MML Review Magazine May/June 2024

“ Dig Once ”

A New Approach to Municipal Infrastructure Planning By Eric Paul Dennis, PE and visit, you need public infrastructure that facilitates those activities. It is difficult for municipal planners to influence infrastructure design. Planning commissions may adopt master plans and zoning codes, but the infrastructure that runs through a city or village is typically outside of the scope of planners. Work done by your road agency or public service department may not consider the goals of the planning department in design decisions. Further limiting the ability of the municipality to influence design decisions, county and state roads that intersect your community are often designed and managed with limited coordination with the municipality. Complicating the issue, roads run within public rights-of-way (ROWs) that host a variety of both public and private infrastructure systems. Within the ROW there may be water lines, storm sewers, sanitary sewers, natural gas lines, electric power lines, telecommunication lines, streetlights, even steam lines. These are managed by multiple public and private agencies, each with their own plans and goals. The economic and social wellbeing of a municipality is shaped by its physical infrastructure. If you want your city or village to be inviting for people to live, work,

Inefficiency of the Current System When one agency does work to maintain or improve their infrastructure, this is usually done without consideration of other infrastructure systems or the intent of local planners. Each agency performs each individual project to be cost-efficient for that agency, but the lack of coordination creates inefficiencies and long-term costs for all agencies as well as residents. A typical example is when a utility owner replaces subsurface utilities such as water mains, requiring the construction crew to remove pavement and excavate underneath. Because road agencies and water departments often do not coordinate planning, the subsurface construction may occur after

a road was recently repaved. Not only does this mean that sections of the road will be repaved twice in quick succession, but the replacement patches are of lower quality and invite the formation of cracked pavement and potholes. Furthermore, excavation is often performed with limited knowledge of the location of underground utilities. Michigan’s 811 system (Miss Dig) helps with this but provides only rough estimates of where utilities lie beneath ground. Utility damage is common during construction, leading to increased construction costs and service disruptions. There were nearly 5,000 utility “hits” reported in Michigan in 2022 alone. In the case of gas lines, this also imposes a safety hazard.

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| May/June 2024