It’s a go: City to switch to automated water metering

Published 5:00 pm Thursday, August 6, 2015

No more hashing out the pros or cons of a proposed city-wide changeover to an automated meter reading and billing system.

Only cheers erupting from City Council members happy to have finally taken the thing from “proposed” to “gonna happen.”

Such was the reaction Monday night to the council’s unanimous decision to enter into a $5.4 million contract with system vendor Ferguson Water Works.

By year’s end the City of Auburn expects to launch the process of switching its 14,000 water utility customers to the automated system. It should take about 2 to 2½ years for the vendor to install the hardware and software and replace the meters.

Citing the need for additional information about the changeover, the City Council had delayed for at least two weeks entering into the contract with Ferguson Water Works of Kirkland.

City officials say it will be a much more efficient way of collecting real-time, water-usage data that will help the City better manage its water resources and its customers better manage their own water use, so they can conserve, save money, identify new problems that they have and be better stewards of the environment.

The upshot is that, excepting rare occasions, when its all done, the City will no longer dispatch personnel to physically read meters. Instead, in a box next to the customer’s water meter, the vendor will install a small radio and its transmitter to send real-time water-use data to several antennae. These broadcast the information to a centralized server. From there, the data makes its way to the City’s customer service department for water-use analysis and billing.

Ironically, the changeover does not call for any shiny-new, 21st century technology, but a practical, tried-and-tested approach to asset management that provides qualitative and quantitative benefits. On the qualitative side, the new system promises to be much more efficient, provide better customer service and offer more real-time data.

The initial outlay won’t be cheap. And it will take 20 years to pay for itself.

On the other hand, City officials say there’s a lot of bang for the buck to go around:

• The City gets a more consistent revenue flow;

• When the changeover is complete customers may monitor their own water use on a City webpage; they will no longer have to wait for a meter reader to reveal a costly leak they didn’t know about.

• A cut in costs for the City, which will no longer have to send meter readers out;

• More efficient billing for the City, and real time, unauthorized-water-use detection capabilities;

• And the City gets help in its efforts to conserve water.

“But we expect a return on the investment within 20 years,” Utilities Manager Lisa Tobin said recently. “And those are just the things that are hard numbers that we can quantify. There are intangibles that are priceless: in the level of customer service; in the amount of information we’ll be collecting; and in our being able to better manage our resources so we can plan future capital improvement projects based on our actual customers’ data. That’s information that we don’t currently have, and it will help us do our jobs much more efficiently.”

The City sold bonds in 2013 to pay for the initial implementation segment of this project, so there will be no rate increases.

The changeover will be accomplished in stages. In 2016 the vendor will do the first half of the customer meters and in 2017 the other half.

Puget Sound Energy has used the same system for 15 years. The City of Renton is a more recent customer.