Prioritize Your Public Works Projects

All, and welcome to the prioritize your public works projects webinar. I'm glad you've all joined us for this discussion. We'll jump right in. Luke Anderson, strategic consult strategic solutions consultant here at Brightly will be our moderator today. Luke comes from a background in energy automation and HVAC controls and has been with Brightly software for about ten years. After receiving his FMP in twenty seventeen, Luke has focused on both sides of the asset management world, day to day operations and long term strategic capital planning. Luke spends his workdays at his home office juggling his four year old son, Everett, his new baby, and his attorney wife, Alex. Luke's current role as strategic consultant allows him to consult with civic leaders, helping to establish clear and justified capital plan. Welcome, Luke. The floor is yours. Alright. Thank you, Tracy. Welcome, everybody. Thank you guys for coming. I think we'll have a fun time this, this morning, this early afternoon, depending on where you're located. I've had a a light chance to get to know Meghan, and and not only she's she come across very intelligent, but she's a lot of fun. She has a a little girl that's the same age as my little boy, so we've been talking all about year round schools versus traditional, the the fun daycare stuff and everything that comes along with, having little toddlers. So I'm definitely looking forward to it. Megan Powell, everybody, is the other person that I'll be kind of, walking through and and and interviewing today kind of specifically about this idea of of project planning, how we understand funding. Her role with, Withers Ravenel is funding and asset manage mid project manager, funding and asset management project manager. And really we wanna try to take our our twenty, thirty minutes today and talk about how do we align the goals of your community, the goals of the team itself, right, when we think about your public works operation, your paving projects, your your your water and sewer, needs, and how that ties with the community vision. Right? So how are we gonna link those two things together, not just at the board level, but also to the citizens, the constituents. Right? How do we how do we build this path to to to reach those goals? So Megan, I mentioned, very intelligent, has extensive knowledge working in local, gov in North Carolina. She's worked recently with the grant administration for the ARRA, the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. A lot of sustainability projects, a lot of community outreach, a lot of engagement with the community to kind of help justify and drive a lot of those projects. She's been a manager and a a budget manager and an auditor. It has, led teams securing millions of dollars for funding. So if you are a local government, you might have worked with her in North Carolina helping you earn money and get money to do some of these projects. Day to day, she does a lot of developing best practices and policies. So there's a a a controls act, the local government budget and fiscal control act. When we think about procedures, how do we comply with that control act? At state, local, federal, all these levels of laws apply. She's doing a lot of that, you know, pretty on a pretty consistent basis. She's also the first vice president of the North Carolina Local Government Budget Association, the NCLGBA. It's a long name. Spends her name out time outside of work, like we mentioned, with her with her, four year old, and her husband here in Asheville. So super excited to have you with us, Megan. I know that was quite an extensive, introduction, but welcome. And, we'll just jump on in. Sounds great. Thank you. Yeah. So I wanna talk if it's just just at the very beginning, high level. Right? We've got somebody here has projects they need to do. There's there's money. There's there's there's cost. There's there's time. There's commitment. And then we think about the department as itself, and we think about the entire municipality, whether it's a a city, a county, a state, how how do you think about bringing all those things together? What's kind of a good starting point for us to kinda wrap our heads around right now? I mean, really to start with, you know, if you're thinking about your department, you're part of a larger organization. So you also you wanna make sure that you're not thinking of your department as its own little silo. You know, you are part of that bigger organization, which is part of the community. So making sure you're communicating across those platforms, talking to your other coworkers, talking to your budget office or your manager if you have don't have a budget office, being in constant communication about what you're needing and why you're needing it is your first step. If you can't tell them what you need and why you need it, you're not gonna be able to get that funding piece to start with. So communication is really the number one thing I tell people that you really need to just start with. And that's something that everybody can do. You may not be great at it. That's one of those things that some of us have to work on a little bit. I know I do. Sometimes need to work on those communication skills, but talking about what you need and why you need it most importantly is your step one. In talking about why you need things, a a really great way to help explain that story is looking at performance measures. Things that you can do to