Springfield service director says city at middle of multi-year water meter upgrade

Service Director Chris Moore told the Springfield City Commission during a work session that the city has reached a midpoint in a multi-year effort to replace aging residential and commercial water meters with advanced metering infrastructure.

“We're here, kind of celebrating the halfway point of our water meter upgrade,” Moore said, describing a program launched two years ago. He said the meters were “30 plus years old” and failing at a high rate, motivating the replacement effort.

Moore said the new meters send data through neighborhood repeaters to a base station on the city’s water tower and into a central database. Readings are transmitted twice daily—at 1 a.m. and 1 p.m.—and the system can send leak, freeze and dry-pipe alerts. Staff said the technology will allow customers to receive leak alerts and will help utility billing staff and field crews identify problem services more quickly.

Staff provided replacement targets for the program’s rollout and current status during the presentation. Moore said, “We've replaced 11,586,” and in the same explanation also referenced “11,900 meters remaining to be replaced.” That phrasing was not clarified in the meeting; staff later agreed to provide a clarified count to commission staff after the session.

Moore said the city has been prioritizing routes for replacements and has shifted some resources to commercial meters, which are logistically trickier. He described the installation process as typically taking 10–15 minutes for an in-home swap and as faster when meters are in pits or outside the house.

On durability and lifecycle, Moore said the new meters have expected lives in the “20 year range.” He contrasted that with older mechanical meters that began failing and “slow down” over time, contributing to underreported water flow.

Moore also said a regulatory requirement from U.S. EPA requires the city to document service-line materials on both the city and property-owner sides of service lines. He said the meter upgrade offers an opportunity to record whether services are copper, galvanized or lead, information the city must report to state and federal regulators.

Commissioners asked about customer notification procedures for inside versus outside meters, timing for finishing the second half of replacements (Moore said about two more years, barring supply-chain issues), and whether the AMI system could control water flow (Moore answered it does not; it is metering and telemetry only).

The presentation included demonstrations of the meter dashboard and examples where the system detected houses using anomalously large amounts of water; staff said those alerts led to two vacant properties being remotely identified and the water turned off to prevent loss.

Next steps noted to the commission included continuing route-based installation, meeting logistics for commercial meters, and finalizing an accurate consolidated count of meters replaced and remaining.