[Updated November 2016]
For the past several months, Civiltec has been busy rolling up its sleeves in the great City of Beverly Hills! Our work in the City revolves around assisting their Public Works Services Department with its water utility service, as well as helping the City streamline its processes for new development.
The Civiltec team — David Byrum, Greg Ripperger, Amal Sedrak, Gretel Ochoa and Atenas Reynaga — has been tasked with a variety of different responsibilities and executables, namely:
- Conducting interviews and workshops with City staff to understand existing standards and processes
- Updating standard drawings and technical specifications for water system construction
- Creating and helping implement formal process guidelines for new developments
- Performing hydraulic analysis and preparing technical memorandums to assess the impact of new development on the existing water system
- [NEW] Reconstructing the water system computer model onto the City’s GIS platform through a contract extension
Updating the City’s processes for new development was especially needed, due to dated standard drawings and specifications documents that were created in the early 1990s. Now, the City will be able to have developers step through a clear-cut process, which includes analyses and modeling of how new developments will impact water service in the City. By calculating whether there will be additional demand on the City’s water infrastructure system, the City can stay aware of infrastructure improvement needs and fire flow demand throughout its system.
At the same time, the City of Beverly Hills is building a GIS model for the entire city, which will be completed early in 2017. Civiltec is helping the City construct a water system computer model that will be integrated into this GIS platform. The model construction is a complex undertaking involving field survey to gather new data, a new demand analysis conducted at the parcel level, demand forecasting based upon General Plans and land use, demand allocation into the model utilizing software tools, model calibration with new field and SCADA data and development of standard scenarios for average and peak demands plus fire flow. The model will require months of construction and testing and should be ready for use in the Spring of 2017.
“Standardizing processes and analysis is second nature to us at Civiltec,” said Project Manager Greg Ripperger. “I’m glad we have been able to immediately lend our collective expertise to the City so they can provide consistent, high-quality service to a steady stream of developers.”
“We have had a great start to what we feel will be a long-term relationship and look forward to the challenges that come our way as part of this ‘as-needed’ contract,” said Civiltec President David Byrum. “Thanks to the City of Beverly Hills for placing its trust in Civiltec to improve processes that serve (and positively impact) so many residents.”
