A Tracker Software Corporation Product

Asset Inventory – A T-Square Approach
By Gary Gleason

Gas and oil exploration has been a boom business in recent years, with hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands being opened to exploration, and fuel costs reaching record highs. While this development has brought jobs to beleaguered western states, it has also brought headaches for public works managers trying to maintain roads not designed for current traffic loads. In Wyoming, and elsewhere across the west, initiatives are now underway to help inventory, rate, and track the deterioration of county road and bridge assets. PubWorks has been an integral link
in the effort.

“A couple years ago we were approached by several counties being impacted by coal bed methane gas exploration. These were low volume rural roads that pretty much served ranching grazing operations, and were getting impacted by increased truck traffic for exploration and oil/gas development,” explained Rich Douglass, local government coordinator with the Wyoming Department of Transportation (WYDOT). “Rather than just go out and start some road construction projects, we worked with the counties to come up with methodology to address problem.”

Now in its second year, that methodology involves use of the Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) out of the University of Wyoming to create a complete inventory and condition rating for all county road and bridge assets, and to track those assets over time. Under the T-Square program, as LTAP is also known, college students are being used to capture and track data so the counties involved can quantify the extent of the problem.

“We are locating and taking digital photos of each feature - gravel roads, asphalt roads, state roads, culverts, cattle guards, signs, approaches and bridges - and visually rating all roads by 1-mile segments in terms of surface condition, rutting, washboards, dust, etc. In some cases we are also condition-rating cattle guards culverts, signs, approaches and bridges,” explained George Huntington who is heading the initiative for the Wyoming LTAP. “The goal is to be able to make cost projections for current improvement needs, and costs for maintaining assets to a certain level.”

As PubWorks users, Johnson and Sheridan Counties – two of the three Wyoming counties participating in the study – are also able to connect maintenance costs with the asset inventory and condition ratings being provided by the state LTAP.

“Here in Johnson County we have roads that saw maybe 10 vehicles per day, and now they see 600,” said Cheryl Benner, Resource Utilization Specialist with the Johnson County Road and Bridge Department. “We can now tell people what we are spending on what have become industrial roads, compared to roads that are serving their traditional purpose of ranching traffic and county collector routes.”

Johnson County, which used to track costs in Excel spreadsheets, says that converting to PubWorks has also enabled them to quantify capital improvements by road and road segment. This is something the county needed to fulfill reporting requirements of GASB34, the Government Accounting Standards Board ruling requiring cities and counties to project useful life and report depreciation for their transportation infrastructure.

“It is helpful for the commissioners to have this kind of nice, concise specific information, and it's easy to come up with details if that is important for them,” Benner said. It's good for our crew, too, because they have better idea of the value of what we are putting in.”

At Tracker Software, we believe that counties should consider looking to their state LTAP for assistance in establishing GIS-based asset inventory and condition ratings. In addition to GASB compliance, this data, when paired with PubWorks Software, provides the baseline necessary for smart managers to make smart decisions.

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