It is kind of like buying your groceries on a credit card. The bill lasts a lot longer than the food does.

But that’s the strategy Lawrence has been using to maintain streets for years. Frequently, the city will issue bonds – the equivalent of taking out a loan – for more than 10 years to pay for a simple repaving of a street that likely will need to be repaved again before the 10-year period is up.

City Commissioner David Schauner said the scenario is one of the better examples of the problem that has plagued the city when it comes to planning for, maintaining and financing the city’s infrastructure.

“There has been too much short-term thinking,” Schauner said.

And that thinking, Schauner and other commissioners said, has left city leaders consumed with issues related to a deteriorating and aging infrastructure. Such as with downtown water lines, the city’s relying on infrastructure that is more than 100 years old to provide vital services. And in some cases it is showing its age. A nearly 70-year-old sewer line in downtown collapsed in February, causing portions of Eighth and Kentucky streets to be closed for more than a week.

The city has hired a financial consulting firm to report on ways the city can better fund street projects and other infrastructure issues, and the city’s Public Works Department recently completed a year-long project to examine every street in the city and score its condition so leaders can make more informed decisions about which streets to repair.

Infrastructure and planning issues were among the few reasons city commissioners publicly gave for forcing City Manager Mike Wildgen’s resignation in March. Commissioners have said finding a new city manager that is strong in infrastructure planning issues is a must.

City taxpayers, though, should watch closely to see if the changes result in higher taxes or fees. For example, City Commissioner Boog Highberger said he didn’t like the practice of bonding maintenance projects either. But he said there was a simple reason why it was done.

“It kept our mill levy low,” Highberger said. “We didn’t need as much cash to do those projects.”

But Highberger said he, too, wants the process to change. He just wants taxpayers to understand the potential cost.

“I don’t think we have been budgeting adequately for maintenance,” Highberger said. “Citizens expect a higher degree of street maintenance than they have been receiving. But I don’t think there’s a magic bullet. I think better maintenance is just going to cost more money. But hopefully that will be cheaper in the long run than letting it deteriorate and fixing it later.”

Figuring out how to pay for increased maintenance in the here and now, though, is expected to be one of the larger questions commissioners tackle during the 2007 budget process, which is going on now.

In the past, though, those budget sessions are often where planning and politics have collided. That’s because when it comes to maintaining infrastructure, the answer usually comes back with dollar signs. But city commissioners – who face re-election at least every four years – also have campaigned on reducing the city’s property tax rate and directed staff members to prepare a budget that does so.

That was the case last year. The current group of city commissioners added about $1 million to the city’s street maintenance budget, but they also cut the city’s property tax rate by about 1.5 mills. They were able to accomplish that by dipping into the city’s version of a savings account, but the city’s financial planners have said that strategy won’t be a viable option for much longer.

And the commission just previous to the current one – which included all the current commissioners except Mayor Mike Amyx – actually agreed during the 2004 budget process to reduce the street maintenance budget by about $200,000. That was largely in response to a decrease in state funding that put the city budget under strain, but it is an example of how infrastructure issues often get caught up in larger political debates.

“I think maintenance is traditionally underfunded,” Highberger said. “But then when the budget gets tight, it often is one of the first things to get cut. I think most people’s home budgets are the same way, but that doesn’t make it right.”

Interim City Manager David Corliss is preparing a report on alternative ways to increase revenue for maintenance other than raising property taxes or sales taxes. Those alternatives could include new impact fees and excise taxes. That report is expected in early July.

‘A menace’

The infrastructure issue has become hard to ignore. When city commissioners earlier this year received the long-awaited pavement management report from Public Works, it showed that 30 percent of the city’s streets had deteriorated to the point that simple maintenance would no longer be enough to keep them in satisfactory condition. And it reported that many more city streets were at the “tipping point” of falling into that category.

Also, city commissioners, beginning late last year, became consumed with a sewer crisis that led to some private development projects in the northwest area of the city being delayed because city engineers weren’t sure whether the sewer system could accommodate growth.

