MOUNT VERNON – Mathias Orndorf, city director of public utilities, and Mayor Richard Mavis used a series of calculations and phone calls to reach a conclusion they presented at Monday night’s city council meeting.
The duo calculated the cost of hiring an outside agency to upgrade the city’s water meter reading systems (known as ‘MXUs,’ or meter transceiver units) could be higher than if the city continued to use summer workers to perform the same task.
They also discovered the timeline of in-house replacement would be much shorter than previously estimated.
Previously, Orndorf thought that his ‘summer help’ crew, which consists of four members, had only replaced around 25 percent of the reading systems over its last three years of work. Instead, after placing phone calls to find out when the MXUs were most recently installed and then calculating how many they had upgraded over the past three years, he found they had actually already upgraded 44 percent.
Orndorf noted his summer work groups have grown over the past three years – he started with just two workers – and as they have become more experienced, they have been able to replace the systems quicker.
At this rate, Orndorf believes more than 50 percent of MXUs will be upgraded by the end of the summer. He also proposed the idea that if he hired two more workers next year (his four workers this year work in teams of two), then the project would likely be finished in three years.
This is a vast improvement from his previous estimate, which predicted summer workers wouldn’t be able to finish the upgrades for another eight to 10 years.
Council Member Sam Barone added that hiring additional workers in the fall and spring could help speed up the process even more.
“We had those new numbers this afternoon, and it’s a game-changer,” Mavis told the council on Monday.
The benefit of hiring a contractor would be to speed up the process of MXU replacement. Hiring an agency to do so would take far less time than even the three-year window that Orndorf proposed, let alone the eight- to 10-year window.
But Orndorf also recently reached out to a contractor to receive an estimate for how much it would cost to go the external route.
The contractor said that it would cost $47 to replace each MXU; that price would rise to $109 if they were to replace an indoor unit (the city currently still has to replace over 4,000 old MXUs). Meanwhile, it costs $11 for the city to replace each system itself; that cost does not rise for indoor units, the process just takes longer.
Between the two factors discussed on Monday – the timeline change due to the unexpectedly high progress rate and the pricing differences between the two methods – it seemed as if Orndorf and Mavis advocated for the council to strongly consider the possibility of simply performing the task in-house.
The council requested that Orndorf come back to next month’s council meeting with figures that would show exactly how much the city would spend hiring a contractor to install the new MXUs at once versus continuing to install them in-house over the next three years.
Then, the council will make its decision.
Installing upgraded MXUs quickly and affordably is a key concern for Orndorf and the city, as he discovered last weekend that the city’s most recent MXU installation was in 2003.
The typical lifespan of an MXU is 15 to 20 years, Orndorf said, and the accuracy of an MXU decreases every day.
The city has also been tasked with replacing outdated water meters, some of which have dropped to 50 percent efficiency due to their age, according to Orndorf.
Extra costs and FlexNet
Orndorf noted during Monday’s meeting that as a part of the city’s water meter and MXU replacement efforts, the city will have to purchase both items regardless of whether they perform the MXU upgrade or a hired agency does.
It will cost the city over a million dollars to purchase the new meters and MXU systems needed to complete the transition, City Auditor Terry Scott said. That price might drop due to a bulk discount that Orndorf discovered, however.
Scott also noted that the city should be able to pay that amount off “within five years,” saying that the mere purchasing of the materials wouldn’t prove to be a financial burden for the city.
Orndorf said that after the city replaces over 50 percent of the old MXU systems, it could start looking into a FlexNet reading system that allows the city to track water usage by the hour (or in whatever time increment it chooses).
FlexNet is an antenna-based reading system that does not require manual readings – it signals back to city office computers how much water each resident is using by the hour, or every four hours, which would lead to increased transparency between the city and its residents.
Mavis noted that recently, multiple residents have had complaints about their water bills being abnormally high due to leaks they didn’t know existed.
Due to limited water department staffing, each resident’s water rates are only measured every third month (the first two months are constant). This means that if a resident had a leak within the first month, they wouldn’t see it affect their bill until their rate drastically increased two months later, an occurrence that has caused confusion and frustration among residents.
FlexNet would fix that issue, as residents could more accurately pinpoint when a leak might have occurred. They would then have the ability to fix it more quickly, saving them money.
“We’ve all suffered here in the last couple weeks, when we do have a person with a $400 water bill and a $2,000 water bill, and then we’ve had a couple larger incidents,” Mavis said. “This means a lot to not only the city, but to our customer base as well.”
FlexNet is still somewhat far off, though, as Orndorf wants to surpass the 50 percent mark before getting into the logistics of funding the new system.
