WMAC Meeting Minutes, May 27, 2010

Attendees:  David Crosby – Chair, David Hearne, Paul Lauenstein, Rory McGregor – Secretary, Len Sekuler – Vice-Chair

Guests: Eric Hooper – Superintendent, DPW; Nancy Fyler, Water Conservation Coordinator; Kate Kavanagh – Sharon Resident

1.  The minutes from the May 13 WMAC meeting were approved as amended.

2.  Len Sekuler presented a methodology used by his consulting company, Malcolm Pirnie, to evaluate and prioritize capital projects for client utilities that are driven by rehab/replacement, enhancement and growth issues.   The approach is to define each individual project and the related social, environmental and financial impacts that it has on the utility’s customers.  Another task is to perform a criticality and risk of failure analysis on each project.  A financial analysis is also done to estimate design and construction costs, continuing operation and maintenance costs, and life expectancy.  Other factors such as parallel projects (for example, water main replacement and road paving) are also taken into account.

A scoring formula for each project determines numerical values for relative merit based on financial/strategic considerations and level of service factors. Each project is plotted on this 2-dimensional matrix.  Those in the top right quadrant have highest priorty while those in the bottom left have lowest priority.

Len used the past case of an electric transformer project to illustrate how the methodology worked.

We agreed to try and apply this methodology to the list of capital projects in the Master Plan under preparation by Weston & Sampson.  The list has grouped the projects into distribution network and tank improvements, well rehab/enhancements, and major projects such as new well development, emergency water connections to other towns, and leak detections.  Len will provide a template that we can use to evaluate and score Sharon’s projects.  Eric will review the project list and make any further groupings that simplify the number of projects that we need to review.  We will start the evaluation process at the next WMAC meeting.

3.  The next meeting will be on Thursday, June 10th, at 7:30pm at the Community Center.

Respectfully submitted,

Rory McGregor