The City owns and manages a variety of different assets. It is important to know what a municipality owns.
Find out how strategy is used to inform decision-making and efficiently manage and maintain infrastructure.
Asset Management
Municipal infrastructure is the backbone of everyday life in a city. It’s the road we use to get from home to work. It’s the buildings where we go for recreation. It’s the systems used to dispose of waste. It’s how we care for our heritage treasures and position emergency services to protect life, property and the environment.
Strategic Infrastructure Asset Management Plan: 2024-2028
Infrastructure is essential to Edmonton residents and businesses. It is critical to the competitiveness of our economy, vital to our quality of life, and crucial to delivering public services. The ability to build and maintain infrastructure ensures Edmonton can provide services while remaining an attractive and cost-effective place to live and do business.
The Strategic Infrastructure Asset Management Plan: 2024-2028 helps to guide the City in managing its assets. This plan relies on innovative tools for infrastructure asset management. The goal is to maintain infrastructure to meet the needs of a growing population. This is achieved through informed decision-making and efficient resource use.
The City’s infrastructure is aging. It needs more maintenance and renewal to maintain and meet residents’ needs. Edmonton is also a growing city and needs new infrastructure to support its growth.
The City uses asset management best practices to help manage its infrastructure. The goal is to achieve the best possible balance between infrastructure renewal and growth.
Strategic Asset Management Plan
Edmonton was one of the first cities in Canada to recognize the importance of a plan to manage its infrastructure. The City’s Strategic Infrastructure Asset Management Plan helps Council and City administration make sound asset management decisions. The goal is to ensure that Edmonton's infrastructure is in good condition and can support the needs of a growing population, now and in the future.
History of the Strategy
The City is on its fourth iteration of a strategic plan for asset management. In 1998, the City’s first infrastructure strategy had 15 guiding principles and supportive strategies. In 2006, the City of Edmonton Office of Infrastructure updated the original infrastructure strategy by creating the Edmonton City Council’s Infrastructure Strategy. It sought to balance the renewal needs of existing infrastructure with the City's growth and expansion pressures. This strategy supported the development of effective infrastructure management tools. It recognized the need for collaboration among engineers, academia, financial services, industry, residents, other orders of government and other stakeholders.
In 2018, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Leadership in Asset Management Program assisted the City in updating its Infrastructure Strategy. The updated strategy aligned with Council’s vision for both the City Plan and supporting corporate strategic plans. The strategy also created standards for the City and set out the mandate for asset management processes.
The latest iteration incorporates learnings from the previous strategies and recommendations from a recent audit connecting asset management principles and enablers with the City Plan.
Edmonton has consistently aimed to create a robust asset management system across all versions of its asset management strategies. An asset management system should be effective, data-based and transparent. It should connect asset investment with progress toward strategic goals and service-level outcomes.
How are Municipal Assets Managed?
Infrastructure assets are the physical assets developed and used by a municipality to provide services and economic activities. Without the services, there is no need for infrastructure. This infrastructure hierarchy table lists and describes the types of assets owned and managed by the City. The City’s asset inventory is diverse. It includes roads, parks, buildings, fleet vehicles, traffic control, recreation facilities, computer networks, affordable housing, libraries and more.
There are fundamental questions in asset management; while the data needed to answer these questions is extensive, the concept of what we need to know is not.
Fundamental Questions
What Do We Own?
What is it Worth?
If an asset failed today, what would it cost to replace it? This value is key as it provides an order of magnitude to help understand the value of the City’s assets.
What is the State and Condition?
The City uses a standardized 5-point rating system on a scale of A to F (Very Good to Very Poor) to grade asset state and condition.
What is the Average Age of our Infrastructure?
In managing assets, we need to know how many more years we can expect the asset to last. Generally speaking, the older the asset, the more reinvestment is required to keep the asset functioning safely.
What Will it Cost to Bring the Asset Back to an Acceptable Condition?
Many tools are used to identify assets that need reinvestment and possibly funding strategies. An acceptable condition does not necessarily mean returning the asset to a new condition; it means a condition that allows the asset to do what it needs to operate safely.
We can judge how effective capital investment decisions have been by assessing and analyzing the City's infrastructure inventory. This analysis then gives reasoning for key budget decisions.
Determining Investment Need
The City's 10-year Capital Investment Outlook (2027-2036) was developed in collaboration with all City departments; it identified capital needs and growth project priorities and determined investment targets for renewal.
The Capital Investment Outlook provides a long-term view of Edmonton’s infrastructure needs, which helps City Council understand the impacts of their decisions. It helps to see how these choices affect the City’s future capital investment needs. The Capital Investment Outlook assists Council in making strategic decisions about how best to allocate limited City resources between renewing existing assets (i.e., replacing and rehabilitating) and building new infrastructure.
The City Plan outlines how we will get to a future city that builds on the benefits we enjoy today and creates new opportunities. The City Plan is about our spaces and places and how we move around the city. It is about our community and what we must do together to grow, adapt and succeed.
The City’s 10-year Capital Investment Outlook and the City’s 4 year Capital Budget guide City Council in allocating municipal resources to build and maintain the infrastructure Edmontonians will rely upon in the future.
Funding Programs
Grant programs help the City provide the infrastructure needed to support its services. The federal and provincial governments provide grant funding to municipalities for infrastructure projects. This funding helps Edmonton move forward on projects that would have otherwise been delayed due to a lack of funds.
Grant management helps align the priorities in the City's 10-year Capital Outlook to ensure that the selected projects meet the grant funding program’s criteria. The criteria for eligibility may impact project priority, and some grant programs have restrictions, such as spending limits or matching criteria. This means that some projects may receive funding which would not have been available otherwise. However, not all expenses are eligible under a grant program, and a municipality may need additional funding to move forward with the project.
Grant funding availability doesn’t directly decide what the City renews or builds, but these decisions can be influenced by available grant funding.
Growth Needs
Developers pay the construction costs for the infrastructure needed to support new neighbourhoods, such as stormwater ponds or sewer trunk lines. They recover these costs by selling housing lots. After 1 to 2 years of infrastructure maintenance, the City is responsible for this infrastructure’s maintenance.
The City provides services such as transit, police, fire rescue, roads, waste collection, parks, libraries, and recreation services. This requires investment in operations and maintenance, service delivery, and asset renewal and replacement. When existing infrastructure can no longer accommodate new homes, commercial buildings, or people, reinvestment is required to upgrade existing infrastructure or add new assets.
Changing land use impacts an asset's functionality and demand/capacity. The City reinvests in infrastructure to add functionality that may not have been needed when the asset was originally built.
Contact Us
Lifecycle Management
12th Floor, Edmonton Tower
10111 104 Ave NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 0J4
| infrastructure@edmonton.ca |