ZELIENOPLE — Borough council met Monday night and considered options to upgrade their utility meters for more technologically-advanced models.

The borough has been considering upgrades to its electricity and water meters for the last few years, and at their meeting they had the chance to hear exactly what this would entail and how much it would cost.

The project would involve installation of new meters as well as monitoring systems throughout the borough.

These systems, known as advanced metering systems or AMS, would increase efficiency, replace deteriorating devices, and allow the borough to remotely monitor the meters while giving customers online access to their electricity and data usage, said Jared Price, chief technology officer at American Municipal Power.

“The AMS are the next step,” Price said.

Customers in municipalities with AMS can access their data on a website which shows their use with other information like the weather throughout that time to help customers make sense of increases in use.

Customers also can sign up for mobile alerts when they’ve spent a certain amount on water and electricity.

Additionally, the borough will be able to monitor any outages or blinks — momentary outages that expose weak spots in the system — allowing officials to respond quickly and be more proactive with maintaining the utilities. Alerts include tamper warnings when a device suspects someone is attempting to tamper with it to steal power or cause some other sort of harm. These alerts can also be sent to area police departments.

The borough has been looking into working with American Municipal Power to upgrade their systems since 2015.

“Zelienople was one of the first municipalities to sign a letter of intent for AMS,” said Price. “These are long-term investments that your borough is making.”

For all the benefits that the AMS offers, they require a near-complete overhaul of the municipal utility metering system — and that comes with a hefty price tag.

American Municipal Power’s preliminary cost estimate for the project was $1.4 million for setup and another $50,000 a year for maintenance.

Price also recommended that the borough forecast for additional costs in the event of unexpected complications in the installation process.

The cost gave the council pause.

“We were thinking $1 million, but now we are seeing $1.5 million,” said council President Alan Bayer. “In my mind, that requires some more due diligence.”

He suggested the board table the motion until more research can be done to calculate the AMS return on investment to justify spending the money.

The rest of the board agreed and voted to wait for more research to be done before moving forward with the project.

“Now it’s time the rubber meets the road,” Bayer said. “You have given us some good numbers, now the ball is in our court.”