City looking to create servicing standards

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This article was published 06/04/2022 (1436 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For the first time ever, the City of Brandon is creating a defined set of municipal servicing standards.

A tender posted to the city’s website last Friday states that Brandon is looking for an engineering consultant to prepare and peer-review a set of servicing standards for the city.

These standards would apply to engineering work relating to the renewal and expansion of elements like water distribution, wastewater collection, land drainage systems and transportation networks, including multi-use paths.

“In the past, we had some draft documents put together, but they were never finalized,” said Jennifer Coey, the city’s manager of strategic infrastructure. “Once the standards are adopted, we’ll start using them and then annually or every couple of years on a certain rotation schedule, we’ll review the standards and update them as needed.”

According to a document attached to the tender, the city currently uses standards for design requirements based on construction specifications and past practices. The city’s engineering services are in charge of reviewing designs and standards, but in some cases, work is contracted out to external specialists.

These factors, the document says, lead to a time-consuming and onerous process for city employees and a perception that the city is inconsistent when it comes to standards.

In previous years, the city had some standards written up in draft form, but they were never formally adopted and they were never collected in one place. Coey said that a lot of the standards in the final document will be the same or similar to the ones the city currently uses.

This includes design standards for managing stormwater and land drainage systems assembled in January by Winnipeg-based firm AECOM and guidelines for naturalized stormwater ponds released by Native Plant Solutions in April 2018.

The stormwater standards, for example, dictate how much rainfall and runoff related infrastructure can handle.

For things like transportation, Coey said, there are currently no formalized standards at all.

“What we wanted to do is have a consultant take what we’ve completed in the past, do a peer review to see if anything has changed and then fill in the gaps of what we’re missing into one inclusive document so that when external developers and consultants are wanting to use our standards, they only have to go to one place to get them.”

Ultimately, these standards will be for the city when it completes designs for projects and for outside engineers as well.

The goal is for the standards to be complete by March 2023. Once they’re created, they’ll be implemented and the city intends on working with industries to gather feedback and implement changes so both groups are on the same page and the rules can be formally adopted in 2024.

“In 2024, when we go to finalize the document, we’ve already kinda done our external consultation process,” Coey said.

“Sometimes when you go out and you ask for feedback on a specific document, unless you’ve used it in practice sometimes it’s really difficult to give feedback. We can get valuable feedback just by having them review it, but sometimes the information is more beneficial if they’ve actually gone through the process of seeing what’s working and what’s not.”

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