This year, Hoyle, Tanner won two awards for the ACEC/VT Engineering Excellence Awards (EEA) competition. The first award was a Merit award under the studies, planning, and consulting category for this project. The second award was Grand award, with only five projects selected for this award type. The Merit winner was the Stormwater Infrastructure Assessment & Capital Budget Report for the Town of Colchester, Vermont, and the Hadley Road Infrastructure Improvements Project for the City of South Burlington, Vermont and Champlain Water District received the Grand Award under the environmental category.
Merit Award Winning Project
The Town of Colchester, with funding provided through the CCRPC Unified Planning Work Program, completed Vermont’s first integration of Zoom Camera technology for a town-wide stormwater system condition assessment. A Zoom Camera is a camera on a pole, allowing for a faster and cheaper sewer inspection. For this project, we inspected of the Town’s public-owned stormwater system. This project integrated a mix of new techniques and technical disciplines including zoom camera technology, GIS, asset management, stormwater and roadway engineering, operations, maintenance, capital project planning, and stormwater utility management. The effort required processing and organizing massive amounts of data and developing an Excel-based capital planning tool that allows for informed decisions to be made on future stormwater system investment.
Since the completion of this project, several other neighboring communities are using a similar approach to collect this municipal-wide stormwater system data. Zoom camera technology has proven to be the most cost-effective (and fastest) way to collect this large amount of data and determine where planning efforts are best spent for the municipally-owned stormwater systems.
Grand Award Winning Project
Our design team developed an engineering alternative to disconnect the Hadley Road Sanitary Sewer Service Area from the City of Burlington sanitary sewer collection system. The goal was to reroute the Hadley Road Sanitary Sewer Service Area to the City of South Burlington collection system for treatment at the Bartlett Bay WWTF, thereby eliminating the annual payment for treatment, yielding short- and long-term capital benefits to the City. Complex coordination involving three utility owners (the City, Champlain Water District, and City of Burlington) and four types of infrastructure (drinking water, wastewater, stormwater, and transportation) greatly enhanced the cost effectiveness of the project, providing more reliable infrastructure for all three utilities under one project.
Project coordination involved multiple funding and regulatory agencies including the VT Clean Water State Revolving Fund and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds programs, DEC Facilities Engineering Division, Watershed Management Division, Drinking Water and Groundwater Protection Division and VTrans. The Design Team was successful in assisting the City with obtaining $700,000 in grant funding and $2.4 million in loan funding.
Project Management for Environmental Engineering
Both Projects were managed by John Reilly, PE. Mr. Reilly has over 28 years of experience with the technical management of multidisciplinary teams engaged in planning, design, refurbishment and management of drinking water, stormwater, and wastewater infrastructure.
