Baltimore County, MD Hello Baltimore County, 2 Nov 2016

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From YouTube: In the Trenches Every Day: Hello Baltimore County November 2016

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Public Works Director Steve Walsh shares some surprising stats on the work Department of Public Works does to keep our daily lives on track.

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Welcome to hello, baltimore county., I'm your host, ellen kobler. when it comes to maintaining and upgrading critical infrastructure.

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Like roads, bridges,, sewers, and storm drains,, baltimore county has been ahead of the curve.

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under county executive, kevin kamenetz's, administration,.

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This commitment to investing in these basic resources has been unprecedented.

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Here, to tell us about why this is so important is director of public works, steve walsh.?

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Thank you so much for joining us., thanks for having me. all right,. So infrastructure is kind of a fancy word,, but the department of public works is the one part of local government.

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That touches people's lives every day..

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Can you give us a quick overview of what you and your team handle?.

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Sure., we have a very large department, --.

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Almost 900 people work for the department of public works, -- broken up into five bureaus..

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We have the bureau of highways, who handles roadway maintenance;.

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We have the bureau of utilities that handles subsurface utility maintenance.

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All right, say that in a non-engineer way. [laughs].

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Sewers... sewers and storm drains.

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We have the bureau of utilities that handles sewers and storm drains.

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We have a bureau of traffic engineering that handles roadway safety items.

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Such as traffic signals,, roadway, markings, and signs.

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We have a bureau of solid waste that handles trash and trash removal.

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And recycling. and recycling. yeah., and we have a bureau of engineering and construction, which handles the planning, design, and construction of replacement infrastructure.

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for all of the above. for all of the above, correct.

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Great. okay, and baltimore county's a really big place.

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And you've brought with you some pretty impressive facts and figures.

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To give us a sense of that scope., what do you say? We start with roads?. I think everybody knows that dpw plows snow.

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What else involving the roads?.

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Sure, absolutely. well, the county is huge.. The county is almost 600 square miles in area., so we have 2,700 center line miles of roadway,.

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Which is equal to 6,000 lane miles of roads.

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Okay. so,, when you think about it,, the united states is 3,000 miles. Wide.

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So, we have 6,000 individual lane miles of road that we have to take care of.

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So,, when they're out plowing the snow or filling pot holes,.

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It's as though they go all the way to california and back. [laughing].

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Absolutely., it's a huge,, huge piece of infrastructure. okay, that is pretty big.

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We'll fill 50,000 potholes in a year. fifty-thousand.

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After a bad winter., yeah.

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And when you think about a road, think about all of the things that are with that road.

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uh huh. think about the storm drains under the road.. We have 1,600 miles of storm drains that drain roadways.

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We have roadway markings that go along with that road.

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We have signs, traffic, signs,, 100,000, plus traffic signs.

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uh Huh, and they're, all bigger than they look.

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Absolutely. we have 400 traffic signals.

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Four-Hundred? okay. four-hundred traffic signals.

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And bridges, too, right?.

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Bridges, absolutely. we handle bridges.

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Six-Hundred sixty four bridges over eight feet: wide.

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Over 20 feet wide, we have 330 bridges, the most county-owned bridges over 20 feet in the state of maryland.

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Huh, okay. and our bridge program is excellent..

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We require to inspect bridges every two years as part of a federal mandate.

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We actually inspect the smaller bridges on that same schedule,, just to make sure everything's appropriate and we invest money.

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Into fixing the bridges and obviously planning for.

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The replacement of the ones that need replacing.

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Okay,, so people can feel pretty confident about the bridges.

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And the roads in baltimore, county. absolutely.. Another thing we do with the roads is the spring of every year.

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We do an inspection of every road in baltimore, county and rate them.

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And from those ratings we develop our resurfacing program, --.

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Plan, what is to be done in that fiscal year.

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The county executive has done a great job is acknowledging.

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That infrastructure investment is important.

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And he has given us $100 million over a five-year period.

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To invest in roadway resurfacing, a really important program,.

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Because, like you said in the beginning,, people use these roads every day.

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And our citizens deserve good condition. Roads.

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Okay, and what about keeping moving on those roads?.

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Everybody hates traffic.. What do you do about improving the traffic flow?

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traffic,? We do the best we can with making sure.

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That our traffic devices are working properly., so we have inspectors going out and making sure they are working.

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We respond to complaints about congestion.

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And we do our best to try to alleviate that where we can.

