Public Works and Utilities Committee Tue, Jan 20, 2026 · Public Works and Utilities Committee https://santafeminutes.space/meeting/959 == Executive Summary == The Public Works and Utilities Committee received an annual update on the Water Division's asset management plan, which aims to efficiently manage over a billion dollars in assets using new software and predictive modeling. The Water Division is implementing OpenGov for asset management and VODA AI for predicting water main risks, with a full rollout expected in March. The committee also approved an amendment to their schedule to include a Finance Committee meeting on January 26, 2026. Public Utilities staff offered facility tours and informational briefings to councilors, and provided an update on their successful new 'utility operator' training program. Councilor Barrett commended the Water Division's proactive approach to asset management as a model for other city departments. There were no public comments during the meeting. == Key Decisions == - Approved the agenda unanimously. - Approved the consent agenda unanimously, with Item E pulled for separate consideration. - Approved a motion to amend the committee schedule to include a Finance Committee meeting on January 26, 2026, unanimously. - Approved the amended schedule item unanimously. == Motions & Votes == - Approval of Agenda — Passed unanimously. - Approval of Consent Agenda (excluding Item E) — Passed unanimously. - Motion to amend the committee schedule to include a Finance Committee meeting on January 26, 2026 — Passed unanimously (Chair Chavez, Councilor Barrett, Councilor Faulkner, Councilor Fagali voted Yes). - Motion to approve the amended schedule item — Passed unanimously (Chair Chavez, Councilor Barrett, Councilor Faulkner, Councilor Fagali voted Yes). == Public Comment == No public comment period. == Topics == - Water Division Asset Management - Utility Operator Staffing - Committee Schedule Change - Public Works & Utilities Committee Operations - Water System Assets - Asset Management Software Implementation - VODA AI Software - Water Infrastructure Funding - Committee Member Engagement - Community Energy Efficiency Development == Full Transcript == Can you let me know when we're live, please? We are live. Thank you so much. I call to order the Public Works and Utilities Committee meeting. It's January 20th, and it is 5:02. Can I have a roll call, please? Absolutely. Chair Chavez. Here. Councilor Barrett. Here. Councilor Fagali. Councilor Faulkner. Here. All right, we have a quorum. Next is approval of the agenda. Are there any changes from staff? No changes from staff. And I have a motion from the committee. Second. All those in favor signify by saying, "Aye." Aye. Any opposed? Seeing none, motion passes. I know originally on consent, we didn't have anything pulled, but I would like to pull item E. Are there any other items that last minute were pulled off consent? All right, with that, can I have a motion? Motion to approve. Second. I have a motion. I have a second. Could I get a roll call, please? Chair Chavez. Yes. Councilor Barrett. Yes. Councilor Faulkner. Yes. Councilor Fagali. All right. Next is public comment. Do we have anyone in chambers to come up and speak to us this evening? We do not have public comment today. So, we will move on to presentations. Presentation. Annual update on the Water Division's Asset Management Plan. We have Taylor Jurgens, engineer, here to give us that presentation. I turn it over to you. Good evening, Madam Chair, members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to present to you all tonight. For those I haven't met yet, I'm Taylor Jurgens. I'm an engineer with the Water Division. And tonight I'll be presenting to you our annual asset management update for 2026. Can I just, Councilor Faulkner, is it okay if I turn the screen so we can see it? No. Okay. And at any point if you can't hear me or want me to speak up, just feel free to let me know. First, just a brief agenda of what I'll cover tonight. I'll start with kind of defining what is asset management and why we need it. Then I'll take a look at the current assets we have in our water system as well as many of the asset management practices we're already doing. Then I'll highlight some of the progress we made in expanding our asset management program in 2025 as well as look ahead at next steps for growing our program further in 2026. And finally, I'll wrap up by sharing a few screenshots of the actual software that we've implemented over the course of the last year. So first, what is asset management? Basically, it's a methodology and a set of tools that we can use to decide how and where to allocate our resources to best maintain our assets and meet our operational goals, ideally for the lowest life cycle cost that we can. Why do we need it? It comes down to a few reasons. One of them is it helps us do more with the limited resources we have. That includes both time and money. It helps us be more effective in our operation, our maintenance, and our planning strategies. This will allow us to be a little more proactive and planned with our work that we do rather than reacting to whatever comes up. It also gives us a lot more data to help in our maintenance and project planning for the years ahead. It's also quickly becoming the industry standard really all across the world for utilities, mainly because it helps cost savings. It helps do more with limited resources. And it's also becoming more common for a lot of federal and state funding to have requirements that asset management plans be in place. And that brings me to that next bullet. The New Mexico Water Trust Board and SRF funding, they do have requirements in place to be eligible for some of their funding to have an implemented asset management plan. And that's ultimately what led us to adopt a resolution back in 2015 committing to implementing an asset management plan for the Water Division. This just gives you a high-level sense of the assets that we have in our water system. I won't necessarily