say, this is why I need this. To be able to help tell that story with data is a really important part of that first step. So so walk me through kind of an example what that looks like. So I'm just gonna make it up. I'm the public works director. I've got a few paving projects I need to get done. Right. I'm in the the city of Lukeville, so I've got, you know, a mayor. I've got other departments. Give me an exam can you can you give me an on the spot kind of example what that would look like? Where would I go first thinking, okay. I need to think interdepartmentally. Where am I gonna go with my information? Who am I gonna communicate to? Well, to really come up with a good answer for that, we might wanna take a step back and talk about, a strategic plan within in your community. Do they have one? Or does your council have a set, level of expectation of service? If they say we want x level of service and, you know, we want our roads to be in a certain condition, you know, that's a great way to start. Do you meet that expectation? And if you don't meet it, how are you falling short to be able to get to where the board wants your community to be and that vision that they have? A lot of that ties again back into those big strategic goals for that community. But, you know, seeing what level of expectation does your board have is the best way to start and say, how do you get there? And that can vary in transportation projects. Everything is you know, has different ratings for for roads. If you're talking about facilities maintenance, how many work orders are expected? You know, what level of service is is expected for that building? And it just depends on different projects what that level could be. But it's basic, you know, the the widgets. Do you do you meet this set number of goals or do you, you know, baseline stuff? If you're not meeting that, that's a great way to start talking about we're not meeting the goals of our community. Here's some steps as to how we can get there. Beautiful. Now you said something that I'm gonna go on a tangent for. And just to let the audience know, I am one question in, and we're completely off script here because Meaghan just said something that I think was super important that I don't hear enough of, when I talk to a lot of organizations, which is defining a level of service. And and when we think about defining a level of service, I always like to explain is how good or how well does this asset need to do its job. Mhmm. So if the asset needs to perform its job at a hundred percent, no no room for any kind of issue at all, then we need to fund it and we need to treat it differently than an asset that we may say, you know what? It's okay. Right? If we think about a road, right, funding it a hundred percent would mean we're maintaining a PCI or a road rating of maybe ninety or above, which I don't know about you, mate. How many communities do you have that that's their goal? Right? Perfection on roads. Perfection in buildings. That's what what the board wants, but it's not what they're willing to pay for. Exactly. So I'm gonna give you an on the spot question, which is what I get asked all the time, and I don't have an answer for it. Is there a resource or a way out there to look at for somebody that has never defined a level of service? What what is a good starving place? Where you know, I know my road PCI that's usually, you know, seventy is good enough for many people. But what about for everything else? Any resource there or thought around that concept? I think it depends on the industry. I know you can look at, other communities your size. In North Carolina, there's a great resource called the benchmarking project that's done by the school government. They have other communities that are participating. So you could look at, you can look at communities your size and say, hey, what are other people doing? You can look at other communities that have similar size community or population or similar budget sizes to you and look at their, you know, public of it, publicly available documents and see what are they doing. You may not necessarily be able to dial down to that kind of more granular data of what a PCI score is in those documents, but you can see how much money they're spending. If you're in a community that's like yours, it's probably cost a similar amount to pave a road in one community than another. You can kind of judge that based off the amount of money they're spending just in those publicly available budget documents. And that's something that's available in, you know, not just in North Carolina, but in all states. Yeah. If you're in Texas, don't don't look at the guy in Nome, Alaska and his paving project cost cause it's not gonna be the same. But, yeah, look for other places and and that that makes a lot of sense. Okay. Well, alright. Let's go back. Let's go back to this project. So so now that we kind of understand we're we're we're gonna be working with other people, how do we tell that story? What is that what is that process look like when you mentioned inter interdepartmental collaboration? Walk us through through a little bit of what that that story looks like when we're actually building that that process to get things included and and set up with our budget. And this is a question that's very timely for, those organizations. One, they're either in North Carolina or those that have fiscal year ending June thirtieth, which I know a lot of states do, because you're deep in the