In need of R&R

CHARLOTTE – The Burson science building sits on the rapidly modernizing campus of UNC Charlotte, about a two-minute walk from the bustling student union.

Students pour in and out of the union, on their way to class or back to their dorms. The Barnes & Noble bookstore and Starbucks in the building seem miles away from the dregs of Burson Hall, where building systems sputter and cough and sometimes choke. The chipped, stained flooring in the chemistry building doesn’t look like it came from the same century as the gleaming tiles of the student union, which opened in 2009.

Down in the mechanical room of Burson, which opened in 1985, is a problem that few students ever glimpse, but a problem that affects everyone in the building. The mechanical systems in Burson are long overdue for a fix, and likely a complete replacement. One week students and faculty are forced to bundle up, the next week temperatures inside can reach 80 degrees.

The old building is one of several on the UNCC campus, and one of hundreds of public buildings across the state, that are badly in need of repairs or renovation. But the state hasn’t budgeted enough money to fix these problems, which has caused a multibillion-dollar backlog of repair work that a state official said will never be balanced.

Speros Fleggas, the deputy secretary of the N.C. Department of Administration who oversees building maintenance, said that over time the state has gotten $3.9 billion behind in the repair and renovation of public buildings. These buildings include educational buildings at public universities, government buildings and correctional facilities, among others.

During the 2013 session of the N.C. General Assembly, lawmakers approved spending $150 million on repair and renovation of state buildings, including $90 million on government facilities and other non-educational buildings and $60 million for public colleges and universities.

At that rate of spending, it would take the state 26 years to square away the $3.9 billion deficit on existing buildings and that’s only to correct existing problems in buildings across the entire state, not any that occur in the future.

The $150 million approved by legislators last year is to cover two years of repair and renovation, but according to conventional wisdom in building maintenance, that isn’t close to what’s needed for just one year of work. The rule, according to several sources interviewed for this story, is that the cost of repair and renovation simply to maintain a building’s quality is between 2 percent and 4 percent of the replacement cost of that building. When discussing repair on the state level, the total building inventory is taken into consideration.

According to Dave Simpson, government relations and building director of the Carolinas chapter of the Associated General Contractors of America, the system-wide replacement cost of the state’s public buildings is somewhere around $26 billion. By the rule mentioned above, N.C. should be spending between $520 million and $1.04 billion per year on repair and renovation. The money approved in the General Assembly in 2013 is less than 30 percent of what is needed every year, according to that metric.

The AGC and affiliated groups have decided this year to make funding for the repair and renovation of public buildings the focus of their lobbying efforts with the state legislature

“Not all the deficiencies can be fixed at once,” Fleggas said. “It’s just the availability of money and needs across the state. Because of that, there will always be a backlog to some extent.”

Determining needs

Several years ago, the General Assembly adopted an initiative called the Facilities Condition Assessment Program in order to determine the repair and renovation needs of public buildings in the state.

The State Construction Office fields a large team made up of professionals from three disciplines: architecture, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. Those teams are dispersed across the state to inspect all state-owned buildings larger than 3,000 square feet, university buildings included. The teams assess the facilities and document building deficiencies, then report back to the SCO with a rough estimate of the cost of needed repairs.

The SCO reports directly to Fleggas, whose office then sends the reports to the various agencies and institutions across the state.

“The Department of Corrections gets their report, UNCC gets a report on their facilities,” Fleggas said. “Those agencies use these reports to help report their needs.”

After getting the needs and repair-cost report from the Department of Administration, the individual agencies and institutions are able to rank the projects based on importance. But just because a project is deemed dire by an agency doesn’t mean that the state will or can give enough money to repair the buildings.

“In the order of priority, you look at life safety systems first,” Fleggas said. “Fire-alarm systems, elevators, mechanical and other electrical systems. Sometimes the cosmetic stuff is given a lower priority. Do you really need to get new carpet, or can it wait a few more years?

“We’re doing the best we can to keep everything operational and safe for employees.”

