Municipalities and the provincial government need information about municipal assets. The provincial government needs municipal asset information to be able to plan provincial short and long-term funding for municipal infrastructure and to negotiate funding for municipal infrastructure with the federal government. Municipalities need the information for asset management and to meet Public Sector Accounting Board (PSAB) capital reporting requirements.
Background
At the Municipal Forum (December 2006), the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association (SUMA) and Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) agreed to work together to develop a Municipal Asset Information System (MAIS). A municipal-ministry MAIS committee was established to develop a plan for obtaining the information required to meet municipal and provincial government needs. The MAIS committee includes representatives of SUMA, SARM, the cities of Regina, Saskatoon, and Prince Albert, the Urban Municipal Administrators Association of Saskatchewan (UMAAS), the Rural Municipal Administrators Association of Saskatchewan (RMAA), and Municipal Affairs. The committee reports to the Municipal Forum. A status report about MAIS was presented at the Municipal Forum on March 25, 2008.
In 2007, Municipal Affairs hired TESCO Consulting Ltd. to gather background and develop objectives and a proposal for the MAIS committee's review. From the TESCO report, the MAIS committee agreed to the following MAIS objectives:
- To provide an information base to guide provincial decisions about amounts and scheduling of provincial spending on municipal infrastructure;
- To establish an information base to support the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and municipalities in negotiations with the federal government for funding of municipal infrastructure;
- To assist in setting priorities with regard to provincial funding for municipal infrastructure and in scheduling the province's expenditures on the established priorities; and
- To assist municipalities in meeting PSAB requirements.
MAIS Committee
The MAIS committee continues to guide the MAIS initiative. The committee:
- Agreed to use provincial interests and priority assets as the framework for collecting information for MAIS.
- Agreed municipalities will use the same functional and asset inventory categories for PSAB and MAIS.
- Agreed MAIS information will draw from municipal data collected for PSAB and asset management.
- Agreed MAIS reporting thresholds should be the same as PSAB reporting thresholds.
- Reviewed municipal software applications to determine suitability for MAIS and PSAB reporting and municipal asset management.
- Created the provincial and local government MAIS data collection templates and agreed about the type of information and level of detail needed.
- The provincial government MAIS template will identify the aggregated information of priority assets to be provided by municipalities to the provincial government. The template will guide the collection of information about timing and cost of major repairs, upgrades, replacements, expansions and new infrastructure.
- The local government MAIS template will guide municipalities in identifying information they will need to provide to the provincial government.
Ministry of Municipal Affairs
- In April 2008, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs issued a request for proposals (RFP) for a feasibility study for the system requirements for MAIS. The successful applicant was GHD Inc.
- As part of the study, GHD surveyed municipalities to gather information that would help shape the structure of MAIS. Information was requested about:
- existing infrastructure asset types owned by municipalities;
- data held by municipalities about these assets; and
- information systems used by municipalities to store and retrieve the data.
- The feasibility study was completed in March 2009 and recommended the Ministry of Municipal Affairs should:
- Assist municipalities to understand the overall benefits of asset management through capacity building and training;
- Clearly outline the asset information required from municipalities and base it in part on data already gathered for PSAB compliance; and
- Develop the system at the provincial level to receive and analyze aggregated asset information from all Saskatchewan municipalities through two phases:
- MAIS Basic - collect, store, aggregate, analyze and report asset quantity replacement cost and expenditure profile information for approximately 63 possible asset types;
- MAIS Advanced - build on MAIS Basic by adding performance measurement information and expanding possible asset types to 100.
- The Ministry of Municipal Affairs initiated a pilot project for MAIS data collection in northern Saskatchewan as part of the PSAB compliance work being completed in 2009. The pilot project includes the development of the MAIS Basic system.
MAIS Implementation Timeline
Next Steps
- Refine the MAIS implementation plan and funding requirements.
- Develop and implement municipal pilot projects for MAIS.
- Develop capacity building initiatives about municipal asset management.
- Create a communications plan outlining the benefits of MAIS and future information requirements.
- Address asset management details by defining levels of service, standard asset lifecycles, and benchmark replacement costs.