budget process right now. You've probably submitted some of your requests to your budget office or to your manager, and they're going through and evaluating everything, trying to figure out what goes in and what doesn't go in because there's a limited amount of funds every single year. Start with that budget office and your manager. Sit make some time with them if they haven't already asked you for it, and sit down and explain those needs and talk to them about what, again, what you need and why. Telling that story is probably one of the most important parts that really gets overlooked. Data is really important. All the other metrics we can use help you tell that story, but being able to say what you need and why, again, is just the the the easiest way to do it. When I ran the budget office in my local government before I came to Withers, that was one of the biggest things somebody would say, well, why didn't I get this funded? It was a great capital project. We had all this data. We have this somewhere like you didn't tell us that. It's hard for us to go to bat publicly for you with the board to teach them about what's going on because they're the ones ultimately making those decisions if we weren't informed about that data. And after, you know, a couple of, unfortunately, failed times for that department, they started coming to us and telling us what was going on, and we were able to communicate that to the elected officials to help them get that project funded. Now, again, it ultimately is up to those elected officials, but having somebody that can help you, with that message, it is gonna be, you know, kind of a great way to do it. And that's probably what you've got going on right now in your budget offices. They're they're figuring all this out, what can go in, and, now's the time to really do that for next year. So basically, we said it kind of talked about two parts. And you mentioned something when we did it we did some of our other conversations, which I'm gonna incorporate here in just a second. But there was two parts. There's kind of the artistic part, right, which says, how do I how do I convey my need? How do I communicate the issue? But then there's also more of kind of this tactical data driven part that says, I'm gonna tell this story, but I'm gonna back it up by showing you how many of blank we had, or how many dollars of blank we did. So there's two pieces. Right? There's that, or how many dollars of blank we did. So there's two pieces. Right? There's that that that artistic and more of that tactical. You you said a term earlier, board visioning and and walking through walking boards through the comparison of things that are important versus things that are maybe nice to haves or things that are public focused versus things that are integral to infrastructure. Can you describe kind of what board visioning is and how that kind of goes to that artistic side of the process? So for board visioning, that can look different in every community. But it's something that I think think elected officials should do fairly regularly, whether it's once a term for them, once every couple of years, once every reevaluation cycle, but it's going through and and as part of a potential larger strategic plan if they have one, figuring out what they as a board want the community to look like. It's setting it's like, you know, we talked about earlier, setting those baseline goals of and it may not necessarily be we want a PCI score of ninety, But it's we want good roads, or we want greenways to be a priority, or we want our facilities to be the most beautiful town facilities you've ever seen in your entire life. You know, setting those goals kind of helps from the top down, start that vision, to go forward. And, you know, a visioning can be fairly simple. It can be, the manager sitting down with them and maybe at a board meeting a couple you know, once a year and and going through some things of let's talk about what you want. Let's figure out where your goals align from various different board members, to come up with this this direction. And it could be something, you know, very structured where you have a facilitator come in and spend all day talking about, you know, what are the most important things in your community. It can be all of those anything in between. So, in terms of so board visioning to me sounds a lot like, what do they call them? Vision statements almost, or or mission statements in the in the the corporate world. Right? This, you know, we at at at Withers Ravenel are gonna provide a great level of server that yada yada yada. Do do you see I know most cities and counties, most organizations have a vision statement, a mission statement. I've I've talked to some departments that have created one for their facilities team. I've created one for their streets and paving team. Is that something you see or is that something you'd encourage them to do to kind of take that vision statement and make it more specific for their group and organization? I think people definitely should do that because, again, you have those vision statements and mission statements. A lot of local governments have those. But, you know, you do need to figure out how how do you do how do you accomplish those things. We want a beautiful community. That's great. That's what everybody wants. How do you create that beautiful community? And and individually as departments going through and figuring out how you fit into that vision is very important. Makes