Page 8 - Arkansas 811 Magazine 2022 Issue 3

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3. Third-Party Enforcement
Board: Develop or enhance 3rd
party investigation and enforcement board, with a balanced number of representatives from each stakeholder group, imbued with both responsibility and authority to manage the entire damage adjudication process.
4. Standardize Minimum Notification Time: Standardize the ticket notification time to a minimum of two full business days after the day/date of a call.
5. Effective Metrics: Identify, develop, collect, and track metrics that effectively support trending and continuous improvement of the state damage prevention performance. Mandatory reporting is necessary to accomplish this effort. Develop and track metrics that support behavioral change in addition to metrics designed to track violations of the law.
6. Annual Reporting to CGA
and DIRT: Require state entity(s) responsible for the oversite of the 811 system and collection and adjudication of compliance or damage reports, ticket volumes, etc. to submit data to the Common Ground Alliance (CGA) to support the preparation of the annual DIRT report.
7. Standardize Ticket Size - Distance, Duration, and Life: Standardize the ticket size, distance, duration, and life to the described characteristics.
As previously noted, the 2019 Arkansas estimated total damage cost is approximately $92 million in annual and out-of-pocket cost to the system with an additional largely invisible $1.5 billion in waste, inefficiency, and excess cost embedded in the system. The seven recommendations proposed, will eliminate $1 billion of these damage and waste costs over a 3-5-year timeline and these benefits exceed the implementation cost of $13 million
by a factor of 76x over the 3-5-year implementation timeline.
Recommendation Detail
To support investigation and potential implementation of the identified recommendation, the following additional information is provided for research and discussion purposes and includes the following:
• Tactical / Process Issue Addressed:
A description of the tactical activity or
6 • Arkansas 811 Magazine 2022, Issue 3
process breakdown and inefficiency identified.
• Recommendation: Summary description of the proposed recommendation.
• Solution Summary: A description of the condition, characteristic, practice, process, or law that was identified as high functioning in another state and is a starting point for research and discussion purposes.
• Solution Reference: A description
of where or how to access additional information about the condition, characteristic, practice, process, or law
The Arkansas damage adjudication process lacks effective enforcement with no third-party enforcement board to investigate or enforce throughout the adjudication process.
that was identified as high functioning in another state.
Mandatory Damage Reporting
Tactical / Process Issue Addressed
– Process: Hold responsible parties accountable for damages and cause them to change future behavior. Structure system to support continuous improvement efforts through collection of data to identify trends, conduct root cause analysis, and ultimately support building a culture that embraces damage prevention.
Recommendation – Mandatory Damage Reporting: Refine the dig law to require reporting of all damages (not necessarily investigation into all damages) to support more effective damage adjudication and enforcement.
Solution Summary – New Hampshire law states...each operator shall file monthly, with the commission, on or before the 15th day of the following month, probable violations of PUC
800, damages to underground facilities, or both. Excavators are required to notify 811 of any damage as well as... report the damage within 72 hours, excluding weekends and holidays, to the commission.
Solution Reference – New Hampshire Code of Administrative Rules, Chapter PUC 800 - Underground Utility Damage Prevention Program, parts 802, 804 & 805
Balanced Enforcement
Tactical / Process Issue Addressed – Tactical: Fair and balanced enforcement with responsible parties to achieve accountability based on their individual role or contribution to any particular damage.
Recommendation – Balanced Enforcement: Cause enforcement authority to weigh involvement of all primary participants in the damage and hold the asset owner, excavator, and locator responsible in the damage adjudication process in a fair and balanced fashion.
Solution Summary – Where...the facility owner...has misidentified, mislocated or failed to identify
its facilities pursuant to this act,
then in computing the amount of reimbursement to which the facility owner is entitled, the cost of repairing or replacing its facilities shall be diminished in the same proportion
that the facility owner’s or designer’s misidentification, mis-location or failure to identify the facilities contributed to the damage.
Solution Reference – See Pennsylvania Law - Underground Utility Line Protection Law - 806, No. 50, Section 5, §12.i and 12.ii, SB242
Third-Party Enforcement Board
Tactical / Process Issue Addressed
– Tactical: Ineffective or lack of enforcement. Cause a behavior
change in responsible parties to support effective damage prevention. Structure system to support continuous improvement efforts through the collection of data to identify trends,