FHWA/AASHTO Asset Management Expert Task Group

Asset Management ETG Minutes April 30, May 1, 2015

FHWA/AASHTO Asset Management Expert Task Group

Meeting Minutes, April 30 and May 1, 2015

Minutes

The Asset Management Expert Task Group (ETG) held an in-person meeting April 30 and May 1, 2015 at the headquarters of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). The ETG is a joint effort of AASHTO and the Federal Highway Administration Office of Asset Management, Pavement and Construction.

Attending were ETG members Chris Champion, Chris Evila, Mo Lali, Tim Henkel, Brad Allen, Randy Park, , Omar Smadi, Regina Aris, DeLania Hardy and Laura Mester. From FHWA were NastaranSaadatmand, Francine Shaw-Whitson, Steve Gaj, and Egan Smith. From FTA wasMshadoni Smith. Guests included Dave Johnson of the Washington Area Mass Transit Agency (WAMATA) and Eric Randall of the Washington Council of Governments. Neil Pedersen and Tom Palmerlee of the National Academies also participated. Supporting the ETG were Matt Hardy of AASHTO and consultants Katie Zimmerman and Gordon Proctor

Welcome

Tim welcomed everyone to the meeting and the meeting participants introduced themselves. After the introductions, Tim reviewed the objectives for the TAM ETG as outlined in the strategic plan. He stressed that the meeting activities will lead to a closed-door session where the ETG will review the work plan to ensure that it is on task.

Round Robin

The meeting opened with the Round Robin discussion of issues that members raised to share information, suggest topics of concern or to provide notice of upcoming events.

Key points raised during the Round Robin include the following:

• Tom introduced the TRB activities in asset management, including the Denver workshop on May 31st. A total of 31 states are registered, with 71 total attendees. The National Conference will be held in Minneapolis in 2016.
• Steve stated that the NPRM is out and it closes on May 29th, He invited people to make both positive and negative comments with explanation. He mentioned the NHI training and new training on financial plans. The gap analysis plan has addressed needs in 15 states.
• He would like to identify strategies to make the gap analysis a way of doing business. In many organizations, the PMS and BMS folks don’t know their role in asset management.
• He would also like to see the group discuss strategies to accelerate innovation related to pavement management or a related topic.
• Nastaran added information on the new course on Financial Planning and the series of reports on financial planning. There will be 5 reports in total and two are very close to being posted.
• Francine indicated that the pavement and bridge condition NPRM closes next week. She is anticipating that the final rule will be targeted for September. So far, there are 28 comments submitted, but she said it could be 2 weeks for the comments to show up on the web docket.
• Tim provided an AASHTO perspective. The Board adopted a new strategic plan that calls for AASHTO to do several things, including a review of their committee structure. This could impact the Subcommittee on Asset Management. He indicated he would welcome feedback on this effort. He indicated the Subcommittee meeting in the summer will likely be in August and it will be aligned with a peer exchange on risk-based asset management and a workshop funded through the 20-24 series on Enterprise Risk Management. The product from the workshop will help inform the Board about how risk should be incorporated into the AASHTO Committee structure. There has been no replacement named for the Chair.
• Egan mentioned that the third in the series of guidebooks in statewide performance-based planning has been released. Next week there will be a focus group meeting on this document. He would like input from the ETG on these documents. He said there is also a STIP State of the Review document (white paper) that is being developed to document why projects are being selected. He would also like the ETG to review this document.
• Moh indicated that there is comparable group in Canada through Transportation Association of Canada. He would like the products from the TAM ETG to be shared with this group. In Canada, TAC is also looking at asset management, but most agencies have been working in this area since 1980. As a result, they have large data sets and they can show impacts of different investment levels. He said they were spending $25M on data collection but have scaled back to $18 million.
• Nastaran suggested that a link could be established between the TAM ETG website and the TAC website.
• Omar suggested that the ETG could inform groups on the cost of doing asset management and the benefits that can be realized.
• Francine identified resources to help states and other agencies offset those costs. This would help reduce the amount of duplication.
• Chris Evilia pointed out that the NHS is not owned or managed by only one agency and this leads to different perceptions in terms of priorities. They feel the planning process is where these discussions need to take place and noted that the NPRM is not very specific on this process. He suggested the ETG might offer some language for consideration in the final rule.
• Randy said Utah looked at how business is going to change with asset management. In the past, they complained that federal funding is siloed, but they also realized that state money is siloed. They have since un-siloed their money and regions are given money to manage the performance of their assets. It is expected to be a work in progress and there’s a culture shift that has to take place so people don’t fear being fired.
• Brad indicated that NY State implemented a new STIP planning process. In the past it was goal oriented, but the transformation is putting objective measures for performance in place to use as the basis for investment decisions. They are finding that maintaining this requires a constant effort so it doesn’t turn into a few people making the decision. In some cases there is an absence of data and they rely on Google Maps to get an idea of whether a project is justified. They are also working on new data collection efforts for the NHS in accordance with MAP-21. They are getting a new CEO and he has a political background. They are interested in seeing how this impacts things. As an aside, Brad said they spend $100M annually to collect data on about 1900 bridges ($10,000/bridge). Things that could help them:
• Original TAM Guide (2003) is stale and needs to be updated.
• Self-assessment guide is very technical. Need to help agencies look at softer guides (training and structure).
• Matt said there is an NCHRP project being conducted by SpyPond to look at the benefit of investments in asset management. Brad said they haven’t yet seen the benefits, but they are starting to build the benefit. He’s hoping there are states with more mature systems to document the benefit. Matt said this group should take notice of this project. He also said there’s going to be an asset management research roadmap that will be conducted and the ETG should influence that. Randy said they don’t even know what benefits they will see – they’re discovering them every day. The political capital they have gained has been tremendous, for example.
• Omar has a project with FHWA Office of Safety to review roadway data. As part of the project, he brings in pavement and bridge groups to see how the data interact and this is a challenge for some agencies. He said the data needs to be able to talk together. Francine said in a recent peer exchange, they discussed the impact of pavements on safety and so on. The participating states are talking about how to do this. Nastaran asked about where the original ETG white paper is and whether it’s available. Matt was able to find the paper.
• Nastaran indicated that states can set steady-state and declining targets.
• Neil said there may be MPO and transit perspectives to put on the table.
• There was a bit of discussion about how all of this interacts. FHWA has separate offices, there are different rulemakings, and AASHTO committees separate these activities. Steve emphasized that someone needs to bring it all together.
• Misi suggested that ultimately, asset management has to balance transit and safety, and infrastructure condition. Ultimately, it comes down to customer satisfaction and trade-off decisions. The transit industry wants to learn from the highway side and avoid our problems.
• Dave Johnson said it’s an on-going process of address this and they are questioning what is the new way of doing business and is the organization set up to address this? When you have leadership turnover, it can have a tremendous impact and constantly evolving view of asset management’s role. There needs to be a lot of focus on business process.
• Chris was going to emphasize the relationship to the customer and using asset management to consider trade-offs between several objectives. He said IPWEA has converted its 4-day face-to-face training to a 3-month web-based training. They have put through about 200+ people and have received very positive responses. They use sample data and have to provide a draft asset management plan at the end of the course.
• Laura stated that Michigan is looking at how rules are impacting resource requirements from a financial perspective. Asset management also impacts accounting and budgeting and so the area of impact is huge. She said they now use the modified GASB approach and if they start to see declining conditions, they will have to shift dollars and this will have an impact through many parts of the system. Steve sees this as a huge opportunity area. Brad said it’s similar in New York because they report the value goes up because construction costs have increased so much. Communicating that declining conditions will have implications on bonding ability and reporting for GASB is good, but GASB modified approach calculation of asset costs is useless in making asset management decisions. He asks what the cost is to replace everything right now. They then predict how this number will change over time.
• Katie said that agencies are now asking for training on the TAMP and not spending the time to figure out how to organize to support asset management over the long-run. She also mentioned that guidance on network-level life cycle analysis is needed as well as the amount of information needed to do cross-asset optimization.
• Omar and Moh wrapped up the discussion by mentioning how much more complex the decisions are getting when trying to understand the total impact of decisions. Moh added that managing customer expectations is very important.

MPO, Transit, and State DOT TAM Discussion

Dave Johnson, WMATA

Dave Johnson gave a presentation on their transit asset management efforts. They focused on establishing the “line of sight” from organizational goals to asset management decisions. The strategic asset management plan is drilled down to asset groups, who develop their own asset management plans. The group asset management plans roll up to the strategic plan. The champions for asset management form a Stakeholder Reference Group to provide guidance and direction to project selection. One of the organizational changes they made was changing asset management from a project to a business process. One step in that was creating the Transit Asset Management Office (TAMO) in engineering. They are still working on developing condition assessments so they can set investment priorities. Right now, their trade-off decisions are relatively ad-hoc, but they’re moving away from “everyone gets a slice of the pie.”