a lot of sense. I, I I'm I'm trying to remember the vision statement here in Holly Springs. And, it's funny because I was I was thinking about kind of what you're talking about with board visioning. And part of the the vision of Holly Springs is, you know, economic development, sustainability, safety, things like that. And when we when you think about that and you think I think about specifically economic development. Right? We're in a you know, most of North Carolina is booming right now as are many many metro areas. And, essentially, when we think about economic development, the first thing people think about is, oh, that, you know, you know, sidewalks and roads and big big roads. But it's like, well, put the water and the sewer and the things that come underneath. And I think when you have a vision statement that talks about those types of things, it creates that easy line of sight that says, I know we wanna invest in parks. I know we wanna invest in things that are beautiful, but the things underground that allow those beautiful things to exist, that's that's the line of sight that we wanna create by having these types of conversations. I don't know if that was a question or not, but it just it it it it reminded me a lot of of really when we were thinking about having a vision statement and specifically creating for an inner department. Exactly. Well and I would agree with you on all those things. All these things are intertwined. You can't have great economic development if you don't have water and sewer to provide for that, or you can't have thriving communities and great neighborhoods if you don't have interconnectivity. And, again, you know, water and sewer and all the stuff underground that you just don't see as pretty. It's essential to have those pretty things Yeah. Okay. That infrastructure to support it. And I think we all knew that if we've worked together. Absolutely. So good. So let's go to the other side now, the hard data. And then after this, I wanna talk about technology. Right? Because at a certain point, us sitting here talking about all this stuff these people need to do is gonna become so overwhelming. They need help. Right? So we'll talk about tech. We'll talk about where things come in to make it easier. But I do wanna talk a little about that that solid data. We've mentioned PCI. I'm gonna assume everybody on here knows what a PCI is, a pigment condition index. And I would also venture out to say most people understand, you know, understanding condition ratings of their assets, things like that, whether it's water pipes or facility condition rating. What are some other things in terms of hard data that you find useful, maybe from your time and budget that that would help people when they're thinking about the hard data that they need to supplement with their with their kind of soft skills of communication? So kind of thinking away from maybe assets from other things. People, that's really an important asset in our communities. If you come to me and say, hey. We're busy. I need another person. I need another FTE next year. That's a really expensive ongoing expense. I need another one. We're busy. And I'm like, tell me how you're busy. A great one to look at inspections is, you know, in North Carolina, you're expected to do a certain number of building inspections per day. With let's say that number is ten. I'm I'm not sure what it is currently, but it's ten. If you're doing twenty five, that's a huge public safety issue because that means they're not spending the amount of quality time they need to be doing on a building inspection to do it accurately and and properly. And, that that's a great economic indicator. It means your real your community is growing, but it doesn't show that your those inspectors are performing the job to the best of their ability because they're being rushed. And that, you know, averages. You may have one that only takes a few minutes, but that's a great one to do. Libraries, the amount of circulation, books that are in there, the number of people that are coming in and using your technology, renting your rooms, having study groups in the afternoon. You have high schoolers coming in and and working on projects together, tutors, things like that. How much how much of your space is being utilized by the public? Parks and recreation. How many how many times are your fields rented every single week? Are your park shelters rented? Are they only rented on Saturdays or are they rented all the time? You know, those types of things is use of facility is a great way to help doing, for for those non infrastructure things. Using your assets is also very important and and showing how they're being used by the community. Do you need more of something? It's a great way to look at that. And, again, it's all it's all very dependent on your department. And when I I worked in local government, I helped a lot of our departments establish some of these great performance measures. And they would come to me and they say, well, what's a good one? I'm like, tell me what you do. You can measure yourself better than I can. What do you do, and how do you do it? And looking at those things, you probably already got the data. Use what you've got to help help do that stuff there, help show how you can tell that story a little bit more. So you hit on a couple of real of of great ones, I think. The, the the the library usage. Right? Huge huge leading indicator of of growth and school needs. The one I