Key Takeaways:
- Who: Ontario municipalities looking to strengthen asset management planning, Levels of Service, and long-term infrastructure decision-making.
- What: A Q&A from Momentum 2026 featuring perspectives from County of Essex, Loyalist Township, and Horton Township on how asset management is evolving.
- Benefit: Learn how municipalities are using better data, budgeting alignment, and climate resilience planning to make more informed investment decisions.
At Momentum 2026, PSD Citywide’s annual user conference in June, one of the discussion panels focused on a familiar question for Ontario municipalities:
“How do you move asset management planning from a compliance requirement into everyday decision-making?”
Ontario municipal asset management has matured under O. Reg. 588/17. The next phase is using asset management planning to inform infrastructure planning, municipal budgeting, and long-term service level decisions in real time.
Three professionals sat down to answer that question, each from a different seat at the table:
- Heidi McLeod, Manager of Accounting – Administration and Deputy Treasurer, County of Essex
- Alex Scott, Asset Management and Strategic Initiatives Coordinator, Loyalist Township
- Adam Knapp, Asset Manager, Horton Township
Together, they discussed the pressures Ontario municipalities are navigating right now: aging data, limited staff capacity, climate risk, and the need to make asset management something staff actually use, not just something they do once and then file away.
Q: What does the next phase of asset management look like in your municipality?
Heidi McLeod: For the County of Essex, the next four years are going to be focused on a few different areas for improvement. The most important is the alignment of our asset lifecycle with our budgetary requests. Historically, the timing of budget funding to replace or rehabilitate our assets was generally driven by our department heads or by the asset owners, with subsequent Asset Management Plans (AMPs) being adjusted to match this timing.
Alex Scott: For me, the next phase of asset management is about moving beyond compliance and embedding asset management into everyday municipal decision-making. Most Ontario municipalities have developed their AMPs and Levels of Service frameworks across Ontario municipal asset management programs. The focus now is on using that information to guide capital investment decisions, long-term financial planning, service delivery, and climate resilience initiatives.
Adam Knapp: The next phase of asset management in Horton Township is moving from compliance to continuous improvement. Our focus has been building internal capacity so that staff can assess assets, update condition information, and make informed decisions without relying heavily on outside consultants.
Q: What is your biggest current challenge?
McLeod: The biggest current challenge continues to be human resource-related. We all face the saving pressures of how to do more with less and make the most of every tax dollar. Time is scarce, and therefore, continuing to improve our asset data, managing new growth, and ensuring alignment between the corporate budget and AMP places increasing pressure on our team’s workload.
Scott: Overcoming what I would call asset management fatigue. Many staff have been through multiple iterations of AMPs, asset inventories, condition assessments, and data collection exercises. After a while, it’s easy to see asset management as just another reporting requirement rather than something that actually improves how we do our jobs.
Knapp: Ensuring that asset data remains current and meaningful.
Asset management is not a document that sits on a shelf — it needs to be updated continuously so that Council and staff are making decisions based on today’s conditions, not assumptions from five years ago.
Q: How are AMP and Levels of Service influencing capital planning and budgeting today?
McLeod: The focus can now shift toward ensuring that the corporate budget requests accurately match the lifecycle that was set out in the AMP. Long-term financial planning is also becoming an easier task, with our long-range capital plans consolidated into one comprehensive report that gets updated regularly.
Scott: We’re not at the point where our AMP and Levels of Service are driving every capital decision, but they’re becoming much more influential each budget cycle and in municipal budgeting discussions. Historically, many capital decisions were driven by asset age or by waiting until an asset had deteriorated into very poor condition before it became a priority.
Today, asset management is giving us better information about condition, lifecycle needs, risks, and long-term funding requirements, resulting in more informed discussions during budget deliberations.
Knapp: Asset management and Levels of Service have become the foundation of our budgeting process. Rather than responding to the loudest voice or the most recent complaint, we prioritize investments based on asset condition, risk, and service expectations.
Having a long-term framework helps Council and staff stay focused on shared objectives while providing transparency to residents about why projects are prioritized.
Q: What helped asset management move beyond reports into daily workflows?
McLeod: Beginning in 2021, we established an AMP Steering Committee that includes representatives from each of the county’s main functional departments. Our Infrastructure Services group has recently implemented Citywide Maintenance, which opens the door for future AMPs to be more of a joint effort between finance and our infrastructure experts.
Scott: Our goal is for asset information to routinely inform maintenance, renewal, and operational decisions, not just annual budget discussions.
That’s when asset management truly becomes part of the organization’s culture rather than a planning exercise; when it ties asset management planning directly to daily work.