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We might look at physical improvements to an intersection., maybe we want to add a bypass lane or a turn. Lane.

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And where we can, we will plan and budget for those improvements.

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On the other hand,, a lot of our folks try to tell us.

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That people are driving too fast in their neighborhoods.

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ah, yes. so,. We will work with the police department where we can to improve enforcement on certain roads.

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And we also have a program called the traffic calming program where we will look at a road to see if it qualifies and if it does qualify,, we will look into physical improvements.

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To alleviate traffic-- or alleviate speed in a certain neighborhood --.

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A traffic speed, hump or a choker device --.

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Some kind of physical improvement which will help that situation.

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Okay,, and that means where the sidewalks kind of bump out.

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To make people slow, down. yes,, it's a very popular program., our citizens, like it a lot.

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Great! all right,. Now, let's move to the ultimate dirty jobs.

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Explain to us what happens when we flush and put things down the drain.

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And how the sewers work and what you do to upgrade and maintain the system.

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Big, big piece of infrastructure.

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Thirty-One hundred miles of sewer lines in the county.

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A hundred thirty-seven pumping stations in the county.

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In 2005,, the county entered into an agreement with the state.

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And the federal government to improve the county sewer system.

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With the ultimate goal of reducing sanitary sewer, overflows.

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Okay. and that laid out the plan, which the county is in the midst of right, now.

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The beginning of it was certain operational things that we needed to have in place,, and we were on our way to having those anyway.

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But the first part of it was a work order, management, system,.

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Which has been fantastic., the other one was actually mapping our sewer system to the point where every piece of sewer in our system has a unique identifier.

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Really? within our geographic information system.

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So it's all sort of about efficiency, huh?.

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Absolutely -- efficiency and making sure we know what's happening with our system.

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The initial part of the consent decree was for pump station improvements.

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So,, our sewer pump stations were evaluated., all old equipment was logged and categorized.

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and new projects were done to improve those pumping stations.

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After that,, we did investigations into the condition of our sewers.

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We actually had to do closed-circuit television of our sewers.

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To see the condition of them, number one, and to see whether there was any infiltration.

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One thing we do not want is to have rain fall infiltration into our sewers.

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Because it takes up capacity.

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So you put little cameras: down. absolutely., interesting.,.

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We also did hydraulic modeling to make sure,.

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Or to see where our deficiencies were -- capacity, deficiencies.

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So, over the last number of years, we've been developing. These plans,.

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Which basically identify the work we need to do in the sewer system county-wide, and over the next few years.

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We will be developing projects to fix the deficiencies.

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Found in the study part of it. so overall, the sewer program,, we will have spent over a billion dollars.

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From the 2005, by the time it's over in improving the sewer system.

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To the point, where we're very comfortable with the way it operates.

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All right,, so you and your engineers are working very hard to make the system work. So all the rest of us can not even think about it.

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We like that. absolutely.

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in the minute we have left,, everybody loves recycling, --.

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Not so much trash --, but that's where you have some really huge numbers.

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Tell us about the pick-ups that your department does.

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Well, there's 300,000 unique places where trash is picked up in the county.

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Homes and businesses... homes, correct.

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Well, you figure, the county has 830,000 people,, so it makes that there would be about 300,000 pick-ups.

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The county will do 43 million unique trash pick-ups in a year.

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Forty-Three million!.

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It's a huge number of trash pick-ups when you think about it., and our bureau of solid waste does a great job in managing those pick-ups with very little complaints..

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And the big number,, when you really think about it,.

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Is the county processes and-- 900 million tons of trash.

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Come through county trash facilities in a year.

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And is that trash and recycling combined? trash and recycling combined. okay.? How is recycling going in the county? recycling is going great.

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In 2013,, the county built a facility in cockeysville.

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Which segregates and sorts county recyclables.

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And what we do is we sell that product on the open, market.

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What that does is a great thing, because the county actually makes a little money as opposed to paying for those recyclables.

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Going into the landfill or going, you know, out of state.

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So,, it's a great,, great program., it's very environmentally friendly.

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and it just makes sense from a business standpoint. okay. all right,. Well, it sounds like almost everything.

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That your department does is about protecting the environment -- with the trash,, the sewers,, all of that..

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So thank you very much for what you guys do and thank you for coming here to talk to us about it.. Thank you very much., and thank you for watching hello, baltimore county..

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You can learn more about these topics and others on the county website.

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And by connecting with baltimore county government on facebook and twitter., we'll see you next time. (, ♪♪♪ ).