6.6.3.5 Financial Planning

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6.6.3.5

Financial Planning

The TAMP Financial Plan should consider all sources of funding used to support maintenance. The Financial Plans should indicate how that available funding is expected to be used over the TAMP time period. This will typically require extrapolation or forecasting beyond established maintenance budgets. The maintenance activity categories can be helpful in determining how to account for this funding within the plan.

  • Preventive Maintenance, Repairs, and Unit Replacements are often funded and delivered by multiple programs. As such some of these costs may be captured under the Preservation work type, and some captured under Maintenance. Agencies should take care in understanding how this work is funded and delivered to ensure costs are fully captured and not double counted in the TAMP.
  • Funding for Operations and Routine Maintenance may come from its own budget line or be part of overall maintenance funding. Additionally, some operations expenses may be funded out of capital programming through programs such as the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) program. These activities are generally performed in a similar fashion regardless of asset condition. Therefore, these are commonly included as fixed-cost items that reduce the amount of funding available for activities that improve asset condition. Typically, this is included as an average annual cost.
  • Organizational Strengthening activities can be budgeted separately from the other categories to clearly communicate their importance and show what activities are planned. These activities can be tracked using the time, labor, and material features in a maintenance management system.

A process for developing TAMP financial plans has been established through several documents. Most recently, NCHRP Report 1076, Guide for Incorporating Maintenance Costs into a TAMP updated this process to better incorporate maintenance costs (Allen et. al. 2023).

  1. Determine the scope of the TAM program.
  2. Identify maintenance fund sources.
  3. Establish maintenance fund uses.
  4. Structure maintenance sources and uses list.
  5. Validated the list.
  6. Document Constraints.
  7. Document assumptions about fixed costs.