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Property management outlines asset-mapping plan to track city facilities and warranties
Summary
The Department of Property Management described a digital asset-mapping effort to catalogue city-owned buildings, utilities and systems (HVAC, plumbing, roofing) to track maintenance, warranties and condition scores; staff said they expect to phase in layers and noted the system could flag blighted or vacant city properties.
The Department of Property Management told the council it is building a multi-layer digital asset map that will eventually include every city-owned property and components such as HVAC units, plumbing fixtures and roofing so the city can track maintenance, warranties and building condition.
Howard Nobles, director of Property Management, said the system will assign grades to building components and allow staff to create a weighted condition score for each facility. “Each layer will include every component,” Nobles said, describing a plumbing layer that will show every sink, toilet and shutoff valve and scheduled maintenance history.
Nobles said vendors and some other cities have implemented similar systems and that the office plans to tailor condition metrics to New Orleans’ climate. He said the city has begun with a shell map of roughly 500 buildings and will add several sublayers — HVAC, fire suppression, roofing and plumbing — over time. “We’re taking the metrics that they set up to determine a score for a building, and that is what we are going to create a score that really deals with our heat, humidity, and our climate here,” he said.
Councilmembers asked about whether the mapping would include vacant city-owned buildings and lots and whether the system would help identify properties that are blighted or in poor condition. Nobles said the platform is intended to include those assets and that the system will make condition and maintenance data publicly visible on the city’s property viewer dashboard. He also said the platform can include warranty documentation to support legal follow-up on newly constructed facilities that experience early failures.
Nobles asked for time to build the platform by layers and to coordinate with departments that manage their own facilities; he said staff would make records available to council offices on request.
