What Is City Maintenance? (Types, Examples & Job Roles)

A well-functioning city might seem to run like a well-oiled machine, but like any machine, cities require regular maintenance. Specifically, any maintenance performed on public buildings, facilities, land or any other type of city-owned or city-managed property or assets. This maintenance is typically funded from taxpayers, including local sources like sales and property tax, along with state and federal funding. 

A public works department’s maintenance division that oversees city infrastructure — everything from city streets, bridges and street lights to facility maintenance — typically oversees city maintenance. Some larger cities have separate agencies, like for sanitation or parks and recreation, which might have their own maintenance responsibilities, but they still often coordinate with a public works department or city manager to manage city maintenance projects.

City Maintenance Examples

City maintenance can come in many different forms, considering the wide range of responsibilities and assets that cities manage. Some common examples include:

Building Maintenance

City-owned buildings and properties such as city hall, courts and police stations all require building maintenance. This includes everything from maintaining and repairing key operational systems, like HVAC, electrical and plumbing systems, as well as structural areas like doors, roofs and elevators.

Public Works Maintenance

Public works projects like building roads and installing stormwater drainage systems don’t stop after the initial work is completed. These projects typically require ongoing maintenance services, like repairing potholes, fixing electrical issues that cause traffic lights to malfunction or inspecting drainage systems to ensure they’re ready for the next big storm.

Grounds Maintenance

City buildings and properties also often require grounds maintenance for the exterior of these places. For example, city-owned buildings may have gardens that require ongoing landscaping and public parking lots or driveways that may require snow removal come wintertime.

Bridge Maintenance

Bridge maintenance may fall under public works maintenance depending on the city and the specifics of the bridge, but often the engineering demands are unique enough to consider bridge maintenance to be its own category. For example, bridge maintenance might include inspecting bridge expansion joints as the seasons change to ensure that the changing temperature isn’t causing cracks to develop.

Fleet Maintenance

Many cities have their own fleet of vehicles, ranging from emergency vehicles to sanitation trucks to cars for certain elected officials. Like any vehicle, these all require inspections and upkeep, such as oil changes, changing brake fluids or inspecting electric vehicle batteries. This category of maintenance is collectively known as fleet maintenance.

Types of City Maintenance

In addition to these different areas of maintenance mentioned above, any of these categories can involve different types of maintenance in terms of how or why the work is performed. These types of maintenance include:

Emergency Maintenance

Emergency maintenance occurs when something urgently needs to be repaired, such as for public safety reasons or if it impedes critical operations. For example, if a tree falls and blocks a road, emergency maintenance would involve removing the tree. Or an electrical issue that makes staff unable to use their computers could require emergency repairs.

Corrective Maintenance

Corrective maintenance is generally a step below emergency maintenance in severity, but it occurs when something is starting to break down or needs to be replaced but perhaps still has some functionality. For example, a city building’s HVAC systems might involve corrective maintenance if staff notice that the air conditioner is not working as strongly as intended, which might suggest the need for new coolant.

Preventive Maintenance

Not all maintenance should be performed as a reaction to existing problems. It can also involve preventive maintenance, such as inspecting bridges and fleets on a regular basis, rather than when something goes wrong. Preventive maintenance can occur on either a set schedule based on time or after a certain number of uses. For instance, a service request might involve inspecting vehicles after a given number of miles driven.

City Maintenance Job Roles

While cities don’t always have formal city maintenance teams and the names might differ a bit by municipality, the role of different city maintenance workers generally fall into the following categories:

City Maintenance Technician

A maintenance technician is someone who’s on the ground doing the actual inspections or repairs. Think the person fixing the broken traffic sign along a major New York City roadway.

City Maintenance Supervisor

A maintenance supervisor typically falls in the middle between a technician and manager. The supervisor usually oversees a team of maintenance technicians and might even specialize in a particular area of city maintenance. For example, a maintenance supervisor might be in charge of property maintenance, which could involve managing technicians who inspect HVAC systems and repair issues like broken doors and windows.

City Maintenance Manager

A maintenance manager typically oversees city maintenance responsibilities as a whole. For example, city maintenance supervisors would report to a city maintenance manager, who’s prioritizing city maintenance initiatives from a more holistic approach. This role might be handled by someone such as a public works director.

How the City of Dallas Improved Its Maintenance Strategy

Strong city maintenance often requires being organized and clear about how tasks should be handled. Coast Customer Matt Butler with the City of Dallas, Oregon is a prime example. He started using Coast’s computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to develop a clear maintenance strategy and document maintenance work.

The city’s facility division previously did not use any software, which made it difficult to prove all the work the division was doing and, therefore, difficult to get a sufficient budget. With Coast, however, Butler says his maintenance team has been able to more easily document and manage city maintenance projects. It enabled citywide staff to submit maintenance requests from which the facility division could clearly assign work orders and schedule preventive maintenance.

Ultimately, getting a better handle on city maintenance needs has enabled the City of Dallas to almost completely eliminate deferred maintenance and instead handle projects more efficiently and proactively. In doing so, the facility division has also been able to get more budget to accomplish its goals.

How a CMMS Can Help Enhance City Maintenance

As the City of Dallas, Oregon, has shown, using a CMMS can improve a city’s maintenance strategy by making it easy to assign preventive maintenance tasks on key assets and communicate with staff so work orders get handled efficiently. Without a centralized, digital system, it can be hard to keep track of what inventory you have as well as what work has or hasn’t been completed . Plus, non-maintenance staff might struggle to communicate maintenance requests.

While there are several CMMS to choose from, Coast stands out from competitors based on affordability, intuitiveness and the ability to customize capabilities based on your city’s needs. See for yourself how Coast’s CMMS can help you streamline and enhance your maintenance program. Sign up for a free account today.