wanna talk about was the parks and the ball fields because I think that's a good one that we can kinda connect back because with the data and the strategic or with the data and the artistic because we're if we're going and we're saying to our our our our leadership, our board that we need to invest in another park. Right? And we we go and we can communicate. We understand from an infrastructure standpoint what that means for water and sewer, what that means for storm water. We've we've built that in. We understand that meaning. Now we're supplementing that with the hard data of ninety five percent of our available time is occupied by community members. There is no room for expansion. One more group, one more little league team, they're not gonna be able to play because we don't have anywhere to go. Kind of creates that hard and soft data that we are kind of talking about. So what you described or I call those KPIs, key performance indicators. Is there a is that same terminology for you that you're kind of speaking towards? The key KPIs or performance measures is is what they're typically called in local government. Yeah. It's the same thing. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Well, good. Okay. So let's let's talk about that that because when it comes to the data for the KPI, right, when we think about a key performance indicator, we have to have a piece of information that we're tracking that tells us whether we're succeeding on what we're trying trying to achieve. So if we think about, you know, facility usage. Right? Having tools that allow public to access and reserve that and track it rather than, you know, one person at the front has a book that they write down when people need it and they have to check an Outlook calendar. Right? Having data for reporting. Do you have different types of data or different types of technology that Withers provides or that Withers has worked with that help with capturing those different types of KPIs? I think there's a lot of different technology out there specifically. I haven't worked with one particular one that would cover everything. Oh, yeah. There's not one. It's still the basic tool where you can start to track some of that stuff that everybody has access to. So you can you can do it as easy as just having it in Excel. Again and there's there's lots of great software out there that can that fit your needs. Probably some of it that your community is already using and paying for that they're not using to its fullest potential. Every time I'd go to look at something, they're like, oh, yeah. That software we pay does that. I'm like, how does no why does nobody know this? So So looking at what we currently have available, what your what your community is currently maybe subscribing to or has purchased the software, would be one step and excels another one. So using those kind of basic things you have out there, it can be as simple as that. Doesn't have to be incredibly overly complicated. Again, the better software you get, the easier it is, the the less time consuming it is, but it can be as simple as Excel. Well, let's talk about that because I think there's a double edged sword there. Right? Because the better software we get, you're right, does make the analytics and the reporting better. But oftentimes, we we end up with having a lot of onus on the people doing their job now having to use not just doing their job now, but having to use software. Right. And I think that's a big challenge for a lot of organizations, especially when they think about the work order data. Right? A lot of this information in terms of how much are things utilized, how often are things breaking, how safe are certain areas, how consistently are we repairing them. All of that comes from work order tracking. But when we just start talking about work orders, a lot of other stuff just starts to get tacked onto it. And I I think Excel and email is a great place for many people to start. Starting in Excel, list out what is it that you own that you wanna track. Right? What buildings, what assets, what roads, what is it that you need to keep up with? And then email setting up inboxes so that we know when certain things occur, we have a way for that history to live somewhere so that we can always go back and say, hey. This is where we wanna go. Mhmm. There's work order softwares are out there, but ultimately, you're doing the same thing. But as as she just mentioned, right, we're moving into a more a more kind of technology base. What about capital planning, in terms of of looking at long term replacement scheduling? So like PCI. I know there's a lot of tools out there that do pavement analysis. Anybody you found that's that's been more or less successful or or easier or simpler people to use on that that upfront arena? That's not something I've worked with specifically, as a software for for PCIs. You know, what again, what we use in our department is financial analysis tools and figuring out what works, you know, within your budget, having regular financial analysis done from outside organizations. We do a lot of that with our team at Withered Travenel. Helping people looking at their current finances, where do they need to bring in revenue, where then do they need to potentially explore grants, and helping tie that into your capital improvement plans, making sure all of it fits together nicely. Perfect. Okay. So when you say financial analysis, is that looking at, like, things like funding sources, like