Knapp: The biggest change was integrating asset management into our daily operations through our maintenance management system. Every inspection, maintenance activity, and condition assessment contributes to the asset record. That means asset management is no longer something we review every five years — it’s part of the work staff perform every day.
Q: What practical change delivered tangible value?
McLeod: Our shared responsibility for our asset management program will not only spread the workload but will allow for a more comprehensive, realistic plan which can be maintained in a timely manner rather than just updated when the regulations require it to be, including updates mandated by O. Reg. 588/17.
Scott: One practical change has been developing a Corporate Capital Project Prioritization Policy that formally integrates asset management principles into our capital planning process.
Rather than treating the AMP as a standalone document, the policy incorporates key asset management concepts including, asset risk ratings, lifecycle planning, preventive maintenance, and long-term financial sustainability into how projects are evaluated and prioritized. It moves asset management from being a reporting exercise to becoming part of the municipality’s decision-making process.
Knapp: In 2019, we shifted our focus from a traditional lifecycle replacement model to an asset preservation strategy for our road network. Rather than waiting for roads to deteriorate and require major reconstruction, we invested in maintenance treatments designed to extend service life.
The results have been significant.
Our projected infrastructure funding gap improved from approximately 2% with a 15-year phase-in period in 2022 to 0.4% with a 10-year phase-in period in 2025.
That data reinforced that preservation is the most cost-effective capital strategy available to municipalities.
Q: How are climate impacts affecting asset priorities?
McLeod: For now, we’re mostly reacting to emergencies, but we are starting to factor climate impacts into rehabilitation planning where we can. We’re exploring better materials for shoulders and slope protection in flood-prone areas, using recycled asphalt to improve durability and reduce washout risk, adding subdrains in bridge and culvert work, and expanding preventive maintenance to help assets better withstand freeze-thaw cycles.
Scott: Climate change is increasingly influencing how we assess risk and prioritize investments. We’re seeing more frequent extreme rainfall events matching or exceeding the 100 year design storm, increasing drought conditions, temperature fluctuations, flooding, and severe storms, all of which can accelerate asset deterioration and increase service disruptions.
The challenge is moving from reacting to climate impacts after they occur to proactively building resilience into our renewal and replacement decisions and advancing climate resilience through infrastructure planning.
Knapp: Regardless of how climate trends evolve, our approach is to focus on climate resilience. We assess assets based on condition, risk, and potential consequences of failure, and we design, maintain, and replace infrastructure with extreme weather scenarios in mind.
Asset management helps us identify where climate-related risks could affect service delivery and prioritize investments accordingly.
Q: How are you balancing renewal, growth, and resiliency?
McLeod: The County of Essex has recently finalized an agreement with its seven local municipalities to finance the renewal of our county-wide active transportation system. As we don’t currently have funding specifically set aside for this, we’re working to develop a financing plan that will ensure we can continue to provide this service to our residents and visitors.
Scott: That’s probably one of the most difficult conversations municipalities are having today. We have aging infrastructure that requires ongoing renewal, we are a fast-growing community, and we’re maintaining taxes at reasonable rates.
The reality is that municipalities rarely have enough funding to do everything at once. The goal is finding the right balance between maintaining existing assets, supporting necessary growth, and making strategic investments that reduce long-term risk and costs through coordinated infrastructure planning.
Knapp: Balancing renewal, growth, and resiliency starts with having good asset data and clear policies. A well-developed, current asset registry simplifies processes like Development Charge Background Studies and makes it easier to align strategies across the organization.
Q: What risks concern you most over the next 3-5 years?
McLeod: The biggest risks for us are financial sustainability, the growing infrastructure gap, and organizational capacity. We’re under pressure from inflation, limited regional competition, and rising replacement costs, while also needing to balance growth-related spending with renewal of existing assets.
Scott: I see three key risks: financial sustainability, the growing infrastructure gap, and our organizational capacity. Construction costs, operating costs, and infrastructure replacement costs continue to rise faster than many municipal revenue sources.
The biggest risk, though, is not a specific asset failure — it’s making long-term decisions without fully understanding the service, financial, and risk implications.
Knapp: One of the biggest risks facing municipalities is the growing gap between infrastructure responsibilities and available funding sources.
Municipalities continue to face increasing service expectations, aging infrastructure, inflationary pressures, and regulatory requirements.
The better we understand asset condition, risk, and lifecycle costs, the better positioned we are to maximize the life of our infrastructure and make informed investment decisions.
Q: How are you addressing staffing constraints and knowledge transfer?
