The City owns and operates one surface water treatment plant, 12 groundwater plants, four wastewater treatment plants, and 134 wastewater lift stations. These facilities are monitored and operated by state-licensed operators and technicians. A remote Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system provides real-time monitoring and control of the facilities. The SCADA system is the most important tool the City provides its staff to do their jobs. The majority of facilities are not staffed, so the SCADA system is the operator’s eyes and ears to view field conditions, adjust operations, and control equipment. Moreover, it alerts operators to concerning and/or alarm conditions at the facilities so they can respond. Both operators and managers rely on the system for real-time operations information. 
 
The existing groundwater and wastewater SCADA system has been in place since the early 2000s. The surface water SCADA system was installed in 2013. The system needs to be reliable, accurate, and readily accessible, and must be routinely updated and maintained to provide the required functionality.
 
The SCADA Annual Preventive Maintenance Program was initiated in FY20 with the purpose of investing in our SCADA infrastructure to preserve the integrity and reliability of the system and proactively prevent failures. The FY23 SCADA Annual Preventive Maintenance Program includes the following actions by the City’s SCADA consultant, Prime Controls:

• Provide troubleshooting and repair for identified bugs in the SCADA systems, and update the existing water well alternation program.  
• Assist in the final selection, purchase, and programming of new SCADA software. Selection will be based on research and interviews conducted with software vendors in FY22 and site visits and discussions with end-users in FY23. 
• Design, fabricate, and install a new lift station control panel at the surface water treatment plant.
• Investigate cellular solution options to be utilized at SCADA sites with currently unreliable network (radio or DSL) connections.
• Provide spares of I/O modules and backup programmable logic controllers for immediate response to outages.

The risks to health and safety associated with water quality issues and wastewater exposure can be severe. The SCADA system is an integral tool in the Department’s ability to prevent and defend against such issues. Because of our dependency on this application, the consequences of a failure may cause severe upsets to the City’s regulatory, staff, and citizen health and safety, and environmental safety and compliance obligations. 
 
Funding for this contract is available through the Water Utility CIP account. The budgeted amount for this work is $304,000.00. Of the available CIP funds, $191,231.28 is reserved for the purchase and programming of the new water/wastewater SCADA software by the City’s SCADA Consultant, Prime Controls. The remaining $112,768.72 will go towards the other tasks identified above. Prime Controls is a Sugar Land based systems integration and instrumentation/ controls consulting firm. Prime Controls developed the City’s first groundwater and wastewater SCADA systems and expanded them to include the surface water treatment plant and lift stations.
 
These systems are complex and customized to meet the City’s needs. Prime Controls provides the required expertise, knowledge, and design consistency to maintain our systems. They offer the City competitive and fixed service rates through a US General Services Administration (GSA) cooperative purchasing agreement.
 
The Public Works Department recommends that the City Council authorize the execution of a contract between the City of Sugar Land and Prime Controls for the SCADA Annual Preventive Maintenance Program in the amount of $303,714.87.