The Auburn City Council approved the execution of a contract with Innovyze, Inc. during their meeting Tuesday, March 17, that will effect approval of building projects in the community.
The contract includes the purchase of InfoSWMM sanitary sewer modeling software.
“It is a modeling software package that allows us to basically model capacity in our sewer mains, which in turn basically allows us to analyze our existing capacity as well as future capacity needs,” said Matt Dunn, water resource management assistant director. “Capacity is just the ability of that sewer to provide service for whatever customers are tied into that sewer main.”
The InfoSWMM software with a network license is $30,000 and the annual maintenance program cost is $4,500, according to city documents. This will include software, licenses, development and onsite implementation services, but not training.
“Say an apartment complex with 300 units comes in," said Eric Carson, water resource management director. "It is very critical to be able to model our sewer system to make sure that we have adequate capacity in that particular main to accept it before we approve that development, or if we need to do an upgrade, we can do that.”
Carson said the software also comes with a storm water package that they will be sharing with the Public Works Department.
Charles Duggan, city manager, said there is nothing wrong with the current sewer system, and it’s probably in the best shape it has been in for years.
“Currently, we don’t have modeling software for the sewer system, and it is very important that we do because as new developments come online or people upgrade them, we want to be able to tell them if sewer lines downstream can handle what they are going to be putting in the pipes,” Duggan said. “What we’ve been doing for a number of years is surveying our whole sewer system to make sure that we have the data necessary to build this model.”
Dunn said the cost for this software is normal for what they are getting. They had a careful evaluation of two vendors that were the two primary sewer modeling software vendors in the country, Dunn said.
Through webinars, conversations and independent evaluations, they thought Innovyze was the best software able to meet their needs.
“The reason we chose this particular software is it will run within our current (Geographic Information System) program,” Carson said. “That means when we update our utility maps, we will be working with the modeling software within our GIS and the model will be updated automatically as we enter data.”
Carson said he predicts it will take five or six months before they are ready to use the software. It will take a couple of months to get installed, and then they will have to be trained on how to use it. Carson said community members will not be able to tell anything is different because the work will happen behind the scenes.
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