Why Your Town Can’t Afford to Skip Public Infrastructure Maintenance

Most people don’t think about the water flowing through their pipes or storm drains until something goes wrong. I get it. Out of sight, out of mind. But I’ve been on the other end of that phone call when things go wrong, and I can tell you: a little planning goes a long way.

In one of my last posts, I talked about why it's important to keep tabs on your infrastructure. It was more geared toward property owners, so I thought I’d take some time to help city leaders better understand how all this plays out in their world.

Public infrastructure maintenance isn’t the flashiest line item on your budget. But it might be the most important one.

The 2 A.M. Phone Call Nobody Wants

When a municipality calls us in the middle of the night with an emergency, we answer every time. But here’s what I wish more city leaders understood: most of those emergencies didn’t have to be emergencies.

I’ll give you a real example. We got a call from a town where an 18-inch transmission feed line was gushing water, threatening the town’s entire water supply. A previous repair had shifted the pipes out of alignment, and the fix eventually blew out. We worked through the night and into the next day to get it handled, and I’m glad we could be there. That situation started because the original work wasn’t done right, and nobody had a maintenance plan to catch the problem before it became a crisis.

That’s what gets me. A routine inspection could have flagged that misalignment. A scheduled check on that repair could have caught the pressure issue before it caused a blowout. Instead, the town was scrambling, and residents were at risk.

What a Maintenance Plan Actually Looks Like

I’m not talking about anything overly complicated. A public infrastructure maintenance plan doesn’t require a massive staff or a huge budget. It requires consistency and a commitment to being proactive, and teams like ours that you can trust to stay on top of things.

Here’s the framework I’d recommend based on what I’ve seen work:

Plan regular inspections of your water mains, sewer lines, and storm drainage systems. You don’t have to inspect everything every month, but you need a rotation. Annual checks on your most critical lines and the older sections of your system should be the baseline.

Establish a routine for flushing and cleaning your water mains. Sediment builds up over time. If you’re not flushing your lines, you’re asking for water quality complaints and reduced flow capacity.

Once we get big weather systems rolling in, you’re going to want to make sure you stay on top of storm drain clearing. In Northwest Arkansas, we know spring can bring some serious storms. Getting ahead of that with proactive clearing prevents the kind of backups that flood streets and erode public trust in your leadership.

Here’s a big one: valve exercising. This one gets overlooked constantly. If you don’t exercise your valves regularly, they seize up. When you actually need to isolate a section of line during a break, that seized valve means a much bigger area loses water. (I’ve seen it happen.)

We provide documentation of every repair, replacement, and inspection. This is your paper trail. It tells you which sections of your system are aging out and where you need to budget for replacements before failures happen.

The Real Cost of “We’ll Deal With It Later”

I understand budgets are tight. Especially for smaller municipalities. I’ve sat across the table from city officials who are stretched thin and trying to make every taxpayer dollar count. I respect that.

Still, I’ve seen maintenance get pushed off for a few years, and then a water main breaks. Hope isn’t a plan. Things will break down. Guaranteed.

When they do, you’re not just paying for the repair. You’re paying emergency rates. You’re dealing with road damage from the break. Residents and businesses are impacted by the outage. And if the media picks it up, city officials are fighting a tough uphill public relations battle.

Let’s zoom out a little bit. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, “Between 2012 and 2018, the rate of water main breaks in the U.S. rose by 27 percent to roughly 300,000 breaks per year, equivalent to a break more than every two minutes.”

That number is bound to be increasing as time does its worst to infrastructure.

For small towns, where a single break can impact a disproportionate share of the population, this isn’t a risk you can afford to take.

A proactive public infrastructure maintenance plan costs a fraction of what emergency repairs run. And it gives you something even more valuable: predictability. You can budget for planned maintenance, but it’s not as easy to make a line item for a catastrophe.

Your Team Can’t Do It Alone (and That’s Okay)

Most towns don’t have the equipment or crew depth to handle infrastructure maintenance on their own. That’s not a knock on your team. It’s just reality when you’re working with a lean staff.

This is where having a contractor relationship already in place makes a huge difference. I talked about this in a previous post about having a reliable utilities contractor on speed dial. The municipalities that rely on us know our capabilities; they trust our work, and when something goes sideways, there’s no time wasted getting up to speed.

But that relationship is even more powerful when it’s built on planned maintenance rather than just crisis response. We can help you assess your system, identify the areas that need attention first, and put together a realistic schedule for getting your infrastructure where it needs to be.

We’re one of the few contractors in the state with both an unlimited license and a distribution license from the health department. That means we can handle water, sewer, storm drainage, gas lines, and electrical work without you needing to coordinate between multiple contractors. One call, one team, one relationship.

Getting Started Doesn’t Have to Be Overwhelming

If you don’t have a maintenance plan in place right now, that’s okay.

Start with what you know. Which sections of your system are the oldest? Where have you had repeated issues? What’s the one thing your public works team worries about most? That’s your starting point.

Then build from there. Get a contractor involved early to help you prioritize. Put a rotation on the calendar. Set aside even a small portion of your annual budget for proactive maintenance.

Your residents depend on you to keep the water running, the storm drains clear, and the infrastructure solid. They may never notice when things are working well, but they’ll absolutely notice when they’re not.

At Sy-Con, we’ve built our reputation on being the team that cities across Arkansas can count on. Whether it’s a planned infrastructure improvement or the emergency call nobody saw coming, we bring the same commitment to quality, safety, and community impact every single time. Public infrastructure maintenance is how you protect your town, your budget, and your residents’ trust. We’re here to help you get ahead of it.