When asked to describe the relationship between TAMO and the Performance Management Office, he said the PMO has been a natural place to have high-level discussions about back-log and needs. The TAMO will provide the data the PMO uses, but TAMO is much lower in the organization. The PMO will balance the asset condition data, but also human factors, operations, and management to look into strategic objectives such as on-time performance (for example).

Dave indicated that they are furthest along on the vehicle side, as are most transit agencies. They consider preventive maintenance activities to be contributing to avoiding a larger (or earlier) replacement cost. Brad was using this to draw correlations as to how to model bridge element maintenance activities.

Matt asked how an agency “gets” certified. Dave indicated he has not looked into that because they have a long way to go. Chris C. said certifying consultants go in to certify an agency and it’s an expensive process, so it’s important to be ready. Chris pointed out that FHWA is creating its own definition while the rest of the world (and transit) is aligning to ISO. Omar pointed out that ISO is more of a process level certification.

Matt also asked how the TAMO is coordinating with MPOs. Dave hasn’t been involved in this yet, but thinks their strategic plan would have been developed in conjunction with the MPOs. At his level, it isn’t something that is coordinated with the MPO.

Moh asked how they will optimize across assets. He said the vision is that they will use cost-benefit to do this, but it’s difficult with some assets. It’s simple with vehicles to monetize it, but it’s more difficult to do traction power and things like that (which work until they don’t and then the system shuts down). Moh said they use user costs in their B/C analysis to address these issues.

Eric Randall, COG (MPO Perspective)

COG is looking at all the NPRMs to see what MPOs will have to do. Their questions are:

• They are pulling in three discrete organizations (Richmond, VA, Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD) to evaluate how to consider them as one single organization. At times, one out of three are okay or the data they provide is different. How should they approach this? They also have some major parkways managed by the NPS.
• They are deciding how to handle data – do they separate rural and urban data, or integrate it all together into one set of measures and targets?
• What are they talking about forecasting? How does each state forecast? What if they have different trend lines? How do they integrate this?
• From a planning perspective, they will have 3 DOTs and 15 transit organizations. How do they put it all together and consider all of these needs in project selection? They have noted that there is nothing in the NRPM on transit performance measures. What will be expected for reporting this?
• The 10-year requirement for the financial plan is in the middle of their TIP and their Long-Range Plan (20 years). How will they handle this?

They are currently in the process of adding up the assets in their MPO so they can better assess how the rules impact them. They consider their role is conducting analysis for the region.

Omar pointed out that MPOs do not have to develop a plan but are required to develop performance targets. He asked whether Eric thinks this process will lead them to develop a TAMP, but Eric wasn’t sure.

Chris Evilia added that a challenge is having to compare assets across modes and how that impacts other modes. For instance, if WMATA has a failure, it impacts highway modes. He wondered how MPOs are approaching this and identifying where one asset impacts other modes beyond what can be addressed easily.

Brad asked whether the MPO supports efforts in all three states. Eric pointed out the problem is if agencies go in different directions. They would have to rely on coordination and cooperation to resolve this.

Francine asked what AMPO is putting in place to support the coordination effort. They are considering having a pre-conference workshop before their annual conference and they will continue scheduling webinars on this topic to help lay the framework.

Regina said they coordinate with data from Baltimore and other MPOs in the area. She said many MPOs were focused on long-range planning, but they’re shifting to shorter-term forecasts. Their current plans do not provide enough detail for them to be able to understand the impacts of the decisions. Their state (Maryland) gives them direction with respect to how much is for presersation and the Board has accepted that. However, if they had better data, perhaps the Board could help Maryland SHA make better decisions. Omar asked whether states invest in off-system NHS roads. Neil indicated they didn’t Chris said they have rules that say the MPO can’t use federal dollars on non-state maintained roads, but they can use some for bridges. Texas DOT tells the MPO how much will be spent on their roads, but not necessarily why. The MPO has no input into funding priorities at this time. Chris said it’s different on the transit side. For them, the importance is the reimbursement of operating expenses.