Methodology

Methodology Objective

1) To develop a credible and a clear and easily explainable method of arriving at an infrastructure grade.

2) To maintain consistency with the ASCE National Report Card and follow the guidelines described in the “ASCE Manual on grading Community Infrastructure”.

Development of Report Card Grades

In the development of Report Card Grades, the three fundamental components of the infrastructure should be considered. These are:

Condition – What is the existing or near future condition of the infrastructure facility. In assessing the condition assessment of the infrastructure, it is recommend that one not only consider existing condition but the immediate future conditions (up to three years) particularly where future projects which would improve the conditions are either funded or in design.

Capacity – When considering capacity, again one should consider the existing as well as future capacity. In other words, one should be able to consider questions like: Are the current roads and bridges able to sustain the current population? Will the roads and bridges be able to support the community in ten years? Twenty years? The existence of master Plans, Funding Plans, and Capital Improvement Programs are good starting points to gather this information.

Operations – Operations can be a difficult parameter to evaluate. The working groups are encouraged to develop parameters applicable to their areas. However, two approaches should be considered when evaluating this parameter. First, is the infrastructure system complying with existing regulatory requirements? For example, in the wastewater infrastructure, what are the numbers of spill violations, air emission citations, or NPDES discharge violations. Second, does the organizations have sufficient funding levels of their facility maintenance. Sufficient funding can be determining by the degree of deferred maintenance occurring.

Weighting Factor

The Methodology development group elected to apply an equal weight of 30% to each of these evaluation components (a total of 90%). Because of the large degree of variability in the types of infrastructure and data availability of each, it was decided that the remaining 10% of the grade should be allocated to the discretion of the Infrastructure Working Committee, either to be distributed in one or a combination of the three aforementioned component or a new discipline specific component.

Grading Criteria

The Orange County Report Card effort will follow the ASCE national report card’s approach of issued letter grades based on the criteria used to analyze the various infrastructure categories. The national report card grades were based on the following scale:

A = 90-100%
B = 80-89%
C = 70-79%
D = 41-69%
F = 40% or lower

The intent of the Orange County report card is to be consistent with the criteria set forth by the National Report Card.