University of Idaho Dean at the College of Natural Resources, Kurt Pregitzer, spent a year and a half catching rainwater with buckets on his office floor while he waited for the roof to be fixed.
Hayden Crosby | Argonaut
Stephanie Rexus is one of many to walk to class up the marble staircase in the University of Idaho Administration Building. Brian Johnson, assistant vice president for facilities, said the staircase is one of the main priorities for repair because they do not meet the current safety regulations.
“It was odd to have buckets catching drips in the Dean’s Office when prospective students and their parents came in,” Pregitzer said. “But you have to wait until the issue reaches the top of the list before they are able to fix it. They’re limited in the support they get for these maintenance problems.”
The deferred maintenance list — which included the roof over the CNR Dean’s Suite — is a wish list comprised of about $228 million in maintenance projects that UI administrators know need to be completed but haven’t been able to afford.
The nearly 200 projects include things such as replacing roofs on buildings across campus, updating HVAC systems and renovating historic buildings to meet modern safety codes.
Brian Johnson, assistant vice president for facilities, said needs lists like the one at UI are common at all state funded institutions with a large plant of facilities, such as higher education institutions and state prisons.
“What you find are a lot of projects like ‘gee, it’s time to replace this roof,’ or ‘this air handling system needs to be upgraded or repaired in a major way’ and so, like all those other major institutions, UI has a list of needs and typically our only outside fund source is to look to the state,” Johnson said.
The process for obtaining state funding for maintenance projects requires institutions like UI to present a list of their top projects every year to ask for funding. Johnson said UI typically compiles a list of about 25 projects from the overall deferred maintenance list and the state then chooses projects from that list that they are able to fund. He said the state has given anywhere from $2 million to $3.3 million in any given year — but are unlikely to fund projects that cost more than $1 million each.
“The state sort of has this unspoken limit of about a million dollars, so we typically try to break a bigger project — if it can be broken — into multiple phases, ideally not more than $1 million each,” Johnson said.
He said the list also includes smaller projects so that if the state has selected two larger projects and still has a little money leftover they might be able to fund some of UI’s smaller projects such as renovating entry steps or patching roofs. Johnson said the projects on the submitted list are ones with the greatest urgency, but the size and types of projects also depend on how much money the state has to fund every institution in a given year.
“You’re not going to ask for a $6 million project if they only have $2 million to give you,” Johnson said.
University of Idaho Director of Planning and Budget Keith Ickes said in FY14 UI will leave another $3 million in maintenance projects unaddressed while the state will fund $2.19 million.
“I’d say the real number is a whole lot bigger than $3 million. In my opinion, in any given year it’s a whole lot more than $3 million that we’re falling behind,” Johnson said.
He said the reason for this is that the cost estimates attached to each project on the list submitted to the state are simply that — estimates. He said typically projects end up costing more than anticipated.
“If I had to guess, our guesses are low,” Johnson said. “So if we tell the state we need $1 million to repair the HVAC system in Building X, by the time you actually do the engineering design you find the real estimate is $1.6 million and we end up breaking that project into two phases often and we get enough money to do part of the project in a given year, and then three to five years later we might be able to get money for phase two.”
Johnson said UI’s deferred maintenance list is so long and with new things added each year it would be difficult to get to the things UI wants to do versus the things that need to be done. He said as a result certain things — such as beatification outside buildings — are mixed into the list proposed to the state.
“If you chose for example only life-safety issues for every project that you wanted you’d never get anything else done,” Johnson said.
Ickes said issues such as the roof leak in Pregitzer’s office are things that should have been maintained a decade ago and simply weren’t due to lack of funding.
“We just have lots of issues around the campus where things break and we should have replaced them earlier but we just don’t have the money to get it done right now so they get fixed when they become absolutely critical,” Ickes said.
Johnson said if every state agency presented their entire needs list there’s no way the state would ever be able to allocate enough to give everyone as much funding as they feel they really need.
“A common outcome of not getting everything that you need is not fixing everything that needs to be done in a building,” Johnson said. “So although the roof needs to be replaced … you can do some quick patches and you can get a few more years out of it and you end up deferring … you defer and delay a variety of needs.”
Johnson said UI administrators and state officials have to make a judgment call about what safety issues are the most pressing, and which issues are things they’re trying to preserve or enhance at UI.
“If I’ve got a roof leak over a lab versus over a classroom versus over a staff member office space, you tend to fix the lab and the classrooms first,” Johnson said.
Johnson said UI will soon submit their proposal for FY15 maintenance funding with the hope of obtaining enough money to fix safety and restoration issues in the Administration building as well as finish phase three of the Jaansen Engineering HVAC system — roughly $3 million in total expenses, but that funding won’t be available for at least one more year.
“You just chip away at it and fix the essentials first,” Ickes said.
Kaitlyn Krasselt can be reached at [email protected]