 We've got major problems throughout the state with utility delays. Additional costs of the project and project time overrides. Utilities by and large are looked at as an inconvenience. Especially from a government point of view, it's just either on or right away get them out of there. I think nationwide the perception is that the utility companies are not responsive. They're always going to be a problem. There's nothing we can do about it. We just have to live with it. There has to be a paradigm shift. We can't do business as usual. I say there is something we can do about it. We need the utilities, we need the roads. But you need to be a team and work together to get it done. They all have to come together and work together. The good working relationships are the secret to the whole thing. Good coordination, good cooperation, good communication, what we call the CCC effort. They can work. You can make it work. A study done by Penn State University for the AASHTO Highway Subcommittee on Construction found what many have long suspected, that utility-related problems are the leading cause of delays to road construction projects. With record capital improvement programs coinciding with utility mergers and downsizing, with increasing numbers of providers wanting access to already congested rights of way, making the effort to avoid delays is more essential today than ever before. The bottom line is we're working for the taxpayers. You know, it might be a rate payer, well, the taxpayers are the rate payers. Projects should be done with a consideration of overall lowest cost method to do a project, not what's cheapest for the DOT, not what's cheapest for the utility, but overall low cost of a project. We need to work together with each other. We need a lot of communication, a lot of cooperation and coordination. And make sure that our goal is to have a good project at a reasonable cost on a timely matter. One, two, three, go! To reduce delivery time, decrease costs and improve quality in the utility relocation process, frequent coordination and communication amongst all the stakeholders must take place early and often. I'd like to see more of an effort placed on an invitation to utilities on the front end stage of development of projects. Typically we get into what's known as the 90% stage, and by then the corridors have been defined where right away drainage, et cetera, whatever infrastructure is being taken place, has already been defined and utilities are sort of an afterthought. The right-of-ways are very congested nowadays. It takes a lot of pre-planning. Even if they are moving at no cost, we still have an obligation to give them lots of notice so that they can budget for that work. We try to coordinate ten, five years in advance and it starts at the public hearing stage. We invite utilities to the public hearing. We're also inviting the local agencies there because they are impacted. The water, the sewer, a lot of cities and counties now are owning fiber city electric facilities. They are a major player as far as utilities. We treat railroads a lot of times on construction projects just like utilities. There's relocation work, there's inspection track protection requirements, and all that has to be coordinated effectively, where else you can have a delay from the railroads just like you would a utility delay on a project. What ride-os are we in? How many fees? It's important to set up meetings with them throughout both planning and design. Throughout planning where we're just doing general alignment configurations and then all through design, we have milestones that we set, 30% design, 65% design, and 95% design. We have meetings with all the utility companies at each stage of design to make sure that they are updated on what we're doing and we can coordinate with them and then try and avoid their conflicts if we can. If we're in the planning stage and we plan a road to miss some of these major utilities, well, you're a couple steps ahead right there. In order to plan and design around existing utilities, agencies must first know where the utilities are located. Well, one of the things that we're doing is kind of new is subsurface utility engineering. The department's taking an advanced step, if you will, in a pre-construction phase as far as locating the existing utilities out in the right-of-way in our area of our projects. Previously, we came in early in the design process when the initial survey was being done and we marked on the surface of the ground the location of all the utilities. We refer to that as quality level B information. It's designating. Now that we've reached a point in the design where we know where the structures are going, we're back here doing what's called quality level A work, which is the actual locating and exposure of those utilities at the conflict points. So we're using our vacuum excavation truck and we're exposing utilities and surveying their exact horizontal location in vertical depth. Some folks may ask, why do you spend this money up front in your pre-construction process when it really should be the utility companies who spend in that money? Well, at an advanced stage of that process, we're getting level A information, which we actually do, determine the elevation underground of the utility and we can actually plot those facilities and compare those to our proposed drainage structures. And if it works out that we can miss those, then that saves the rate payer and they're also the same folks that are taxpayers. So it's good for all the parties involved. Where the value comes in is during construction and after construction. The Federal Highway Administration commissioned Purdue University and that study proved and was documented that they saved $4.62 for every dollar spent on subsurface utility engineering. It's a national disgrace, the amounts of money we spend to relocate utilities that really don't need to be relocated, that could be designed around if the designers had this good subsurface utility engineering information and used it. And subsurface utility engineering is just one of the tools that allows us to avoid claims, delays and litigation, and everybody wins in the end. It's a win-win situation. The State of Wisconsin has passed legislation that mandates the communication and coordination process and the timeframes in which it must occur. It really just formalized what we were trying to do anyway. It has requirements for both the DOT and for utility companies and for contractors. The bulk of it is between the communication between DOT and the utility companies during the design phase. But this law requires us to give them a certain number of days to do their work, their design work, so we can't condense that. It requires the utility companies to develop a work plan and they also are required to follow that work plan. Where are their facilities? When are they going to relocate them? How are they going to relocate them? Is there going to be work that's concurrent with the highway contractor? Maybe there's a gas line crossing the road and they're going to wait for the road surface to be removed before they go in and lower that gas line. We have to put that type of thing into special provisions. If there is going to be concurrent work, it should be spelled out in the contract documents how all this work is going to be phased between the contractor and the utility company so everybody has a clear understanding when they bid to project what the expectations are. Unrealistic expectations on the part of transportation agencies are a valid concern of the utility industry. Often DOT personnel simply don't have knowledge of the challenges inherent in utility relocation. They feel that we gave them the plans two weeks ago. What's the problem? Why aren't they relocating? They don't understand the process that a utility company has to go through to develop a plan and to schedule the funds and to buy the right of way to get out of the way much the same as we do to build a highway project. A big thing is they have to look at it from a system perspective