City’s new GPS system to help better serve water users

   The City of Weiser is using a global positioning system (GPS) to pinpoint the locations of fire hydrants, water valves and home meters, administrators report.
 Electronically logging water assets will make running the city’s clean water system more efficient and ensure that problems, when they occur, can be addressed and resolved in less time.
 “We’ve been talking about this for quite a while,” said Water Department Supervisor Bill Taylor. “We are right in the middle of it, so it will probably be about two months before we get everything in the system.”
 Water department employees Jason Blair, Todd Schimmel, and Robert Torres have spent about six weeks, so far, manually locating each and every home meter, including 762 valves and 283 fire hydrants, for approximately 3,300 locations.
 “We use a GPS and Tablet so we can record all of the locations,” Blair said. “I’ve had to go find every valve, every meter pit, and I’m still not done.”
 The locations are identified and logged by a handheld GPS “Stick” commonly used by land surveyors to map out land parcels and boundaries.
 Data is transferred to a computer system that features screen shots with maps consisting of icons indicating the location of the City’s water assets. Every meter, at every home in Weiser, is represented by a special icon. There is also a separate map for valves and hydrants.
 Other information tied to the assets includes the size and type of feeder pipe, or even how many turns it takes to turn on and shut off any given valve.
 The system will assist City employees to quickly locate meters when a problem occurs.
 “We can open up the map, look up an address, and we can see where the meter is located on that property,” Taylor said. “It’s going to make everything more efficient.”
 Reading water meters and keeping track of their locations was once the job of meter readers, City employees who went on foot to every location and manually recorded data.
 One of them was current Weiser City Clerk, David Tate, who, for seven years, was responsible for reading thousands of meters on foot, every month.
 Tate was the catalyst for the City’s 2007 transition to a system that uses radio frequencies to report usage.
 “I started it,” he said. “We began with a trial, with the downtown meters.”
 The system, which has been a success, is commonly used in municipalities to collect water, gas, and electricity end-user data.
 It does not, however, record meter locations, which eventually became a problem when on-site visits were discontinued.
 “We were going to them every month, and we kept them clear,” Taylor explained. “Now, we are using radios and if a meter has been running fine for five years, and nobody has been there, a lot of the time grass has overgrown, or people have landscaped and buried them, so we are losing where our meter pits are located.”
 Many meters have been covered with plants and other vegetation, while others have been hidden by things like planters and other landscape features.
 The cost for the GPS project should run between $8,000 and $10,000, according to Tate, and was made possible through a Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) matching grant for development of the City’s new Water Master Plan.
 The City of Weiser put up $50,000, with DEQ matching the rest for a total of $100,000. The Water Master Plan, which is nearing completion, will include recommendations for improvements to the City’s water system.
 The Water Master Plan is part of a larger effort that involves updating the City’s Comprehensive Master Plan.
 The comprehensive plan, which includes sub-plans for the City’s many departments, was last updated in 1999.
 “We just hired a firm to do that at the last city council meeting,” said Weiser Mayor Randy Hibberd, who added that this year’s U.S. Census data would play a role in the development of the comprehensive plan.
 “The Census gives you demographic information on your citizens and numbers, and trends so that you can see what has been going on, and what to expect in the future, so you can plan around it,” he said.