Resilient Engineering: 6 Tips to Maximize Your Engineering Budget

Ensuring the resilience of public works infrastructure in the face of budget constraints and unexpected repairs is both a strategic challenge and an opportunity for innovation. Limited funding and long-deferred maintenance can put critical assets at risk, but with the right approach, departments can maximize every dollar and extend the life of their infrastructure. Here are six strategies to help stretch your budget and optimize resources.

1. Take a Value Engineering Approach for Better Project Outcomes

Value engineering involves analyzing all the features of the project, including the construction process and materials used, as well as expected quality, and looking at what the lowest cost would be to meet that need. Ultimately, it can improve the value of your overall project by optimizing all its elements.

Using frameworks like Envision by the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure while planning a project can help save costs with management and stakeholder collaboration, as well as using efficiency to save money over time.

Constructability reviews are also a tactic to consider. An experienced consultant can analyze the construction plan to find slight modifications that would make the project easier to build and ultimately save money.

2. Strengthen Asset Management for Long-term Resilience

A well-executed asset management strategy extends the lifecycle of infrastructure and equipment while optimizing budget allocation. Regular maintenance of roads, stormwater systems, and utilities helps prevent costly emergency repairs and ensures that critical assets remain in peak condition.

By staying proactive, municipalities can reduce long-term expenditures and avoid the financial strain of sudden failures. Coordinating upgrades across departments further enhances efficiency by consolidating projects and reducing redundant work.

An asset management plan provides valuable data to justify both short-term funding requests and long-term capital investments. And, a thorough asset management plan for your core infrastructure ensures that all system data and maintenance requirements are well-documented and accessible, safeguarding continuity of operations as key long-term staff members retire or transition.

3. Learning from the Success of Your Peers

The challenges that public works departments face—aging infrastructure, funding shortfalls, and climate resilience—are not unique. Many cities have successfully navigated similar hurdles and can serve as valuable case studies.

Consulting with peers for budget-maximizing ideas is always wise, and it’s equally beneficial to engage with your engineering consultant. If their firm has a national reach, they are likely to have insights from other communities and departments facing similar budgetary pressures and can offer valuable suggestions based on comparable projects.

By collaborating with your peers and engineering partner, you can leverage their broader experience to develop accurate forecasts, helping to justify cost-saving measures now rather than delaying projects with uncertain future costs.

4. Maximize Your Budget by Accessing Outside Funding

With budgets for long-term projects often shrinking without notice and climate change creating unexpected challenges, there’s a real need for department executives to look for outside funding. Funding opportunities are available through programs like the National Infrastructure Project Assistance program, which has allocated billions to various projects. Your engineering partner should create a source-and-use-of-funds matrix that focuses on matching various parts of a project with these federal and state grant and loan programs. Many grants require local matching funds but using them can stretch a tight budget to cover a big project.

5. Leveraging Staff Augmentation for Optimal Results

Staff augmentation—hiring specialized personnel on a temporary basis—offers cities a strategic way to meet project demands without committing to long-term hires. Infrastructure projects often require expertise in areas such as permitting, design reviews, and grant writing, but maintaining full-time staff for each specialized area is not always practical. By bringing in expert support when needed, you can address workload peaks without overburdening existing teams. This approach helps to keep projects on schedule and within budget.

6. Review Your Fee Structure

It pays to make sure your permit fees align with those of neighboring communities and are structured to cover your long-term costs. If a utility is paying 50 percent less for services like street cuts, right-of-way usage, and utility permits compared to another city, that’s lost revenue. You can maximize your budget by calculating your actual total costs, comparing your fee structures to your neighbors for these services, and updating your policies and pricing models.

Partner with HR Green’s Municipal Services Professionals

HR Greens’ Municipal Services’ professionals combine creativity with reliability to provide staff augmentation and multi-faceted consulting services to local governments. We provide Engineering, Public Works, Planning, and Building Departments with staff to meet the variable workloads without the normal long-term costs. Our team assists public agencies in both identifying and securing outside financial resources while helping our clients through the associated regulatory and administrative requirements.

Let’s partner together to optimize your budget and build stronger, more resilient infrastructure. Contact us today to discuss how we can support your next project.

Download a PDF