JOCK ‘N’ ROLL ALL NIGHT
MARDI GRAS CELEBRATION The German and French clubs will host a Mardi Gras party Tuesday.
Eastern athletic teams host their annual variety show Monday night.
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D aily E astern N ews
“TELL THE TRUTH AND DON’T BE AFRAID” Tuesday, February 28 , 2017 C E L E BRATI NG A CE NTUR Y OF COV E RA GE E S T . 1 915
VOL. 101 | NO. 110 W W W . D A I L YE A S TE R N N E W S . C O M
Workgroup No. 9 reviews feedback
Rollin’ around
By Angelica Cataldo Managing Editor | @DEN_News
OLIVIA SWENSON-HULTZ | THE DAILY EASTERN NE WS
Brezzy Byrd, a freshman theater student hoverboards around the Doudna Fine Arts Center. “The Doudna’s a great facility for trying new things, and exploring,” he said.
Workgroup no. 9, Academic Visioning II, discussed the feedback they received from last week’s town hall during a general meeting Monday afternoon. Wo r k g r o u p c h a i r M e l i n d a M u e l l e r, a p o l i t i c a l s c i e n c e professor,said many of the surveys submitted ranged from neutral to negative answers in regarding the idea of consolidating department chair positions. During the meeting Mueller and education professor Jay Bickford also discussed a meeting they had with the Executive Council of Chairs. The Organization subcommittee discussed their recommendations and received feedback from executive chair members who were also not in favor of consolidating department chair positions. “They presented very good arguments,” Mueller said during the meeting. One of the executive chair
c o u n c i l ’s a r g u m e n t s w a s t h a t department chairs do not have the same type union-bargained raises in their contracts and it would be difficult to renegotiate a new contract. There was also feedback in favor of possibly making a new academic college instead of combining existing ones. A m a n d a H a r v e y, i n t e r i m associate director for Health Service said the recommendation for possibly decentralizing graduate schools was also met with negative feedback from the audience in attendance during last week’s town hall. She also said there was a lot of “strong support” regarding the Workgroup’s recommendation to change Eastern’s website course catalogue navigation. The Workgroup also discussed other ways members can improve their recommendations and provide more facts and figures.
Read the full story on www.dailyeasternnews.com
Factors considered in Facilities
By Cassie Buchman News Editor | @cjbuchman
When it comes to Facilities, many factors go into deciding what projects are started and completed as well as what is prioritized. Last semester, Workgroup No.5 looked at Facilities and made recommendations for them during the vitalization project. The group recommended several areas receive increased resources to upgrade the look and operation of the campus. This included an investment in facilities staff and the completion of already started projects. The number of employees working in Facilities has gone down from 220 in FY15 to 92 in FY17, according to information given to the News by Paul McCann, interim vice president for business affairs. As the university moves forward, McCann said, it will look at what needs to be done in regards to facilities on campus and what might be beneficial for any number of reasons.
Prioritization
Tim Zimmer, director of Facilities, Planning and Management, said emergency situations, such as an overflowing toilet making a mess, would get immediate attention. Anything that could impact safety is also highly prioritized. “We look at things that impact the educational experience, student life experience, we listen to our customers,” Zimmer said. McCann said the administration prioritizes what needs to be done in a similar way. “It could be for safety reasons, or we need to do it for comfort reasons,” he said.
