It is not clear whether County Council President Tom Perez was thinking about Potomac when he established a 12-member Infrastructure Maintenance Task Force in December. But Potomac showcases the problems Perez said he was trying to address.
As plans for a $7 million school on Kendale Road move ahead, parents at Potomac Elementary say their school is falling apart. And while the $100 million Music Center at Strathmore near Potomac is a new community resource, an existing resource — the Potomac Community Center — is barely cleaned, much less maintained, officials at the center say.
Perez called for the task force in his speech accepting the council presidency last December, citing the concern that the county has spent billions on new capital projects and not enough on maintaining the existing infrastructure. The 12-member group met four times in January, February, and early March.
Last week, the task force released a 32-page report detailing the annual needs for replacing and maintaining facilities under the jurisdiction of four county agencies: Montgomery County Public Schools, Montgomery College, the Parks and Planning Commission, and the County Government, meaning chiefly the Department of Public Works and Transportation. Line items included road sealing; roofs; carpeting; heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems; plumbing; bridges; and fields. For each item the report listed the “Acceptable Annual Replacement Cost,” the approved funding for fiscal year 2005 in the FY05-10 Capital Improvements Plan, the County Executive’s FY06 budget request, and a criticality rating of 1-5.
The biggest finding of the task force, members said, is that the agencies need to keep better, clearer data on the condition of their own facilities.
“The first thing that jumped out is that it’s a mixed bag across agencies as to how good the info is on the conditions of our infrastructure,” said Councilmember Marilyn Praisner (D-4), who chaired the task force. “The school system has a good handle; the college has a very good handle. The information in county government is very much a mixed bag. We could benefit from some funds spent on developing the kind of assessments that the other agencies have done already.”
The Parks and Planning Commission has good information about the condition of its parks and fields, but little about buildings, the report said.
“It’s clear that from some of our items that we’re not holding our own … but it’s hard to say how much without that database of info that would help us,” Praisner said.
Among the most alarming findings in the report were a $3.25 million FY06 shortfall in the replacement of HVAC systems (a criticality rating of 5) and a $8.44 million FY06 shortfall in maintaining emergency light and power systems at Montgomery County schools. The county also estimates it needs to replace 13 traffic signals every year at an annual cost of $1.56 million. No money was budgeted for the signals in FY05 and none has been requested for FY06.
“I’m a little concerned about that one — traffic signals. We should be spending some money in this area,” said County Council Staff Director Glenn Orlin, who sat on the task force.
But “You never have as much money as you necessarily want to have,” said Department of Public Works and Transportation Director Art Holmes, another task force member, who noted that the county executive has placed an emphasis in his agenda on transportation, human services. “You can always do more if you have more dollars,” Holmes said, but “you have to apportion shortages out among your priorities.”
Asked if he saw the shortfalls as an emergency situation, Holmes said, “Emergency, no; something that we have to make sure that we continue to address, yes.”
THE 25 PAGES of financial data are incomplete in some places and uncertain in many. Orlin called the inventories of things like miles of guardrail in the county “educated guesses” and the annual replacement needs are mostly extrapolated from external audits that closely examined a small portion of the facilities — 10 percent of county buildings for example.
The survey left out technology issues, which have been examined separately and do little to account for intricacies in lifespan estimates — the fact that carpets in schools are likely to wear out much more quickly that carpets in office buildings, for example.
But the problems aren’t to be taken lightly, especially since the shortfalls are based on estimates that “Don’t give us what the optimal cycle is but what’s acceptable, what’s tolerable,” Orlin said. “We could never afford to do what’s optimal for everything.”
Still, the task force believes it has completed its main task of putting a tool in the hands of the County Council committees that will hammer out the coming year’s budget from the county executive’s recommendations.
Current plans call for the group to meet again in the winters of 2006 and 2007 and every other year thereafter.
With a spree of capital projects like Strathmore drawing to a close, the task force may signal a move toward the more bread-and-butter expenditures that Potomac Elementary and Community Center officials have asked for.
“These are not the sexy kinds of projects that we get a lot of advocacy for,” Praisner said, “But in the long run they do have as much of an impact and maybe even more so.”