Local problems

Of the $60 million approved in 2013 for repair and renovation of buildings in the UNC System, UNCC got $4.1 million. The majority of that money is going to be put toward fixing leaky roofs and faulty HVAC equipment, said Phil Jones, UNCC’s associate vice chancellor of facilities management.

Once this round of repairs is over, students in Burson Hall will probably stop feeling the wild fluctuations in temperature that can happen in the building. Good for the students studying chemical reactions to be comfortable, but bad for students in the many other aging buildings on campus that won’t be getting any tune-ups this year.

“We have about $140 million in documented backlog in maintenance and repair,” Jones said. “The most recent figure on the (UNC) system level estimates they have $2.2 billion in documented renovation and repair needs. You can see there’s a great need there and it’s definitely not being met.”

Jones said UNCC’s existing infrastructure is valued at $1.7 billion. Based on the 2-to-4-percent rule, the university needs between $34 million and $68 million per year to maintain its buildings. The $4.1 million approved for UNCC is 0.24 percent of $1.7 billion.

Many of the buildings on the UNCC campus were built in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Despite efforts over the last several years to modernize, one-third of all buildings on that campus are more than 30 years old and Jones said the systems in many of those buildings are wearing out.

In many of the older buildings, the roofs and the HVAC and electrical systems are coming to the end of their life cycle. In some cases, major infrastructure, like chillers and boilers, are nearing their ends and need to be replaced.

“That’s a constant battle for us,” Jones said. “What happens is we end up fixing things after they have failed. The roof is leaking because it’s failed.

“It’s become an urgent situation at that point. We take the worst first and push the rest back. We put on Band-Aids to keep systems going at the end of their lives.”

One of the reasons these buildings, and many across the state, have gotten to such a bad state is that often no repair and renovation money was given to state agencies. Fleggas said in the state’s recent history, there have been many years – and sometimes entire terms of governors – in which little or no money was given for repair and renovation of state buildings.

And putting critical building systems in a holding pattern only costs more in the long run.

The cost of doing nothing

Simpson says the state’s idea that it is saving money by not committing to more repair and renovation projects is a fallacy.

“It doesn’t make good business sense to have such a huge inventory of state and university buildings with a whole lot of money being provided and then turn around and ignore, to a large extent, the maintenance of those buildings,” Simpson said.

Jones has seen firsthand what it costs to do nothing at UNCC. An HVAC system that three years ago could have been repaired will likely need to be replaced this year, he said.

Because of the lack of funding and the cost associated with letting buildings languish, UNCC has taken steps to prevent problems in its buildings from becoming worse, sometimes at the expense of academics.

“The chancellor has to take money from other programs, academic programs in some cases, to fix these things,” Jones said. “Our chancellor has taken program money because the longer you wait to fix something the worse it becomes.”

Simpson said that Carolinas AGC is teaming up with the Professional Engineers of N.C., the state chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the American Council of Consulting Engineers on May 28 for the AGC’s annual Legislative Day. The main message at this lobbying event will be attempting to show legislators what it costs when not enough money is given for repair and renovation of state buildings.

The Legislative Day will be held two weeks into the General Assembly 2014 session, which usually lasts between six and eight weeks.

Short session expectations

The General Assembly’s 2014 “short sessions” comes one year after an active 2013 “long session,” but it comes with little promise of additional funding for repair and renovation projects on state buildings.

Generally the short session is for making slight tweaks to decisions made in the previous year’s long session, and Simpson said that’s exactly what he expects.

“To be realistic, the short session is primarily focused on fine-tuning the state’s $19 billion budget,” he said. “We’re not optimistic that we’ll get more money for repair and renovation.”

Simpson did say he’s hopeful that the General Assembly will consider approving a study of the needs for existing state buildings, which would recommend how to fix them and offer a solution on how to find a permanent funding source for the $520 million to $1.04 billion that is needed for repair and renovation of existing buildings.

“What would be most helpful would be a steady stream of funding,” he said. “We’re not talking about building anything new. We’re talking about keeping up existing buildings.

“The 2013 funding was a pittance, it was nothing. We’re trying to put together the message that state and university officials have been making that the state needs to shake loose badly needed hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain and repair state buildings.”