Greenville council approves Neptune AMI meter purchase, to use bond funds for roughly $6 million program

Greenville City Council on April 8 approved a resolution authorizing the purchase and installation of Neptune advanced metering infrastructure — meters, cellular gateways, collection equipment, office software and maintenance services — by a 6-0 vote.

City staff described the project as a fixed-base AMI deployment that will replace or retrofit the city's water meters and give the utility continuous, centralized meter reads, leak detection and a customer portal. John (city staff) told council the proposal covers the full system from meters to billing and that the city will retrofit roughly 15,000 meters in the scope of the program.

Core & Main representative Shelley Robroker, who introduced the Neptune product, said the Neptune water meter is “100% American made and registers down to 0.06.” Robroker emphasized compatibility across meter generations, a 96-day consumption history stored on the meter and hybrid operation that allows fixed-base, cellular endpoints or drive-by reads when needed. She said the system reports frequent short-range signals (every 14 seconds) and sends packets to fixed gateways at longer intervals to preserve battery life.

Council discussion focused on expected benefits and funding. John said the city will use design bond proceeds previously set aside for water projects and that “this is a little over $6,000,000 that we'll utilize for this fund,” leaving the remainder of that allotment for other projects. He also said the city verified the use of the bond proceeds with the city's bond counsel and that the bond-funded projects generally must be completed within three years.

Council members asked about reliability after recent high-profile problems in other cities; Robroker said the Plano failure involved mixed vendors and that the issue there was the third-party radio, not Neptune meter bodies. She told council that a single-vendor, integrated Neptune system avoids that failure mode.

Robroker and city staff said the project follows two pilot meter programs already executed by the utility. When asked about rollout timing, Robroker estimated about six to eight months to begin full deployment once contracts and addressing files are ready. The company also committed local support and a single local point of contact for installation and warranty work.

The resolution passed 6-0. The council did not specify an exact contract execution date in the meeting record; staff said they will produce a detailed project schedule and construction meetings before work begins.