FOLEY, Alabama — The process by which Forward City roadways and street signs are refurbished is getting an overhaul.

That’s because the city of Foley’s Engineering Department will soon begin utilizing the municipality’s computerized Global Imaging System to catalog and monitor streets and street signs within the city, using a software program developed by Volkert.

“We can link to our GIS,” Foley City Engineer Butch Stokes said in a phone interview.

Development for the new system began last fall and took approximately three months.

“It was actually to come up with a method for inventorying the streets that need to be resurfaced,” Stokes said, explaining that the previous method had been to periodically visit each of the city’s 145.24 miles of streets in person to determine wear. “This is a little better planning tool.”

That tool will also help with the maintenance of two additional city components. One of them is determining when street signs need to be replaced.

“When they lose their reflectivity, they need replacing,” Stokes explained.

He added that the city’s previous method had been to manually record locations and state of signs into a ledger.

The final benefit of computerizing the engineering maintenance procedures is that drainage and culverts will also be recorded into the new system.

“So we can see the size, type and location of them,” Stokes said.

Once city staff members are trained on the new software, plans will get under way to begin resurfacing work on city streets and the sign monitoring will begin. Those new procedures are projected to begin by late February or early March.