Kenton County Fiscal Court and NKAPC’s GIS staff are pursuing an assets management effort. The result of the collaboration will be a database that public works’ personnel can use to track maintenance activities and costs for each of the county’s assets as well as a highly accurate digital map that identifies the location of each.
Federal accounting regulations require governments to track assets for inclusion in their annual financial audits. Using GIS technology to meet this regulation puts Kenton County ahead of a lot of other units of government that track their assets on paper.
“Fiscal Court expressed an interest in using LINK-GIS as the foundation for an inventory of the county’s assets,” said Trisha Brush, GISP, deputy director for GIS administration. “We were able to commit the time and funding in this year’s annual work program to assist with the effort.”
NKAPC will help get the project started, contract with a vendor to develop a mobile application for cataloging information on each asset, provide a GPS (global positioning system) unit for the field surveys, and provide technical assistance to county employees.
“Kenton County public works personnel will travel to each of the county’s traffic and road signs, culverts, bridges, and guardrails to record the longitude and latitude of the asset using GPS technology,” said Brush.
Once the geographic location of each of the assets has been determined, workers will enter other data important for inventory and analysis purposes. The resulting database will help county officials keep track of when an asset was installed, when it received maintenance last, when replacement might have been pursued and for what reason, as well as any other information they may wish to maintain on it.
The locational information will also be loaded into LINK-GIS for mapping purposes.
Detailed information on each asset will prove the assets’ existence in accident cases for example because the county can prove that a traffic sign was posted in the area and that its condition had been inventoried recently. More importantly, Brush says, this new system will help to spot danger zones and possibly prevent accidents in the future.
“When the assets management system points out that the county has had to replace the same guardrail three times in the past year, that will raise a red flag that changes may need to be studied or made,” said Brush. “Without this database, it’s possible that county personnel might replace guardrails or signs without recalling specifically whether there’s a pattern or a trend.”
“By doing this project, the county is building better knowledge and resources in order to save time and money,” said Joe Murphy, director of Kenton County’s public works department.
Brush says the collaborative effort will be under way soon. No completion date has been projected yet.