And downtown motorists will be reminded of the city’s aging infrastructure nearly every day this summer. Construction crews are in the second year of a three-year project to replace waterlines up and down Massachusetts Street that are approximately 100 years old. That project will have parts of Massachusetts Street torn up until mid-September.

“This whole infrastructure issue has been kind of a menace that has been facing us for years now,” City Commissioner Mike Rundle said.

Thus, it was not coincidence that one of the first projects Corliss undertook when he was appointed interim city manager in March was an internal review of every piece of infrastructure – items such as streets, sidewalks, water lines, sewer lines, storm sewers, traffic signals and public buildings. Corliss, previously an assistant city manager and director of legal services, did not directly oversee many of the city departments responsible for maintaining infrastructure.

Corliss calls the project, which is expected to be completed this summer, an “infrastructure audit.” When it is complete, Corliss said it would be a document that spells out the condition of infrastructure systems and also explains how often each piece of infrastructure is inspected and what criteria are used to determine whether it needs to be repaired or replaced. The project also will include an analysis of how Lawrence’s practices stack up against other communities.

“I want the commission and the community to have the comfort level that our infrastructure is being properly attended to,” Corliss said. “We’re trying to do this is in a systematic way and look at the entire infrastructure. We don’t want any surprises in the future.”

More scientific

For Rundle, the changes are a long time in the making. Rundle has been critical of city management for years that it did not take enough of a scientific or process-oriented approach in determining how to care for and replace its infrastructure.

“I think a lot of times over the years, some projects have been inserted over some other more deserving projects based on some real arbitrary standards,” Rundle said. “But I think we have made some changes now. I think we’re starting to become more analytical instead of arbitrary.”

Schauner agreed. For example, he said his impression of how the city management made decisions about where to direct street maintenance dollars was by driving around and monitoring complaints.

“If you do it that way, you are going to miss a lot,” Schauner said.

A more analytical approach would put the city on par with how major utility companies in the private sector evaluate their infrastructure.

Aquila, the city’s natural gas provider, uses computer modeling to determine the operational requirements of its pipeline system and uses that data, along with regular inspections, to create replacement schedules.

The system is similar at Westar, the city’s electricity provider. Steve Owens, the company’s director of asset utilization, said the company looks at an array of statistics such as load patterns, reliability ratings, number of customers served and the number of outages that have occurred on a system when determining where maintenance or capital improvement dollars should be spent. The company also does regular time-related inspections of equipment. For example, every pole that supports a major transmission line is inspected at least once every 10 years, and must either be replaced or certified that it can last another 10 years.

City leaders say that is now what they’re trying to do. For example, with the downtown waterline project, members of the city’s utility staff used statistics related to the quality of water from the line, number of times crews had to respond to breaks in the line and the age of the line, among other factors, in determining the need for replacement.

Corliss said the infrastructure audit that he is working on will determine whether crews were using the right methodology in evaluating the line or whether it had been allowed to serve for too long.

City staff members were reluctant to give a firm life expectancy for city water and sewer lines, but several industry-related Web sites rated cast iron water pipes for 75 to 100 years, while clay pipes used for sewers were rated upwards of 100 years. The oldest waterlines being replaced in the downtown were installed 120 years ago in 1886. The newest waterlines being replaced in the downtown are 90 years old.

Westar’s Owens said any organization is well-served by having a series of performance-based factors to examine rather than just relying on a single factor, like age, in determining when a piece of infrastructure must be replaced.

“Age is a factor for us, but we try not to make it the only factor,” Owens said. “We have some equipment that is quite old that works pretty well. The saying that they don’t make it like they used to is definitely a good one.”

But in addition to adding more specifics to the city’s infrastructure evaluation process, Mayor Amyx said he wants the city to focus on an overall philosophy that highlights the importance of taking care of what you have.

“We have a lot of new improvements or projects that we could do,” Amyx said. “But every time I consider one, I have to wonder how many of the existing things we have are being properly maintained. That’s the question we always have to ask.”