The Michigan Infrastructure Council (MIC) has recently released a new Asset Management Readiness Assessment Tool – a scale aimed at helping infrastructure owners understand, measure, and advance their asset management capabilities. This important measuring scale will be essential for local communities in understanding what infrastructure assets they have and what plans to maintain them are put into place for the future.
MIC was created through legislation heavily supported by MITA in 2018 after recommendations from the 21st Century Infrastructure Commission were released and found that little to no coordination was occurring between various infrastructure assets across the state.
The new Asset Management Readiness Assessment Scale measures progress across five asset management competencies – People and Leadership; Data and Information; Planning and Prioritization; Policy and Governance; and External Communication and Knowledge Sharing. The eventual goal is sustainable service delivery of our infrastructure.
MIC will be promoting the new scale to local communities and community organizations. It is intended to be used by those local communities, as well as water authorities, road commissions, utilities, communication companies and parks.
This is the first step toward an overall goal of having all of our infrastructure rated and mapped out across the state. It is difficult to convince policy-makers to approve investments into our infrastructure when we may not know the total scale of the problem. Eventually, MIC would like to have infrastructure assets mapped out for the public to see in plain sight what their communities have and what plans are in place to maintain and improve upon those assets. We believe that this will drive more calls to action from the public and ultimately lead to more projects.
To learn more about the Asset Management Readiness Assessment Scale, please visit www.michigan.gov/mic, and click on the AM Readiness Scale tab.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Mike Nystrom, Executive Vice President, at mikenystrom@thinkmita.org or Lance Binoniemi, Vice President of Government Affairs, at lancebinoniemi@thinkmita.org. They both can be reached at 517-347-8336.