grants and and income tax, or is that more on the, like, taxes and and the other side of the the operational expenses and capital expenses side, or is it both? Both. So, you know, looking at what revenues you have available to you as a local government, where you could potentially tap in outside funding sources like grants, and then where are your expenses? Looking at all of that together holistically to see, what what you need to do as an organization moving forward. And, you know, it depends on if you're a utility, you likely are an enterprise fund, and it works a little bit differently than if you're a library and you're getting funds out of the general fund. So it really just depends on where you fit in there. But we look we try to look at a financial analysis really holistically of all the different funding sources potentially you could have, whether that's, you know, you know, property taxes, sales tax, fund you know, grants, and then where, again, those expenses are. And that includes your capital and operating. Operating is a really important thing. We were talking about that earlier with, you you know, your employees. So they've operating ongoing expense. That's a little bit different than I need a new x next year because the old one needs to be replaced. Right. They're all part of that same same expense ultimately at the end of the day. So how how and then this might be a biased question because you do them. But, how often should people be doing this? How often do you think about rate studies on the utility side or think about an analysis? Like, you know, I love the example of a library because, right, it's not just libraries. It's libraries and it's parks. General fund funds so many different things, and so many different things have their own indicators as to what their needs are gonna be five, ten years from now. Is this something people do on a yearly basis, every five years? What's a good kind of schedule to kind of have this, or is it constant? It both. For a smaller community, you probably need to do it a little less often than a larger community. And And again, larger communities may have the, personnel to do some of it in in house yearly. You know, looking at somebody, externally to do it maybe every five years or so. But internally, that's something you can kind of update a little bit every single year and then kinda have the big, you know the the same as you would do for a capital improvement plan. You look at those every single year, but you have somebody help you with them every five or ten years, go through and do an outside look. Okay. Perfect. Well, we are almost at the top of the hour. There's three minutes left. So I do wanna give you the final word, Meaghan, just to just some, some some lift offs here, you know, thinking about the communication we've talked about, right, that artistic style, the data, putting plans into action. You know, one one final piece of advice or piece of guidance you can give for our our attendees today before we, close over to Tracy and and wrap up here. I think we pretty much covered it. But, you know, I I think I've got everything on my little list that I had to to make sure we cover bullet point wise. And, again, you know, I think most everybody on this call is familiar with it. You know, it all does come down to the money and the funding, and there are limited resources. But doing all these things to help, look at a holistic view of your organization, of your department, and, telling that story. Hopefully, we'll, have, great keys to success. Alright. Now I'm gonna give you one more. I'm gonna give you a loop question. You get to wave the magic wand. Right? Right. And everybody on this call, not money. They can't you can't give them money. But you can give them some some piece of information that is gonna help them moving forward. Right? You know, a better understanding of their levels of service, you know, better data for their asset. What do you what do you think would be the best thing that everybody if they could snap their fingers and have have information about? What what would you like for them to all have? Oh, that's a really hard see, you're supposed to tell me these things ahead of time. No. That's why that's why I do it because it makes it way more fun if you don't know they're coming. But, you know, being able to communicate properly, have every everyone having that communication skill. You have not being afraid to talk to people, being able to make sure you can accurately speak publicly if that's what your your community has to do. Being able to communicate in the way you need to communicate. That would be it. And I'd be interested. I I love that because I bet you that's better than any piece of data in the world because data is useless without knowing how to actually use it and communicate its need. That's good. That's great. Cool. Well, good. Megan, thank you so much. Unfortunately, we are kind of out of time. Tracy, did you wanna say a final word and, and wrap us up here? Yeah. Thank you very much, Luke and Megan. I think that was a fantastic conversation. For the audience, you will receive the recording of this presentation within twenty four hours and a follow-up email so you can reach out to us with any fantastic opportunity to engage directly with Megan or Luke, one on one or as a company. So hope you enjoyed the webcast today. Thank you again, Megan and Luke. That was a really great conversation. Have a nice day. Thanks, guys. Bye. Thank you.