The City of Newton, Massachusetts, sought to revise its capital planning process so that it would be more transparent and objective to its constituents. The City hired Kleinfelder to perform an assessment of 43 buildings and to develop a new methodology for preparing its five-year Capital Improvement Plan (CIP), based on a thorough investigation and condition assessment of existing assets.
The City sought an innovative approach to defining, reviewing, and prioritizing capital projects. The goal: to identify and prioritize capital needs, as well as allocate funding through an objective, logical, data-driven process. As the project proceeded, the City expanded it to include assets for all City departments.
Kleinfelder developed a unique risk-based approach to compare and prioritize disparate capital projects. Each capital request was assigned a risk factor based on probabilities of failure, which were derived from condition assessments, and consequences of failure from multiple factors, including health and safety, impact on city operations, and costs or savings. The same risk-based methodology was applied to all proposed building and non-building capital projects and equipment purchases. Kleinfelder developed a custom tool to integrate the findings and generate a prioritized capital project list.
This was the first application in Massachusetts of a risk-based approach to prioritizing capital requests in a CIP. The logical, data-driven, transparent process enabled city staff and the public to clearly understand how projects were ranked and funded in the five-year CIP.
Location:
Newton, Massachusetts
Owner:
City of Newton
