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Pleasanton is nearly done developing its Asset Management Plan, one of the city’s landmark plans that city officials say will help future City Council’s prioritize repair and replacement projects based on up-to-data data and analysis on the assets. Now that the city has taken inventory of all its assets, city staff will look to finish developing the management plan by mid-2026. (Photo by Christian Trujano) 
A couple and a group of kids travel along one of the many trails at the Bernal Community Park. (Photo by Christian Trujano) 
A notable crack can be seen on a sidewalk near the corner of Santa Rita Road and Valley Avenue. (Photo by Christian Trujano) 
A sign lets people know that the grass field at the Amador Valley Community Park is closed for renovation. (Photo by Christian Trujano) 
Significant damage can be seen on a bridge located along Bernal Avenue right before Pleasanton Avenue. (Photo by Christian Trujano) 
The Dolores Bengtson Aquatic Center is another city asset that is nearing the stage of needing major repairs and replacement. (Photo by Christian Trujano) 
Damaged roads and sidewalks are just some examples of assets that the city took inventory of as part of its asset management plan. (Photo by Christian Trujano) 
The city’s vehicle fleet was identified as a category of assets that needs the most repair and replacement. (Photo by Christian Trujano) 
One of the main recreational assets the city owns is the Pleasanton Public Library, which recently changed its hours of operation this year due to city budget cuts. (Photo by Christian Trujano) 
A fire truck sits inside the Livermore Pleasanton Fire Station 4. Fire and police vehicles are among some of the city’s assets that need repair or replacement the most. (Photo by Christian Trujano) 
Signs such as this one on Bernal Avenue are another example of assets that the city will look to repair or replace in the future. (Photo by Christian Trujano)
The city recently finished taking inventory of all its assets — roads, buildings, vehicles and everything else that the city owns and maintains — as part of its ongoing efforts to finalize Pleasanton’s first-ever Asset Management Plan that city staff said will serve as a helpful budgeting tool to manage city property.
During its final meeting of 2025, the Pleasanton City Council reviewed staff’s latest update on the management plan, which included information on how roughly 94% of all the city’s assets that are funded by the city General Fund are in “good, very good or excellent” condition (for now), as well as the next steps the city will take to complete the management plan by mid-2026.
“It’s turned into a project that I, personally, … think is the backbone for a lot of really good in our future,” Mayor Jack Balch said in regard to the plan. “Really laying out the non-flashy but essential work that we do here for the city to deliver services for our residents.”
Over the last 18 months, the city has been working with Kayuga Solution, an infrastructure asset management consulting firm, on a $1 million project to develop the city’s debut asset management plan which, according to assistant director of public works Adam Nelkie, is a consolidation of various master plans and inventories of assets that have been “long forgotten”.
According to Nelkie, the plan documents what assets the city owns and manages; helps the city understand the conditions and state of its assets; helps identify which assets are critical; and forecasts what it will take to sustain the delivery of those assets.
“The purpose of this Asset Management Plan is to help us move from a reactive, to a proactive state of management identifying assets nearing failure, ensuring we have the necessary budget and resources to address them,” Nelkie told the council Dec. 16.
He said the plan will help guide staff in the overall planning and management of city infrastructure, replacement of assets and the development of a 10-year capital improvement program (CIP).
“We’re going to be better able to plan for the future, fund and maintain the things that support all of what the community expects from us as the city of Pleasanton,” City Manager Gerry Beaudin said at the council meeting.
The work of completing the management plan is close, but not quite finished.
What the council reviewed during its Dec. 16 meeting was an update of the first two completed phases of the process.
According to Nelkie, during those two phases the team assessed the city’s asset data gap, took inventory of over 200,000 assets and began looking at the condition of all of those assets as well as the lifespan for those assets.
Nelkie spent some time going through the various categories of assets including buildings, parks and trails, the city’s fleet of vehicles, utilities and roadways. He briefly went over the city’s many street signs and how out of the over 13,000, the city identified over 650 of them that are in poor condition and need to be replaced.
Nelkie also went over how a majority of the city’s other assets — primarily the buildings; parks and trails; roadways and traffic signals; and the stormwater system — are all in either good, very good or excellent condition. He noted that the confidence data for all of those assets still need to improve.
Where things start to look bad is when it comes to the city’s fleet. According to the management plan data, about 45% of the city’s fleet of vehicles are in poor or failing condition. That translates to about $7.9 million in costs.
About 33% of both the Pleasanton Police Department and the Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Department’s fleet is in similar poor or failing condition, Nelkie said.
“Fire and police vehicles have a high criticality score and shorter replacement cycles due to the need to be dependable in emergency situations,” he said. He added that equipment for these vehicles typically takes longer to replace and noted that the city has already begun the process of replacing certain parts but that those replacement efforts were not captured in the management plan.
Nelkie explained that while most of the general fund-supported infrastructure that has an asset replacement value of over $4 billion is in good condition, the reality is that a lot of those infrastructure assets were built several decades ago and will soon need to be replaced.
“I hate to break it to you, the city’s getting that old,” Nelkie said when asked about some of the strongly built infrastructure like the stormwater systems.
He said over the next 10 years the city will need to heavily invest in its assets — the ones in poor or failing condition, along with the ones in fair or even good condition. He noted that, based on current assessments, general fund-supported assets will require an average of about $63 million per year over the next decade to implement lifecycle-driven replacements and resolve existing deficiencies.
For comparison, the city’s current budget includes about $19 million for such repair and replacement projects, which shows a significant gap between needs and available resources.
For that reason and others, Beaudin’s administration and the City Council have and continue to support the development of the management plan so that the city can begin using it when developing its next two year budget.
“This is a budgeting tool to make sure that we can keep our current level of services,” Nelkie said.
Vice Mayor Jeff Nibert said there is monumental value in the Asset Management Plan and many benefits that will come from it in the future.
“Bad news, early, is good,” Nibert said regarding the state of the city’s assets. “We want to know, as early as possible, about what’s coming down the road.”
“The numbers are sobering,” Nibert continued. “The amount of backlog in work-deferred maintenance plus the predicted future replacement needs and capital improvement needs per year … (is) a significant problem that we are going to need to address.”
He and other council members said with the additional, detailed information that will come from the management plan, the city and the council will be able to make better decisions about what to prioritize in funding during future budget discussions.
Councilmember Julie Testa also spent a couple of minutes reflecting on all of the good news that the current numbers from the management plan show, including all of the assets that are in good condition.
“I was pleased with the result,” Beaudin responded in regard to the high percentage of overall healthy assets.
“I think as you start to peel the onion and you start to look at the size of the number, it is significant,” Beaudin said in regard to the future costs. “But what we’re trying to do now is … we’re trying to give you the news early so we can plan for it and work that plan together over the next several years to make sure that this remains something that we can keep within our grasp … rather than letting it continue to let it grow.”
The next and final phase of developing the management plan, Nelkie said, will be predicting the future needs of those assets and understanding the future funding needed to do so. That includes analyzing and developing risk and investment scenarios that the council will discuss in February.
The final phase will also include integrating all of the new asset data into the city’s current computer maintenance programs and systems so that the data can continually be updated and reviewed from now on.
“I believe we’re being pretty prudent with the taxpayer money by implementing this now so that we can rank (assets) based on how critical something is — and obviously the condition of it — so that we can be as prudent as possible with limited resources … and then just maintaining the service levels in the city as our residents expect us to do,” Balch said.
