Wrightstown, Green Bay, Wisconsin have some major water infrastructure projects on the horizon – most importantly, a new water pipeline to source water from the nearby lake.
Wrightstown has qualified for a construction loan, federally funded, which would finance the 12-mile pipeline, along with metering stations to measure the town’s water consumption.
The debate is now whether to “Buy American” or to import the materials needed from offshore suppliers.
The Green Bay Press-Gazette reports:
“Now members of the Village Board must decide whether to take the savings or spend more money to support American manufacturers when building a pipeline to Green Bay’s municipal water system.
Village Administrator Stephen Johnson said it is a tough decision for officials whose preference generally is to buy American.
“There’s a lot of pressure to want to do that,” he said. “But then the bottom line is you’ve got to look to your rate-payers.”
When building and maintaining infrastructure, does it matter whether or not the materials are supporting local manufacturers?
Wrightstown is not the only place to consider this important question.
Inframanage.com notes that municipal and utility authorities create a marketplace with their procurement choices.
Procurement is an integral part of your lifecycle management strategies in infrastructure asset management practice and can be considered in such areas as professional service delivery, project management, operations and maintenance, construction, and materials
In each of these areas, the objective is to deliver optimal long-term value and delivery of the agreed levels of service to customers and the community.
Achieving this may not necessarily be by taking the lowest price.
Analysis of your procurement within a framework of providing optimal long-term value will provide guidance to the sort of questions that Wrightstown is considering.
PHOTO CREDIT: “WrightstownWisconsinSignWIS96” by Royalbroil – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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