David Hodge is aware how the City of Meridian’s Public Works Department touches every person visiting, living and driving through town, and as the office’s new director, he’s  responsible for making sure his department makes a good impression.

Meridian Public Works is responsible for a lot. The department maintains roads, sewers, storm drainage and maintains the city’s two treatment plants for drinking water. Hodge said one of his priorities is to raise the standards for how the department performs.

“We want to be well-managed and highly effective in taking care of our citizens and responding to the current needs and future needs,” he said. “We want to be innovative. We want to be a team, and be aligned going in the same direction.”

A native of Meridian, Hodge has more than 25 years of engineering experience in the private sector and over a decade of experience working with the City of Meridian on engineering projects.

When Mayor Jimmie Smith called him about the public works position, he said it was an easy decision to make.

“I was excited about the opportunity,” he said. “He’s got big plans and big vision, and that’s easy and contagious to join his vision and make Meridian better than it is today. That’s what we’re trying to do right now.”

For the first few months, Hodge said he’s spending his time evaluating his department and developing plans to get the most impact out of the city’s resources.

“We’re evaluating what we do, how we’re doing it now and use that as a benchmark of how other successful cities carry out their public works duties,” he said. “How many potholes can you patch in a day? How many miles of road can you normally pave in a day? Different benchmarks such as that to where we can eventually get to increase our productivity.”

Meridian shares the same infrastructure woes as much of the nation, with decades of deferred maintenance coming due, Hodge said.

Currently, the city is under a consent decree with the EPA to rehabilitate it’s aging wastewater system. The 20-year, $126 million dollar decree isn’t optional, but Hodge said it presents an opportunity for the city to not only correct the issues but build Meridian’s infrastructure for future generations.

“You don’t want to get to the point where you’re having to negotiate with the federal government,” he said. “But on the other hand, now that we’re here, we can make major improvements and use this to leverage across all of our divisions within Public Works, and even other departments, to improve our information systems, we’re going to be doing that. We’re going to be improving our tools, our equipment, hopefully our people, to make the mandated changes. That’s the mixed blessing with the consent decree.”

The city is in the process of completing the first phase of the consent decree, which included replacing about 7000 feet of 24 inch sewer pipe, Hodge said. Now, the focus is turning to the second phase, which is in the engineering phase. In the 20-year plan, he said the city is in about year two.

“That’s about 60 to 70 percent complete on the engineering side,” he said.

But water and sewer isn’t the only project on the table right now, Hodge said. Public works is also responsible for maintaining over 330 miles of roads, in addition to the ditches and drainage systems that go along with them.

The city recently received a report from a company that came in a photographed every foot of the 330 miles of road, Hodge said. Using that report, Public Works can establish a reliable rating system for city roads and know which roads need the most attention.

“It goes through an algorithm, and it helps us decide which roads to maintain, which roads to repair or repave,” he said. “With roads, you can actually maintain them longer. When it gets to that point on the curve where it starts to fail, if you put some rejuvenation into the streets…That helps the roads last longer than if you didn’t.”

Hodge said he envisions a Public Works department that’s proactive, where potholes are patched before they become problems and weakened water lines are fixed before they break.

Although it will take time to get city infrastructure into shape, Hodge said it’s an exciting opportunity to be part of building a better Meridian.