many local governments utilities developed any integrated asset management program or approach across multiple areas showing cumulative benefit across the various assets? You know, that's that's a great question. I I assume we're talking about across multiple municipalities. I don't know that I've seen it from municipality to municipality, but I've certainly seen it when, there is interconnection between systems or collaboration between a county and the city or the cities inside that county. I know there was a project I did up in Minnesota. It was a pretty interesting model where they were taking into account some of the things that some of the growth patterns that were happening in the city and how that was gonna affect some of the county roads. So one thing to point out in the life cycle model, we really focus today on failing infrastructure that is structurally failing. But the other thing that can happen and be quantified in that model is capacity as well. So again, an eight inch sewer pipe may be in great condition, but it's no longer adequate to be able to carry that amount of flow. And so again, it can also predict, based on those future flow projections, in year two thousand and thirty two, this line is gonna need to go from an eight inch to a fifteen inch sewer pipe diameter in order to be able to handle that flow. So there are certainly communities that we work with that way where there's inter the inter interlocal government agreements. And again, that sharing of information to help build a more sustainable community, not just for that one individual community, but for that entire region. Very good, and there was one more that dropped in there. I'll read it out for the group here. When you mentioned a road being repaved just to be torn up a year later because an old pipe that failed underneath it, how do I get people across departments talking about projects we're all working on and lining them up better? Yeah, that's a fantastic question. And again, the software does a fantastic job of that. You still have to get the right people in the room to have those conversations, right? And again, I'm gonna tell you, even outside of your organization, again, I'll say this often with common quarter, we're talking with a client, and I say, yeah, a year later, it's being torn up. And usually somebody laughs and says, next week, you know, it was torn up or or the utility team went out there and cut it. There will always be emergency repairs that we just can't predict. But, again, if we're if we've got all of the water and sewer and the pavement and storm water all in life cycle models and are sharing that data, I have always found a willingness across multiple departments to be able to communicate that. The biggest hurdle we see right now is lots of times those CIPs, those capital improvement plans, one, they're typically underfunded, and two, they're addressing just the worst needs in the system. And again, there's just not that communication and collaboration across departments. The other thing that I will say is it's great to be able to share that outside your organization. So, again, with the telecom companies, the gas companies, the utilities that maybe the municipality doesn't have, you know, direct influence over, but at least if you can share your plans, your long term plans, they can start to take that into consideration when they're looking at some of their utility upgrades as well. Last questions? I know we're down to the last minute or two here. So I don't see any in the chat right now or the Q and A, so I did want to remind everybody that we did record the session and we will be sending out the recording link for you guys to review and share. We really appreciate your time today. Eddie, I don't know if you have any last final remarks or anything for the group. No, just thank you for your time today, and certainly if there's anything we can assist with, certainly feel free to reach out. This presentation will be made available. Definitely dive in with the QR codes to the to the resources that we've posted in here, and, good luck. There's again, there's a lot of money out there. Make sure that your community is really getting, getting your fair share of that wallet. Thanks, everyone. Thanks a lot. Smarter assets, sustainable communities, Brightly.