step through every bullet, but I think the main takeaway from this slide is that we've got over a billion dollars in assets that we need to manage and maintain going forward. This is a highlight of many of the asset management practices we're doing today to help manage all those assets. First and foremost, we have our 2020 Asset Management Plan. And this is what really kicked off our asset management program. Essentially what this plan and report did was establish a lot of our asset management principles. It included things like a new asset inventory, levels of service, a risk evaluation of our assets, and then established maintenance schedules and replacement planning for a lot of our assets as well. In addition to that, we've also got our Priority Line Replacement Program. And this is a program that focuses on replacing old or undersized poor condition mains throughout our city to help keep our distribution system renewed. I think in the last year we replaced roughly a mile and a half of mains this program. And on a related note, we also have our PRB rehab and replacement that focuses on making sure all our PRBs in our system are functioning properly, are in good condition. And more and more that, you know, we're collecting data from those that's valuable to the operation of our system. In addition to that, we also have our five-year Capital Improvement Planning Program. And this looks more at like our larger capital projects. For example, our Nicholls Reservoir project or our Canyon Road Water Treatment Plant Blocked project. These are projects that are, you know, in the tens of millions of dollars. This program starts planning those out over the next five years or so. We also have our Source of Supply section that has historically been using a computerized maintenance management software to manage and handle the maintenance of a lot of their assets. So ultimately get replaced by this new system that we're currently in the process of implementing. And lastly, we do perform a lot of regular asset inventory updates as we get new water infrastructure installed or we're replacing or retiring old infrastructure. And now looking back at the progress we made in 2025, it was a pretty big year for the Water Division in terms of asset management progress. Back at the beginning of the year, we executed the contract to purchase new OpenGov asset management software for both Public Works and Public Utilities. Then in July, Public Utilities implementation process began and by November we had a test site in place that our staff is actually able to log in and start using the system in. So, we've now entered this testing and verification phase with this software where our staff is in using the software, learning the functionality of it, verifying that all our asset information looks correct. And ultimately getting used to working this into their daily practices. And to assist with that, we have purchased tablets for many of our field crews to help use this software in the field, kind of make that jump as simple as possible for them. In addition to the OpenGov asset management software, we also purchased and implemented a software called VODA AI. This software is a machine learning model that takes in a lot of our historic main break data, compares that with a lot of other data it has access to, and then projects out the risk on all the water mains in our system so that we can which mains are our highest risk mains in the system that have the potential to break cause problems in the future. And we've already started using this with our Priority Line Replacement Program as well. Now looking ahead to 2026, we anticipate going live with our asset management software in March. After this point, we'll continue to learn and expand our capabilities in the software. It's a pretty powerful tool. So, we're not able to just ingest everything right out of the gate, taking this crawl, walk, run approach to it. Kind of build out our capabilities over time. In addition to that, we're going to evaluate the potential for new integrations with other systems and softwares in the division. Examples could include our billing and customer service system, our planning and development process, things like that to help streamline workflows. And then lastly, we'll be performing another model update in our VODA AI software that reflects our current year-to-date break history and all our 2025 break. And then finally, I've got a few screenshots of the software that we've actually implemented just to give you kind of a feel for what the software looks like and what it first, this is our asset management software. This is kind of the main interface of the software. It's really GIS-based and mapping-based. So, you're able to see any assets you need to, all your outstanding work, any customer service requests that are assigned to you all in one place. You then have the ability to drill down to specific assets and see, you know, replacement cost, condition, work history on that asset, all sorts of historical information related to those assets. You can also drill into pretty detailed data on each individual task or work order where you can track, you know, here's the resources it took to do this work. Here's who was assigned to it, things like that. And then finally, it does also have a pretty solid dashboard tool set where you pretty much set up a metric or a dashboard to track any piece of data in the system. Help visualize that so you can monitor. Next, I've also added just a few screenshots of our VODA AI platform as well. This looks fairly similar. It's also sort of a GIS-based interface where we have the ability to go in and say, "Show me, you know, top x% of high-risk mains in our system and where they fall." We can also export this data into GIS and do some pretty cool mapping features with that. And that's how we produce this heat map that kind of ranks all our mains across the board based on their risk. And lastly, it also has some cool analytics for our water distribution system. And this graph here actually shows