Facilities bill climbs to $620 million

With its brick bridge and large windows, the Architecture Building's elegant face hides a secret from passersby.

Inside, rust stains dripping down the white pillars supporting the building make the truth plain: This building, along with dozens of other older buildings on the campus, is badly in need of renovation. The cost to bail the university out of its renovation backlog climbs by tens of millions of dollars every year with no end in sight.

"There are more requirements than resources, constantly," said Jack Baker, director of operations and maintenance. "The juggling act is a day-to-day activity."

Today, it would cost $620 million to completely catch up with building renovations, compared with $500 million in 2005.

University officials said they do not receive enough funding from the state to keep up with year-to-year maintenance operations.

But for students and faculty, leaky roofs, temperamental heating and antiquated electrical systems have become more than inconveniences - they are costing the university in the long run.

Del Propst, facilities manager for the chemical and life sciences, said many of the labs inthe Chemistry Building haven't been renovated since they were built in the 1960s. Fumigation systems, workbenches, lightsand ceilings all require repairs.

Garth C. Rockcastle, dean of the architecture college, described conditions in his school's building as "structurally problematic." If it weren't for the rusting steel beams inside the pillars that support the building, the concrete walls and ceiling would likely have collapsed from erosion, he said. He added that the buildings aren't very well insulated, causing wasted funds on unnecessary heating and air conditioning.

"It's a university structure," Rockcastle said. "They built it. They should protect it with a thick, insulated roof."

Baker said though the ceiling was in urgent need of repair, it is not unsafe. He said he hopes to repair the roof this year - a project that could cost as much as 80 percent of his $1 million roof-repair budget for the entire university. Baker said he wished he could repair a lot of the roofs on the campus, but the Architecture Building's roof is the most pressing case.

Another problem is managing old electrical systems. Ancient breakers needed to operate the lights around the campus are no longer produced by manufacturers, so university officials have to special order them at $20,000 to $30,000 per breaker, Baker said. New breakers cost between $6,000 and $10,000.

While officials wait for the breakers' special production, generators must be rented at $10,000 a week.

In the Chemistry and Biology-Psychology buildings, professors and researchers say inconsistent temperatures keep them from doing some lab experiments, Propst said. Baker said the antiquated steam radiators used to set temperatures in the building lack precision.

Ther are also outdated outdoor lights that require a staff member to turn them on manually, Baker said. Sending someone around the campus at night is "very labor intensive," Baker said, adding, "I would rather have people out fixing things."

Baker said switching to a more up-to-date system with "photocell sensors" would save time and manpower, because the lights would be activated automatically at sundown. Baker said, however, that there is no money to switch systems.

Last year, administrators allocated funds for emergency repairs to an exterior wall of the Physics Building that was pulling away from the rest of the structure, posing a safety risk.

These types of structural problems are rampant among buildings that are 50 years or older, which make up about 32 percent of campus buildings, said Arshad Mughal, the assistant director of capital budgeting in facilities management department. Year-to-year maintenance operations make small dents in the maintenance backlog, but as time goes by, problems accumulate, and waiting costs the university more in the long run, Baker said.

Mughal said $31.8 million is needed to maintain university buildings each year. Baker said only $15 million is in the renewal budget this year.

In December 2005, the Board of Regents aimed to counteract this shortfall by developing a facilities renewal program. Over time, the plan will require the university budget to set aside 2 percent of the cost of constructing a new building and use that money to repair the existing building.

Though this plan will "stabilize" the university's aging buildings and prevent the backlog from growing larger, it does nothing to solve the looming $620 million problem.

"We are up against limited resources," said John Blair, the university's director of budget and fiscal planning. "We have to be mindful of state funding."

Mughal said space restraints pose an additional problem to tackling the backlog. Shutting down sections of the campus to renovate heating and air conditioning and electrical systems would displace students, so the renovations have to be stretched out over time. He estimates that 10 years will not be enough to overcome the deficit.

"There is no easy solution," Mughal said. "The magnitude of the problem is so huge we have to attack it incrementally over many years."

The backlog issue is not unique to academic buildings, said Jon Dooley, the director of residential facilities, the department that oversees maintenance of dorms. While his office's budget is separate from facilities management's, he said, money is just as scarce.

"We all have funds that are less than we prefer," Dooley said. Dooley said if funding were available, he would love to repair smaller items, such as broken ceiling tiles and doors, in dorms across the campus.

The President's Office has been campaigning to increase funding by giving guided tours to state legislators and members of the Board of Regents. Ann Wylie, the president's chief of staff, said visitors are most shocked by the dilapidated state of the Physics Building, which is among the oldest buildings on the campus.

The tours provide administrators a visual way to highlight these and other problems across the campus, perhaps contributing to the Maryland General Assembly's decision to allocate funds toward a new Physics Building last spring.

"It's hard to look at numbers on pieces of paper," Wylie said. "What we have tried to do is illustrate in real life what [the backlog] means."

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