Albany council exempts purchase of automatic water meters from competitive bidding; $6.3 million plan approved

The Albany City Council on Wednesday approved a resolution exempting the purchase and installation of automatic metering infrastructure, or AMI, for the city's water system, a project staff said will cost roughly $6.3 million over five years.

City water operations manager Scott LaRocque told the council the system would move the city from once-a-month manual meter reads to near-real-time reads. The AMI meters, LaRocque said, allow earlier detection of customer-side leaks and provide better data to measure system water loss.

LaRocque said Albany has been installing AMI-ready Sensus iPerl meters for more than a decade, but those units require an additional transmitter and can be large enough that older meter boxes must be replaced. He recommended switching to smaller Camstrup meters, which he said fit older boxes, include built-in transmit capability and include per-meter leak detection that helps locate leaks on mains.

The council heard details and examples from neighboring Beaverton, which LaRocque said is about halfway through its AMI deployment and reported finding large leaks with Camstrup meters, including one the city estimated at 11 gallons per minute (about 5.8 million gallons per year).

LaRocque said Albany produces about 3,000,000,000 gallons of water annually and currently estimates water loss at about 9 to 10 percent. He said reducing loss even by 1 percentage point would save around 30,000,000 gallons a year and that the city estimates a production cost on the order of $10,000 per million gallons.

Cost and funding: LaRocque presented a five-year cost of about $6.3 million. He said roughly $370,000 of that would be equipment purchased for the city of Millersburg, which contracts with Albany for distribution services and would reimburse Albany for that portion. He said the city set aside about $1 million in a reserve fund last year and budgets annual meter replacement spending (about $250,000) that would also contribute to the program. He said the AMI vendor subscription is roughly $58,000 per year and that meter units in the procurement package average about $319 for a commonly used 3/4-inch model. The city has purchased about 30 Camstrup meters for field testing, he said.

Council questions focused on timing, meter life and staffing. LaRocque said the city hopes to complete the rollout in five years using city crews, noting Camstrup's smaller meter footprint should reduce the need to replace meter boxes. He said Camstrup meters typically are warrantied up to 20 years and that large-diameter Camstrup meters allow battery replacement without pulling the full meter in some sizes.

Action: Councilor Smith moved to adopt the resolution exempting the AMI purchase and installation from competitive bidding; the motion was seconded and passed by voice vote.

Why it matters: City staff and multiple councilors framed AMI as a long-term investment to reduce treated water loss, speed customer leak notification and extend the useful life of treatment and distribution assets. LaRocque said better data would also make the city's calculation of water loss more precise and could reduce recurring operating costs.

Implementation and next steps: LaRocque said procurement would piggyback on Beaverton's competitive process, allowing Albany to avoid a full separate procurement. He said antennas and some installation work would be performed by a contractor partner and that vendor training for utility billing and field crews is included in the package. LaRocque also said Camstrup meters for small sizes are manufactured in the U.S. (Georgia) and that the vendor offers a system to aggregate reads and leak alerts for staff use.

Provenance: Council discussion of the AMI resolution and staff presentation began with the meeting's agenda item introduction at 878.25995 seconds into the transcript and concluded with the council vote recorded at 2242.825 seconds.