so we might be asking them to relocate a mile of cable on a highway project but that's part of a 10 mile piece of cable that they have to look at. Transmission lines, these are the high power lines, high voltage and it takes more time to coordinate those lines to be relocated. It requires a lot of upfront coordination in our part the industry to make sure that we can get those lines released to do the work. Acquiring the material, it's time consuming, doing the engineering is time consuming. That it may take up to 18 months for instance to get a fabricated steel tower pole or for that matter a telephone cable may take up to a year to get the type of cable that's required. Lead times to move major telecom cables and things like that have added to the situation. Then too, we're not really given the opportunity to say okay, this is a major concern for us. A lot of times we've got umbilical facilities that are serving communities that once we cut that off then you know that service becomes a real big problem for the residents. We also have to work around other utilities also and the structures that the DOT would be installing as in traffic signal poles, mast arms, their signage, stuff like that. One of the problems we have is a utility is ready for relocation but we don't have all the right of what it requires. And being a power company you can't just go out there and relocate three poles, skip five, and go back to three again or something like that. Late changes to plans and proposed projects that may not receive funding for construction are also of legitimate concern to utilities. We've taken a major PR effort to make a commitment to them on certain projects that we're committed to do it. If we ask you to design early and we make changes, we're willing to accept that responsibility and pay for those redesign costs. The changes that take place before the projects let are not the problems. The changes that take place once it's let become problems. When you change drainage or you change curb design or you change the flow of an outlet, it could conflict with what we've already done. But then when it goes to construction then we have to deal with a different department of the DOT which is their construction department and plus deal with a contractor that may be wanting to change different things out there like how they build the project. Inviting utilities to pre-construction meetings and encouraging or requiring them to attend regular meetings during the construction phase can greatly reduce conflicts, costs, and delays. We have scheduled at least weekly meetings with the utility companies and the contractors making sure everybody is singing off the same page of the songbook. That's proven very, very helpful. Well, communication is the key in cooperation. Communication, communicating with the utility owners, them communicating with us, and them cooperating with us. And also being truthful. If you can't move the stuff, tell us the truth. Let us know when you can and then we'll be covered in a contract. But don't tell us you can move it before the contract is let and still be out here six months after the contract is let. That's when problems arise. And so I would add a C to that. The three C's is commitment. You have to commit. Everybody has a part that they have to keep up their commitments you coordinate, you cooperate, you make a lot of promises. But without commitment, you don't follow through. Some states are finding that making other changes to project development, design, and contract processes can also help to avoid delays and reduce costs. Basically through email, microstation, we were able to send CAD files back and forth, our design files back and forth between our utility companies and our consultants a lot quicker, pull it up on their computer and look at it to make sure there were no conflicts in order to try and facilitate communication and get the design done a lot faster. One of our biggest successes here at VDOT is we have just come out where we will pay, regardless of who pays for construction relocation, we will pay for the preliminary engineering cost. We taught to the DOT on projects where we were entitled to reimbursement when they acquired a ride-away for us when they acquired their ride-away. One of the things that we have been doing for utility companies is we will stake the right-of-way in Wisconsin now or mark the right-of-way so that when they go out to relocate their facilities, they are relocated to the proper location. We prefer to pay the utility to go in and do their own selective clearing in advance of all work. It's in the department and the public's interest to pay a utility when they wouldn't be eligible to receive payment. We've been pretty successful here recently on using the joint-use program. We're becoming more and more successful on getting them all together and having one trench installed where all utilities can be placed in that area. Trenchess technology is something that we at DOT have accepted no more payment cuts. It is used all over the state nothing but just tremendous results. There's some boring equipment now that can be performed long distances and not disrupt the payment and have a good installation and also avoid other utilities that may be already installed. We do have some contractors that are doing the construction work and do the utility location at the same time such as your water lines, sewer lines and maybe some mining utilities. By having it in the contract in other words the contractor doesn't have to coordinate with a third party and so there's a benefit there but of course we're going to pay our contractor for his overhead and for his for the convenience of having him do the work. The internet and worldwide web technologies are being used by some states to expand their communication efforts Face-to-face communication however remains one of the most effective means of coordinating activities and developing cooperative working relationships. Florida's Department of Transportation's Procedures require the designers, the engineers to actually have a LAISON program. Part of that LAISON program is the Florida Utilities Coordinating Committee. We're part of the team. We're jumping into a JPA Our state meeting meets every quarter and it's a great forum and we get to error differences with the DOT with each other. We have speakers come in we're kept current with federal laws state law. You get to meet people from different industries you get to talk to them. I'm a pretty local company where Florida Power & Light might be all up and down the coast and I get to see how they might have handled something in a different area if it's a construction problem. The more you understand to put yourself on the other person's shoes the more you can appreciate the problems that they're having and it makes it easier to express the issues that you're having with their facilities. Finally improved coordination communication and cooperation are needed among the various divisions within transportation agencies including upper management as well as among consultants and the industry. Even some of our managers who set schedules have to have a clear understanding of what's involved in a particular project. We have a big turnover within our own department within the utility industry and within the contracting industry a lot of new people new players involved. In essence now we have highway consultants working with utility consultants to try and bring these projects online in a timely manner. And it's constantly training these people and reminding them of what the process is and how they should be interacting throughout the project development process from the beginning of design all the way through construction. We need to coordinate. If you're very proactive and you work with utility companies they're willing to work with you. It's all a cooperative effort to do that you've got to communicate a lot and we say good CCC early and often. If you want to make it happen it'll happen you can make it work. For more information contact your local FHWA division office.