Translate[Archived] Question #54: Provide an update to FY 2018 Budget Question #5 (How many City-wide Assessments of street light outages are funded in the Proposed budget?) and the status of mobile application reporting
Question:
Please provide an
update to FY 2018 Budget Question #5, including status of the mobile
application reporting (How many City-wide Assessments of street light outages
are funded in the Proposed budget? What would be the cost to fund quarterly or
monthly assessments?).
Response:
Street light surveys are typically performed by teams of two City staff. The teams use a zone/grid system to inspect streetlights across the entire City and report outages to Dominion Energy, which maintains more than 10,000 streetlights throughout the City. Funding required for the surveys is for labor, with negligible vehicle and fuel costs. Each survey takes approximately 40 labor hours and costs approximately $2,500, which is for overtime. The exact amount of each survey depends on the labor rates of the employees performing the work.
In FY 2018, T&ES has absorbed labor costs for the surveys and increased the streetlight survey frequencies from bi-annually to quarterly. The surveys are now scheduled to occur on a rolling (ongoing) basis, so the City is comprehensively surveyed every three months. Thus, four City-wide assessments are planned for FY 2019 at a cost of approximately $10,000. The labor costs for quarterly surveys will be absorbed in the T&ES budget. However, to conduct Citywide surveys on a monthly basis, T&ES would need an additional $20,000 in funding, or a total of $30,000 for this purpose.
T&ES and the Department of Information Technology continue to refine a web-based tool to more easily report streetlight outages. Due to technical requirements, the delivery date was pushed to no later than May 2018 from the initially projected date of November 2017. The capability will be implemented as a request type in the City’s customer relationship system, Contact Us.