Hey Claudia, in Newmarket we are dedicating a section of the AMP to quantify the assets we know are in the pipeline due to growth by cobbling together the master plans that have not been integrated. This addressed the strategic growth, and we are coupling this by quantify increased assets due to subdivisions. While master plans will cover a range of assets and drivers (e.g. upsizing an existing asset, upgrading services with new assets, etc.), subdivisions are fairly easy to tackle with some assumptions or info from developers. If the subdivision is too early for an as-built drawing, you could still get construction info from the developer. To make it even simpler if you have no info, see if you can just get the estimate road length in the subdivision and assume a relative portion of underground pipes will be present by proxy. If you don't want to do a 1:1 assumption, you could compare the ratios of assets in an existing but comparable neighborhood (e.g. maybe there are 1.1 meters of watermain per 1m of road in your municipality) using GIS. This could then be repeated for appurtenances (e.g. 1 fire hydrant every 75 meters - again not an actual number you should use but something like this based on your municipality). This method will deal with linear assets: things like ponds, pump stations, etc. are trickier.
Knowing these quantities is very powerful. It can help you develop some rough replacement values, which in turn feed the reserves you need to start building for replacement. We recently did activity based budgeting, and now have unit costs that can be built off AM quantities (e.g. our roads cost about $8000 per km per year, excluding materials and overhead). If you don't have activity unit costs, you could look at the overall size of your work order charges, operating budget, etc.
To make things even more interesting, you can now use this info to see if the DC and tax revenue you will get from these services costs more or less than what it will cost you to provide them. Newmarket hasn't done this yet but the possibility is there!
I recommend at least taking a look this to assess the impact it would have on your AMP. When we quantified the growth assets in the pipeline, the number was much larger than expected and is important to inform the discussion when AMPs are presented.
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Erik Wright
Town of Newmarket
Asset Management Specialist
Richmond Hill ON
Canada
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