Lompoc officials advance plan to replace aging electric meters with AMI system; contract to return for council vote

City officials moved forward with a plan to replace Lompoc’s aging electric meters with an advanced metering infrastructure system after a consultant presentation and council questions Tuesday.

The recommendation — presented by Rick of Schmidt Utility Advisors and introduced by city staff — asks the City Council to consider a multi‑year deployment and a vendor contract that staff plans to return to the council for a final vote on May 20.

The plan would replace the city’s older, one‑way remote reading meters with two‑way AMI meters that report hourly (or more frequent) consumption to pole‑mounted collectors and a cloud database. Rick, the consultant who led the RFP work, told the council the city’s existing system is aging and a portion of meters are more than 10 years old. “About 20% of the meters are more than 10 years old,” he said, and noted a failure rate “right around 3 percent.”

Why it matters: Staff and the consultant said AMI can reduce routine drive time for meter reads and reconnects, provide customers hourly consumption detail through a web portal, speed outage detection and restoration, support power‑quality alarms and tamper detection, and give utility planners neighborhood‑level load data.

Key details: The RFP team evaluated multiple vendors across roughly 750 requirements, weighing cost at 35% of the score. The recommended vendor is Eaton Power Systems; the preferred meter model in the proposal is an Itron meter. Estimated one‑time and recurring costs shown to council fell in a range staff described on the presentation as roughly $3.4 million to $4.0 million distributed over a three‑year deployment window. Rick said vendors proposed the system to reach “99.9% of the meters every day” with readings approximately hourly.

Council concerns focused on costs, who pays, staffing impacts and rollout timing. Council members asked whether the electric fund or ratepayers would cover the cost and whether operational staff reductions were expected. City staff confirmed the project would be paid from the electric fund and noted the system is listed in the electric division’s CIP. On staffing, staff said a fiscal analysis with quantified labor savings will be in the full staff report on May 20; the consultant said some utilities project reduction of positions over time but that specifics depend on operational decisions.

Data security and ownership: Council asked where meter data would be stored. Rick said the vendor’s architecture stores meter reads in a secured cloud database and that “the data belongs to the city. Eaton is the firm that maintains the quality of that data, the security of that data,” and that the vendor proposed an Oracle database.

Next steps: Staff and the consultant recommended proceeding to finalize contract terms and to present a full staff report, fiscal analysis and the contract to council for action at the May 20 meeting. No contract was signed or approved at the May 6 meeting.

Ending: Council directed staff to bring back the final contract and fiscal study on May 20 so members could act with detailed cost and labor‑savings projections.