“If it’s making something pretty and that’s all we’re doing, maybe we’re going to push that off until an appropriation comes through or we get a donation, or until the right times comes to do that.” Zimmer said Facilities meets with associate vice president for academic affairs Jeff Cross along with the associate deans and every month they talk about the priorities for academic affairs. “We use their input to help prioritize what we do every day,” Zimmer said. “It’s what important to the customer, because if it’s important to them, it should be important to us.” Some assignments come up more randomly, like the time Facilities found out it needed to get flags out on Lincoln Avenue for a Transfer Open House. “If you’re a carpenter and you’re supposed to work on doors over here? Well, if the president’s office thinks of a new priority guess what? Your priorities changed,” Zimmer said. Some of the recommendations made by Workgroup No.5 will take time to implement as they have not even been discussed and items still need to be prioritized. “It takes time,” Zimmer said. “How can you do it this spring if you haven’t started discussing it yet?” There are a series of steps Facilities has to go through before taking on a project. “We have to tell how much it costs, identify the materials we need, get the labor organized,” Zimmer said. “We have to go through all of the steps and then we can start.” Though the Workgroup might recommend an action, the people involved might not have agreed upon it yet. “Once I hear from the president and Paul McCann, everybody else what university thinks is most important, I’ll get
started on it,” Zimmer said. The money for Facilities comes from the campus improvement fee and appropriations, which includes money from the state, tuition and fees, and local fees. In FY15, total expenses were $15,134,014.26. In FY17, the total budget is $10,336,274.06. There is money in the budget that is not specifically allocated to any one purpose. “It’s for current operations and those monies then go to fix the pipes in Thomas or do anything else that we need to do at the time it happens,” McCann said. “... If something breaks, we have to take it out of current operations. We manage facilities like a business, we use th money as we need to.”
Staffing
McCann said the reduction in Facilities staff has been significant. As a whole, the facilities Workgroup thought staffing was the most important part to look at, Workgroup chair Steven Daniel said. He said it was this issue that came up often as the Workgroup conducted interviews during the vitalization project. “The reduced staffing was making it difficult to get projects completed in a timely fashion because they would have to move people from one project to another project rather than just sending people out to do the project, so people are moving around,” Daniels said. Zimmer said every time Facilities has to pull someone off a job because of an emergency, their efficiency is reduced. “They go do something for a couple hours then they wonder, where’d I leave off?” he said. “...Ideally we’d like to schedule it, stay on the job, knock it out instead of waiting for an emergency.”
With a larger workforce, Zimmer said, it would be easier to have more flexibility, but he has been “pleasantly surprised” at how much gets done every day, even with reduced staffing. “There’s people who work harder, that work smarter,” Zimmer said. Zimmer said people have been understanding of this. “We also have customers who understand that they can wait,” he said. “(They’ll say) ‘I know that you don’t have money today, have reduced staffing, how bout we put that on the back burner until you can handle it?’” According to the Workgroup’s findings, after the March 12, 2016 layoffs, facilities planning and management groups are responsible for twice, and in some cases three times as much, square feet or acres per FTE when compared to national averages among rather universities. “This reality has crippled the ability of maintenance shops to do anything except react to emergency repair needs,” the group wrote in its final report. McCann said people doing more work is a campus-wide scenario. “We’ve got some very good people in some case they’re having to do some more work that they’ve had to do before but they’re also being compensated for that,” he said. The university has been able to hire people back in some places on a temporary part-time basis with money from appropriated funds and tuition. “We hired them back based on what needed to be done,” McCann said.
Projects
One recommendation made by the Workgroup is finishing projects that have already been started. Ceilings removed in Life Science, tape
across parts of the south entrance stairway of Lantz Arena, fencing around the south end of McAfee Gym, scaffolding over the north west entrance of McAfee and fencing around a sidewalk at the west end of Douglas Hall are examples of dormant projects Workgroup No.5 cited in its recommendations. They also included finishing repairs on previously bathrooms in Coleman Hall as a recommendation. Facilities recently finished fixing Coleman Hall bathrooms, allowing them to reopen in February. “Vitalization thought it was important, others thought it was important, the president agreed,” Zimmer said. Zimmer said there was student, faculty and staff interest in fixing the bathrooms. High school students coming to the building for a Scholastic Bowl competition also provided incentive to get them done. To fix the bathrooms, Facilities already had almost all of the materials they needed and saw it was easy to pick up where they last started. For other projects, Zimmer said Facilities is willing to be patient, and will let the administration know what their priorities are. Some projects can wait, Zimmer said, but when things start to fail or break, they rise higher in the priority list. “If you have this maintenance thing and you just keep putting it off because you don’t have the money or it’s not broken bad enough you have to do it, then you keep deferring it until the point you have to do something,” he said. Zimmer said several projects were stopped and others were reviewed at several different levels.
Facilities, page 5