A New Tool to Calculate the Lifecycle of Infrastructure
An excerpt from British Columbia’s community lifecycle infrastructure costing tool user guide, showing built-in default scenarios for different types of density. (Source: Government of British Columbia website.)
As governments struggle to fund maintenance costs and question the long-term solvency of new infrastructure expenditures, some are beginning to take a step back before jumping into new projects and are objectively asking, “Can we afford this?” Financial resilience is a goal all communities strive for, and many look for tools to help quantify that. The province of British Columbia, Canada, has created such a tool that “can help local governments estimate the entire lifecycle costs of infrastructure, such as water, sewer and transportation, for different land use patterns, for example, compact- versus low-density development.” This tool, accessible to anyone in the British Columbia province, is called the community lifecycle infrastructure costing tool (CLIC tool).
The CLIC tool is designed to help local municipalities “estimate the lifecycle cost implications of different land use patterns over a 100-year period.” It’s a free, excel-based tool that has the ability to generate long-term infrastructure cost implications through a comparison analysis.
A handful of British Columbia communities participated in case studies with the tool's original pilot phase, with an understanding that how we choose to build may determine the financial trajectory of our cities for decades. One of these communities, the city of Prince George, pursued the use of CLIC to “get at the front-end land use decision making of how they take new assets on, through the long-range planning function.” The city used CLIC to compare and contrast two common development scenarios: a low-density new subdivision and a medium-density infill scenario. Whichever scenario the tool determined would be the most financially solvent, the city would seek to encourage and facilitate.
The case study reports that by using the CLIC tool, Prince George was able to demonstrate that “[i]nitial capital costs in the infill scenario are a mere fraction (about 94–97% lower) than that of the subdivision scenario.” To see everything the CLIC tool revealed, check out the full study here.
The city of Terrace has a population nearing 12,000, and they’re expecting a wave of population growth. They assert that “population growth needs to be managed in an efficient and sustainable manner to ensure the land base will accommodate new residents and other land uses well into the future.” The city wanted to compare four development options ranging in land use, single-family homes, density, and multi-use zoning versus single-use zoning.
The analysis that Terrace staff conducted using the CLIC tool, on initial glance, appeared to indicate that all four development scenarios were a net-positive for the city, producing revenues in excess of current annual expenditures. However, those current expenditures do not include the creation of an asset replacement reserve to cover the future replacement costs of infrastructure. Accounting for such a reserve, the report acknowledges, “implies that a tax increase may be necessary.”
This case study, and the studies for the other communities who participated in this process can be found here, along with the CLIC tool downloadable program and documents.
In this episode of Upzoned, co-hosts Abby Newsham and Chuck Marohn talk about satellite communities and the psychological phenomena that incline people toward large projects.