Do you know how many culverts, guardrails, and regulatory road signs are located along Kenton County’s 130+ maintained roadways? Kenton County Fiscal Court knows the answer, as well as the exact longitude and latitude for each now that NKAPC’s engineering staff has completed a county-wide inventory of these assets.
“This inventory was something the county had in its work program to accomplish,” said Scott Hiles, NKAPC’s deputy director for infrastructure engineering. “When the public works department’s workload necessitated pushing this project to the back burner, they asked if we would be willing to partner with them to get the work done.”
Initially, the project started off in NKAPC’s GIS department with Trisha Brush, GISP, Deputy Director for GIS Administration.
“On the front end, we developed the mobile applications for the county to use,” said Brush. “We started with a GPS product and handed it off to the county for implementation in the field.”
When other priorities intruded on the work, Kenton County Fiscal Court came to NKAPC and asked if Hiles’ department would be able to help them in the field. Because subdivision activity was rather slow at the time, Hiles’ team was able to do the entire project.
“My team walked 100 miles of roadway over the two months it took to complete the work,” said Hiles. “We located bridges that were less than 20 feet in length (those maintained by the county). We accounted for 25 of those. We located every culvert within the side ditches and found over 1,000 of these. We GPS’d every guardrail (154 total), did every road sign, regulatory and warning, and found over 2,000 of those.”
The resulting digital data has been completed and provided to the county.
“The county will be using GBA, George Butler and Associates, software to pursue the asset management and work orders,” said Brush. “That would include such things as sign replacements, guardrail replacements, bridge work, and so on. Right now they are doing quality assurance and quality control on the work. If there is anything they think is missing, we will pick it up in the field and resubmit it. But, for now, our portion of the job is completed.”
Hiles and Brush both said they are pleased with the outcome of the project and look forward to working with other jurisdictions to complete similar work.
“This is something they will be able to use for some time to come,” said Hiles. “They now have for the first time, very accurate, cataloged GPS data identifying their assets. We realize the importance of this work and it’s something we envision doing for other communities in the future. We are talking to some of those jurisdictions now to see how we might be able to help them.”