the projections of our remaining useful life for all the mains in our system. So, we kind of get a sense when we expect a lot of our mains to start aging out and need improvement or rehab. And with that, that's all I have for you all, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Are there any questions or comments? I would say that I'm glad that the Water Division is taking a lead on asset management. I feel like our city could use that within every part of our function and that is why we live in a state of emergency often is when we don't do the work around asset management. If we're not ahead on where things are and how they run and if they're running effectively then we wait for them to break and we have to spend more money, more effort and it's just a waste in resources. So I think this is really exciting. I know we have our Deputy City Manager here to see that we're going to have this looks like it's a successful way to do the job and could be something we look at as a model for other areas in the city. You know, we talk a lot about how we spend our money and this is a way to spend our money smart [laughter] is really being on top of asset management. So, thank you for that information. And I think this is going to just be exciting and be a great example for how we function or could potentially function citywide. Thank you. All right. Next is item E, which is what I pulled. And I just pulled this item because I do need to change the committee schedule. And E is consideration of Bill Number 2526, adoption of Ordinance Number 26 brought forward by previous Mayor Alan Weber, Councilor Carol Romero Wirth, Councilor Jamie Casset, a bill approving a community energy efficiency development, known as Seed Block Gra. from the New Mexico Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department Energy Conservation and Management Division, pursuant to the Seed Block Grant Act, to authorize a seed program project and approve the terms and conditions of the grant agreement. So I am motioning that we change the committee schedule to include Finance Committee on January 26, 2026. Second. I have a motion and I have a second. Could I get a roll call vote, please? Chair Chavez: Yes. Councilor Barrett: Yes. Councilor Faulkner: Yes. Councilor Fagali: And with the amended schedule, can I get a motion on the item itself? You just approved the agenda schedule. I think we should have gone a motion before. That's my fault. Could we get a motion on the item itself? Motion to approve. Actually, I'm going to retract my motion so that one of the two new councilors can have a go at it. Second. Okay, good. We have a motion. We have a second. Can we get a roll call vote, please? Chair Chavez: Yes. Councilor Barrett: Yes. Councilor Faulkner: Yes. Councilor Fagali: Yes. And if Alma, I mean, Councilor Castro is listening, she could tell us what we did wrong at a later time. We have no discussion agenda, no action items, matters from staff. I turn it over to our directors. I have a couple little items to make the committee aware of. First of all, welcome to the new councilors. We're happy to have you on the committee. And to new and existing councilors, I just wanted to re-extend the invite from Public Utilities to tour any of our facilities at any time. We'd love to have you. It's a good way to sort of get a sense of the magnitude of some of those operations. And then also, secondly, for a time, we were bringing regular informational items to this committee. But what I would like to try and do this year is at the request of any committee member who is interested in any topic, we would be happy to provide a five or ten minute overview or briefing on that for the benefit of the committee as a whole. So please feel free to reach out with anything you're interested in or curious about. One other piece of information that I just wanted to sort of provide a little update on is towards the end of last year, the governing body passed a utility operator position which combined several different positions within wastewater and water under a single job description that has what we call, it's a ladder with five tiers in it. And we created that, allowed for this, for entry-level operators to be paid the same across the water and wastewater and then have a 20% step up to really create incentive for a ladder where we could build our own operators. It's really hard for us to attract operators who already have their level three or level four, but we can build them. And I just wanted to report that our initial, our first time that we put that new utility operator out, we got 13 applicants. And at a rapid hire event last week with Public Works, we made 16 offers within the department and I think maybe 11 of those were to operators. So, it feels like we've got some, we're on the right track here and that we're really going to be able to start staffing up these facilities and building and growing our own operators. So, thank you. Dr. Burnett, do you have anything? Nothing to add. Thank you. Alright, I wanted to make sure you had a chance. Next is matters from the committee. Are there any matters from committee members? Oh, matters. Okay. Matters from Chair. I do have a meeting with our wonderful directors this Thursday. I hope I didn't mix it up with all the other meetings I have. I believe it's Thursday. Just to really have a discussion of how we want this committee to move forward. I would love to get feedback from you guys. If you can email me or call me before Thursday at some point. Of course, you could bring it at any time, but I think there's big things we can do in this committee. We're going to have, we have new leadership. We're going to continue to have new leadership, new teams, and I think we could really brainstorm on how to support them in an effective way. So, if you have ideas, knowledge you want to share with me, I would love to bring that to that discussion. And with that, I believe we, our only other thing is our next meeting is Monday, February 2nd, 2026. And with that, we are adjourned. Thank you.