Examples of City of Guelph assets include (but are not limited to): 

• Roads, sidewalks and bike lanes, bridges/culverts, stormwater, water and wastewater infrastructure such as pipes and wells. 
• Facilities such as recreation centres, greenhouses, fire departments, office buildings, water treatment plants and operations storage and maintenance buildings.  
• Fleet and Equipment such as buses, lawn mowers, snowplows, street cleaners, waste collection trucks, computers, printers. 
• Natural assets such as parks, trees and ponds.  

These assets are valued at approximately $7.7B and all of these assets are all owned by the City of Guelph to provide services to anyone living, working, playing or travelling through Guelph.  

First, what services are not asset levels of service? 

Asset levels of service are tied to an asset, they are not tied to people providing services or customer service such as front desk support, swimming lesson quality or the timeliness of waste collection. We care a lot about good customer service standards and in many cases our assets help City employees deliver service to you, but those services are not the asset levels of service.  

So, what is an asset level of service?  

We determine an asset level of service by thinking about the asset from a technical perspective and a customer or user perspective. A technical level of service would measure the roughness of a road or the capacity of a stormwater sewer. A customer perspective would consider the experience of driving or cycling on that road or how well the storm sewer diverts water and prevents flooding. Asset levels of service are the basis for asset management decision making. They are targets we use to measure and record the state of the infrastructure, funding gaps, risks, requirements, priorities, and trade-offs. 

When prioritizing infrastructure and asset related projects we consider where the level of service of our assets might not be meeting the standards the City of Guelph finds optimal for the community. 

For example, if there is an area in a neighbourhood that experiences flooding when there are weather events, we would investigate to see if our stormwater sewers are not meeting the level of service we expect for the neighbourhood. If we find that upgrades to the stormwater assets would provide a better level of service because it would discontinue flooding this would be considered as a factor when prioritizing projects in our asset management plan and budget.  

There are a lot of factors to consider and a great deal of planning that is involved in determining asset levels of service for a municipality. The process we use in the City of Guelph involves several steps. 

Our long-range plans or master plans use condition assessment of the current assets that help provide services. They also look at how much the city will grow and how, and they investigate trends in delivering services for efficiencies, improved services or greener standards. In addition, long-range plans are influenced by the community through various community engagement activities and processes.

The Asset Management Team regularly gathers the most current data from other service areas on all of our assets about the condition our assets are in. Those condition assessments are combined with needs assessments to determine asset replacement priorities. 

When we engaged the community for our Parks and Recreation Master Plan, we heard that people want existing parks and recreation facilities to be in good condition and replaced as quality declines. Our Asset Management Levels of Service plan involves ensuring the City’s assets, including these facilities are assessed and the conditions are reported to be considered in our Asset Management Plan and the multi-year budget.  

The Capital plan for the budget is decided upon using a budget prioritization framework which determines the work that has been completed and still needs to be completed on our assets using the long-range and master plans and the asset management replacement priorities identified in step one and step two.  

The 2023 Multi-year Budget engagement results showed that there is strong support for maintaining funding for critical infrastructure services such as wastewater management and road conditions. Our Asset Management Levels of Service Plan clearly lays out the condition of our assets for these services so they can be addressed as priorities in the multi-year budget.  

In the fourth step, we use the data from all of those activities to determine how well our assets are performing, or what Level of Service they provide.  

We determine a future level of service plan for the next 10 years by predicting how well the assets will offer their intended service based on their current condition and the capital (budget) plan to maintain, repair and replace the assets.  

Our Satisfaction Survey conducted in 2024 reported that nearly 9 in 10 respondents (88 per cent) are satisfied with the delivery of all services provided by the City of Guelph.