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Throughout the last two years, many of us have faced new experiences shaping how we view our future work lives. We’re contemplating career paths, reflecting on what motivates us, experiencing epiphanies, and making changes as a result. We’ve faced a new set of obstacles that’s created an opportunity to reexamine our lives. This panel of APWA leaders will provide an engaging open discussion about their careers—how they overcame barriers, faced adaption and personal resiliency, and pivoted during uncontrollable circumstances, similar to what some of us may be experiencing today. They’ll also focus on opportunities they never thought possible through public works and how their career paths shifted and changed throughout the years, offering a fresh, broad perspective of optimism and new ideas.
Read MoreFor the City of Houston, maintaining and updating school times for over 1,400 individual flashing school zone beacons is a major task. The City must physically touch each beacon at least twice a year to do preventative maintenance, and the process can take weeks. Installing new technology allows changing beacon times during the school year to become a remote process using cellular communications. This Texas-size flasher project with built-in artificial intelligence will be the largest installation that provides connectivity between the smart device and the traveling public via a smartphone app. With no downtime or negative impact to any school zone flasher schedule during the project, the City will become more efficient and proactive in maintaining the beacons. For additional information, please go to: http://houstontx.gov/visionzero/
Read MoreIn 2019, the Austin Public Works Department launched PWstat, a monthly executive reporting meeting that provides an overview of organizational health and an opportunity for the executive team to provide organizational clarity to participants. PWstat combines dashboards, presentations, and storytelling to help leaders and staff make more informed decisions about resources, operations, and more. By infusing data into all levels of the organization, PWstat has sparked a cultural shift and helped improve performance in Austin Public Works, introducing a new level of accountability in meeting annual commitments and expected service delivery to the community. Staff at all levels, from field crews to executives, are now more enthusiastic about performance measurement and better informed. This session will provide information about how Austin implemented PWstat and how to develop a similar program in your organization.
Read MoreThe Town Creek Culvert Project addresses a variety of water quantity and quality issues associated with a failing stormwater conveyance system draining 308.6 acres. This conveyance system, composed of brick and concrete installed before the 1930s, only passed the two-year storm event without flooding significant businesses within Uptown Greenville, N.C. To bring this system up to a 25-year level of service (LOS), the City of Greenville invested over $32 million to construct approximately 306 linear feet (LF) of 84-inch reinforced concrete pipe (RCP) and 1,943 LF of 10’X8’ reinforced concrete box culvert (RCBC) in a highly urbanized core. In addition to upsizing the existing storm drainage system, this project also offers significant water quality benefits by installing several stormwater control measures (SCMs), including a wetland, the largest regenerative stormwater conveyance system in the state, permeable pavement, and a bioretention area. Cumulatively, these SCMs are expected to remove up to 250 pounds Nitrogen /year in a highly impervious watershed.
Read MoreTraffic incidents caused by wrecks, breakdowns, hazards in the road and weather events happen every day. These incidents result in injuries, fatalities, billions of dollars of damages, and delays in travel. They also create great risk to responders from all disciplines. The lack of standard protocols, coordination, and communication among responders from police, fire, EMS, towing and public transportation agencies has caused major hindrances to safe, quick clearance. FHWA created this multi-disciplinary TIM Responder course to address these problems. If your agency deals with traffic incidents, this workshop is for you.
Read MoreAsset management has never been more important for public works departments. Available tools to assist an asset management plan are numerous, but not equal.  This panel discusses must haves when beginning asset…
Read MoreA brief overview of modern management styles vs. the former command and control structure. How a proper plan, training and implementation can bring the change that a snow and ice control manager desires. Shared experiences good and bad of the change process and its effect on the working and supervisory group.
Read MorePlain salt brine is the most commonly used liquid deicer, but agencies often use a variety of more complex brine blends to seek enhanced performance. Field experience is always the ultimate arbiter of effectiveness of any deicer, but it can usually only judge on a coarse, qualitative basis. Laboratory studies permit a more precise understanding of deicer performance properties and can provide valuable supporting information about the effectiveness expected from deicing chemicals. Thus, this presentation will focus on what we are learning about the fundamental performance properties of enhanced brine blends under controlled conditions in the laboratory. Topics will include: how do common brine enhancers affect ice melting capacity and rate? Low temperature performance? Pre-wet performance? What is the optimum brine concentration? What causes some brine blends to turn into “mayonnaise” and how do we avoid it? Under what circumstances are enhanced brine blends likely to be most useful?
Read MoreFrost Control Systems has grown tremendously with 5x growth Year over year for 3 years. We now own and maintain close to 20% of the US RWIS network and the majority of city RWIS. One thing we’ve discovered is that cities use RWIS units very differently than counties and State DOTs. We would like to propose a round table discussion involving 2 cities, 1 county, 1 State DOT, and Frost Control Systems as a moderator. Specifically, we’d like a city with a dense deployment(15-30 RWIS), a city with initial deployment(3-6), a county with a fully developed network(10-30), and a State DOT(70-150). As of now, we can provide a list of 5-7 cities for a dense deployment, 30ish at the initial deployment stage. For counties, we have a dozen or so that have offered to be speakers. We do not have a State DOT, but I’m sure APWA would know a good speaker choice. We’d like the topics to primarily be focused around how RWIS were used before, during, and after the storm. For example, the City of Fort Wayne had a freezing rain event last year that saw temperatures plummet 40 degrees in a 12 hour period immediately before a rainstorm. It left about 25% of the city at unexpected at risk of freezing rain, but they used their network of RWIS to pretreat the coldest areas first and escape unscathed. We’d also like them to talk about some of the factors that mattered in the design. I.E. What they considered before and what they know now. Urban design is much more complicated as different traffic levels, road compositions, building/heat island effects, and micro-climates all contribute. We expect the counties to have dramatically different answers than the city maintenance directors and think it would be valuable for APWA members to hear from them. There’s much more that can be added if need be, but we feel that this focusses on the growing trend of RWIS used in cities and provides an opportunity for a lot of new experience to be presented in a non-salesy manner.
Read MoreThe Maximo Leadership Initiative (MLI) is one of Orange County Utilities’ (OCU’s) initiatives to address technical needs that impact activities across the department. The goal is to use its computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) effectively and consistently as an enterprise business tool. The MLI effort also includes establishing a consistent framework so that all who are using the system have a common understanding and language; defining the elements of key Maximo standards, protocols and procedures; and creating a platform to track and visualize performance of the initiative through a dashboard. OCU comprises 7 divisions, employing more than 900 staff, and all divisions use Maximo in some capacity. Maximo is the mechanism to track and capture maintenance activities. Other uses include getting asset information out of, or into the system. As such, each division has a part in getting the most effective data into Maximo, and extracting key information out to help make sound business decisions. The approach used by Brown and Caldwell (BC) and OCU to perform MLI work followed best practices for conducting an assessment and was well documented so that OCU can revisit the process periodically and adjust activities as needed to meet changing goals or drivers. Following a practical approach meant that the recommendations from the findings were made incremental, achievable and measurable with OCU’s available resources. BC worked with OCU senior management to establish goals and objectives for using Maximo; assess the current state of OCU’s Maximo use and its desired state and priorities through facilitated workshops with Maximo subject matter experts; develop the actions needed to address the gaps in practices; establish policies and measures to guide and track performance; and set up a continuous improvement cycle using a Microsoft Power BI performance measures and KPIs dashboard to address changing needs of the program.
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