Council Elections and Asset Management Requirements

Hello, and welcome to Transforming AM, our regular video series, where we discuss key asset management topics and share tips drawn from our collective experience in industry. Today, I'm lucky enough to have two of our senior consultants with me, Michael Butler, Lauren Russell. We wanted to discuss after the recent council elections here in Victoria. As the new council is being orientated, there will be some asset management requirements for the infrastructure and asset management departments. So Lauren, could you take us through what some of those requirements might be? Yeah. Absolutely. So across Australia, each state generally has requirements that expresses expectations on councils as it relates to asset management and budget requirements and timing, across the infrastructure portfolios. And so we've been crunching through a lot of those local government acts. And so, for example, Victoria, with the recent elections, they've got requirements under their local government act, to have their asset management plan, fully drafted, consulted, and published by October the following year. So we've been going through that and putting together a lot of resources, perhaps to support you in achieving that, or hopefully exceeding your legislative requirements. Yeah. Yeah. I've been through one process myself and I there's quite a bit of work. And, Michael, I'm sure you've been through a few at your time at local government. What recommendations do you have for, the audience who might be going through this process shortly? Yeah. Great. So having the best part of a year, to October thirty, for instance, in the Victorian state feels like a lot of time, but in reality, it's it's not. So get started as soon as you can. The place that I'd recommend you start is doing an assessment of where you currently sit, what information is available, what's your budget situation, what's your forecast, what's your community levels of service, all of that sort of assessment, to understand really where you sit, where you're starting from as part of this year's updates. Right? Once you've done that, then do your life cycle modeling. Understand what your infrastructure's forecasted to look like over the next ten to fifteen years, depending on what your planning period is, and bring all your budgets in, understand the current scenario, as well as what the funding is required for your desired levels of service and any changes you're expecting through your network at that time from growth, from disposals, from capital investments, whatever those changes are, bring those in as well. Once you've done that process, consolidate it into your draft asset management plan to tell the story and then engage with your community as soon as possible. You need to get that feedback. You need to get that expectations, the levels of service that they want, to really feed into that process to understand how your assets will perform against that expectation, and you need to bring that into your modeling process as well. You also need to communicate with your community the trade off. If they want a better levels of service, there's no cost associated with that. What can be funded? What can't be funded? And have that open and frank discussion. Out of that process, you'll end up with a very clear asset management plan. So make it clear and concise, and then you put that up to your elected council where hopefully it will be adopted, and you can have that engagement with them to bring them up to speed on the future, understanding of what your network will look like under current funding, what the desired funding requirements are, and what that gap is so they can make the informed decisions that they are there to be making. Sounds like a robust process, mate. And what about the communication piece with the elected members themselves? What advice would you both have there? I think make sure that you are telling a clear and concise story. So there's a lot of data that's involved in asset management because there's a lot of assets that particularly local governments look after. It can be easy to get bogged down in the data and lose the forest for the trees, so to speak. So make sure you bring it up to that high level. You tell a clear and concise story, and that story, you know, emphasizes the experience, the levels of service, community expectations, because at the end of the day, that's what local government's there for, you know, delivering services to our communities. Absolutely. Yeah. And just to add on to that and bring it back to an earlier point, being really transparent about where you are in your asset management maturity journey, particularly as it relates to data and the forecasting. You're never gonna have perfect data and you're not gonna have that crystal ball. And so what we can do to also foster trust in the community is to be really transparent about the level of confidence and also outline the improvement actions they're taking, to better improve and be more robust with those projections in the future. Alright. Well, thanks for talking. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We hope the videos are helpful for the current process you might be going through. And stay tuned for the next video of Transforming AM coming shortly.