McLeod: Shared responsibility across departments will allow for a more comprehensive, realistic plan that can be maintained on an ongoing basis, and it means more staff develop an understanding of the programs and can take on more of a role in updating condition assessments, estimating useful lives, and lifecycle costing.
Scott: One of our biggest challenges isn’t simply staffing levels, it’s ensuring knowledge stays with the organization. We’re working to embed asset management into our standard business processes so that decisions aren’t dependent on one or two key individuals. Technology can certainly help automate routine tasks, but people and organizational culture remain the most important investment.
Knapp: For knowledge transfer, we focus on documentation, GIS-based asset mapping, succession planning, and standardized procedures within our maintenance management system. Our goal is to ensure that institutional knowledge belongs to the organization, not just to individual employees.
Q: What does “good enough” data look like?
Scott: The goal is continuous improvement rather than perfection. Good enough data is data that supports defensible decisions. We don’t need engineering-grade precision information for every asset before acting.
Knapp: Personally, I don’t like the term ‘good enough’ when it comes to asset data. The data doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to be current, reliable, and continually improving. The moment we stop reviewing, updating, and improving our data, the quality of our decisions begins to decline.
McLeod: Although the regulations set up exactly what is required of us, it’s not black and white. There are various shades of gray when it comes to the completeness and accuracy of the plan. Finding a balance between good and good enough is subject to these timing constraints.
Q: What is the biggest lesson about integrating finance, GIS, CMMS, and asset inventories?
McLeod: Our financial analysts each work with these departments to gather, input, and analyze the data, an arduous task on our already heavy workload. More staff now have access to the data as well as an understanding of the PSD Citywide software and they can therefore take on more of a role when it comes to keeping the software up-to-date.
Scott: The biggest lesson is that technology alone doesn’t solve integration challenges. Success depends on agreeing on asset definitions, ownership, standards, and governance.
It was more important to establish consistent asset identifiers and clear workflows than to pursue a large-scale software implementation all at once.
Knapp: Don’t rush the foundation. It takes time to build a well-structured asset registry, maintenance program, and data management processes. Strong data integration makes future planning, budgeting, reporting, and asset maintenance dramatically easier and more sustainable.
Q: What should Ontario municipalities focus on in the next 2 years?
McLeod: Continuously improving data quality, since accurate, complete, and reasonable data is essential for meaningful decision-making.
Scott: Turning Levels of Service into budget and capital planning decisions (and into municipal budgeting deliberations). Many municipalities have plans and inventories; the next step is ensuring service expectations, risk, and lifecycle needs directly influence annual budgets, long-term financial plans, and capital prioritization.
Knapp: Develop policies that align asset management planning, maintenance, and long-term financial planning.
Q: What mistake should municipalities avoid?
McLeod: Trying to do everything in one year! It’s better to break the work into smaller, manageable stages so it doesn’t become overwhelming or lead to burnout.
Scott: Treating asset management as a compliance exercise.
When asset management becomes focused on producing reports rather than informing decisions, organizations miss the opportunity to improve service, reduce risk, and optimize spending.
Knapp: Assuming that old condition assessments and historical cost data are still accurate without regular review and validation.
Q: What capability must every municipality build?
McLeod: More staff need access to the data and an understanding of asset management programs so they can contribute to updating condition assessments, estimating useful lives, and lifecycle costing — not just a small team carrying the load.
Scott: Data-driven decision-making supported by cross-department collaboration. The ability to connect finance, engineering, operations, GIS, and asset data into a common decision-making framework is becoming essential for managing aging infrastructure, climate risks, and funding pressures.
Knapp: Internal asset assessment and data management capabilities. Consultants are valuable partners, but municipalities should own and understand their asset information well enough to make informed decisions independently.
The conversation at Momentum 2026 made clear that Ontario municipalities aren’t lacking ambition — they’re navigating the hard work of putting their asset data to use. The shift from compliance to continuous improvement isn’t about new regulations or bigger budgets. It’s about embedding the right information into the decisions that already happen every day: which project gets funded, which asset gets inspected, which risk gets flagged before it becomes a failure.
For municipalities at any stage of that journey, the message from Essex, Loyalist, and Horton was consistent: start with the data you have, build the culture alongside the systems, and treat asset management planning as an ongoing practice rather than a document with a due date.
Need help turning AMPs and Levels of Service into better decisions? PSD Citywide helps Ontario municipalities build practical Asset Management Plans, strengthen Levels of Service frameworks, and connect asset data to budgeting, lifecycle planning, and long-term financial strategy.
