By Kim Siebert MacPhail
Bedford’s recently acquired asset management software, now in its first budget cycle, has been characterized as “useful,”particularly for providing a long-range perspective of maintenance and replacement needs. However, at the Selectmen’s meeting on Monday night, Jean Marc Slak, chair of the Capital Expenditures Committee—as well as department heads closely involved with the process—indicated that human judgment is still required to achieve finely-tuned priority rankings of capital expenses.
The new software program provides, in Slak’s words, “a comprehensive list of the Town’s assets and the expenses associated with maintaining them,” something the Town believes is essential to responsibly account for and forecast capital asset needs.
In response to a question about how the software has affected CapEx’s usual process of weighing and prioritizing large projects and purchases, Slak and Assistant Town Manager Jessica Porter responded that although the program does create a ranked list, members haven’t take the computer-generated ranking into account during this first year of its use because everyone is still learning the new system.
Even though this was the case, Slak did credit the computer program with broadening the Town’s ability to forecast needs and plan capital expenses.
“The new software was very useful for that initial report,” Slak said. “It’s really the first time that we have one piece of paper that has a six-year plan for everything. But, for the [yearly] ranking, we essentially wanted to take a year with the departments entering information into the software to create the ranking and to compare that with how the Capital Expenditures Committee ranks items.”
CapEx will meet in the spring to take a more analytical look at how the human and computer systems can best be integrated. However, Slak noted that there were “some glaring discrepancies between how CapEx ranks and judges the priorities of the town and how the software [listed priorities]”
By way of explanation,Slak said that he believes more staff training is needed on how to input data into the program to achieve optimum results. As yet, there is no consistency across departments for how requests are ranked before they are melded with other departments’ requests. Also, the different criteria being used and the numbers associated with them“need to be tweaked,”Slak said.
“Some things might be missing, some things might be weighed a bit too heavily,” Slak explained. “And the other thing that computers can’t do is say, ‘We can do without this, we can do without that, we can cut that back, we can even things out,’ which Capital Expenditures is always doing—changing the amount[s] or choosing to group things together.”
[To read about this year’s CapEx ranking process, see: https://thebedfordcitizen.org/2013/01/04/capital-expenditures-reaches-agreement-on-project-prioritization/ ]
Town Manager Rick Reed was supportive of the new software, saying that its capabilities have not yet been fully explored. Additionally, Reed said that for the first time, due to the software, the Town has a comprehensive, centralized list of all its assets.
Reed also emphasized that this year, Assistant Town Manager Porter has kept a particular eye on department submissions to make sure—given the newness of the process—that requests have ultimately been balanced as fairly as possible.
“The main thing is we haven’t ever had a good, solid accounting inventory of what the over-all physical infrastructure investment of the town has been [or] what the expected life of each asset is,” Reed explained. “The system also keeps a record of when this asset was last replaced. Essentially, with all that information, it predicts into the future when you’re going to have to do [certain] things again. It helps you with the long-term perspective.”
Speaking about the amount of money normally dedicated to capital projects–around $1M—Slak said, “I want to point out something important. The average capital expenditures request [each year] over [the last] six years is $5M. That’s food for thought. That [amount] includes water/sewer and roads [but not some major projects like the turf field and School Way]. It’s higher than what we’ve been investing as a town. It also doesn’t include a [recently added request] for a streetlight replacement project that’s being considered or a bridge replacement project that’s also a large number.”
It was noted, as well, that DPW Director Warrington recently raised concerns that unless more funds are consistently dedicated to road maintenance, pavement conditions will deteriorate. A rise in materials costs coupled with fewer companies bidding on projects—a consequence of the economic downturn—wereidentified as causes of the price increases. To read a previously published article about this subject, visit: https://thebedfordcitizen.org/2013/01/04/road-pavement-conditions-may-deteriorate/
To read about the Town vehicle fleet and other backlogged capital requests see: https://thebedfordcitizen.org/2013/01/07/capital-request-backlog-sparks-debates-about-vehicles-and-increased-capital-funding/
Reed added that, with the new software’s predictive capabilities, the scope of the Capital Expenditures Committee’s work may very well change.
“I think we should work with [the committee] to really focus more on a true six-year capital investment plan, and that the focus of the Committee shouldn’t be the year at hand, it should be on reviewing the five years that have been planned [into the future] for a long time, and then add the sixth year as the new item each year into the capital expenditure plan. Certainly, a few [unexpected] new things are going to come up now and then, but the emphasis should be on the long-term so that nothing is a surprise. ”
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