Increasing Sustainability in Small Utilities through GIS and Asset Management

The majority of US utilities are small, serving populations of less than 15,000. These utilities must meet all NPDES permit requirements yet with fewer resources, both financial and human. This paper will consider how innovative GIS cloud based data and mapping technologies can be combined with small utility asset management planning and professional engineering services to enable small utilities to affordably begin or take the next step regarding risk analysis based condition assessment and rehabilitation. The Sewanee, Tennessee Utility District (SUD) will be used as a case study. For the past year SUD has been relating key data, photographs, videos, condition assessment conclusions, rehabilitation recommendations, pricing and scheduling using simply edited Google Map based GIS technology. All data is related to particular SUD assets without SUD needing to own any database, mapping or asset management software. This enables SUD to afford to manage and sustain their utility with existing capabilities.