Title
Discuss and consider action to authorize the City Manager to approve the procurement of construction services for the Automated Meter Infrastructure (AMI) project to Core and Main using their HGACBuy contract in the amount of $2,664,127.05.
Summary
As part of the City’s 5-year CIP, our water meter infrastructure was identified to be upgraded to an Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI) network from our existing Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) system. The objective of the project is to improve the accuracy of our current meters, add infrastructure to bring water use data into a single system, and to provide City of Pflugerville water customers with a portal to be able to see their water usage in real-time.
The current AMR network requires staff to drive around to gather meter readings in specified zones on specific days of the month. This also requires staff to individually go to specific streets depending on the signal capability of the older registers and meter boxes. This existing network also requires Meter Shop staff to respond to Utility Billing and customer requests for verifying readings as needed. This network also doesn’t give customers a lot of control over their usage and being able to see how much water they use on a given day to try and tailor their usage.
The proposed AMI network would require the installation of network data collectors at our elevated storage tanks as well as various stand-alone stations within the City in order to cover roughly 99% of the City’s water customers. These collectors would be taking meter data from the meters and bringing it into the City’s network utilizing the wireless network that should be completed by the end of June 2021. Once this data is brought into the City’s network, the City will use Neptune’s hosting service for this data to minimize the server and data storage needs that the City would need to have on-site. There are numerous vendors that provide a customer and staff portal to use this d...
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