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Business View Magazine
104 Business View – October
Infrastructure
c o u n s e l i n g o t h e r
municipality leaders on
how to be efficient in the
face of myriad complex
challenges –Elliott gets
positively profound.
“There
is
hope,”
he said. “Cities have
extremely long lives.
“They’re going to be
here for hundreds of
years. There is hope that
you can establish a city system of infrastructure that is
sustainable and can be in place for the long term.”
He’s got a wall full of civil engineering street cred
from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and held
senior municipal positions in North Bay and Kirkland
Lake before arriving in Cambridge in 2010. He was
elevated to his current role a year later and has since
been part of an ongoing shift in the planning paradigm
that’s positioned the city to get ahead of issues it had
trailed for years.
“It took us probably 70 years to get into this jackpot
of a problem, and we’ve been able to get it turned
around in a forecasted 20 years,” he said. “It may take
20 to 25 years to turn your city around, but there is the
hope you can do it. It can be done.”
Elliott and the city’s director of engineering, Yogesh
Shah, are the incumbent driving forces these days
of a proactive approach toward water and sewer
infrastructure maintenance and improvement that was
initially considered a decade ago. The process started,
Elliott said, with a group of asset managers simply
sitting down and approaching the concerns with an eye
toward the future, rather than simply reacting to day-
to-day catastrophes as they occurred.
Shah and his team looked at Cambridge’s 400
kilometers of far-flung water mains and sanitary
sewer systems in 2005 and by 2009 had worked up
a painstaking inventory, giving each item a condition
rating and assessing a priority to each that determined
which needed immediate attention and which ones
could wait.
It was a drastic departure from status quo back then,
Elliott said, and one he kiddingly suggested Shah and
Yogesh Shah
his colleagues aren’t aggressive enough about claiming
credit for.
“Through Yogesh’s abilities and his team that they
have in the asset management department, they do
some real award-winning stuff,” he said.
“They’re doing the leading edge of what asset-
management philosophies are all about, and they need
a lot more kudos than he’s willing to volunteer for. It
gave us the power through knowledge to know where
to spend our money to get the best bang for the buck.
In the past, something breaks. It breaks two or three
times, then it becomes ‘OK, let’s go fix it now.’
“It was all reactive. This allows us to take a proactive
approach.”
When the inventory and assessments were done,
the city was able to create a pecking order of the work
that needed to be done that was already past due –
but for whatever reason had not been done. Elliott
