The University currently faces about $600 million in deferred maintenance costs, seeing the consequences of “dramatic expansion” without “corresponding increase in funds for maintenance,” according to a Senate Executive Committee report.

“Having some deferred maintenance isn’t unhealthy,” said Randy McCarthy, a chair of the Urbana-Champaign Task Force on Faculty Issues and Concerns.

The real problem, McCarthy said, is a lack of steady funding for maintenance costs. 

“Everyone likes to build a castle, but nobody likes to wash the windows,” he said. “It’s easy to get someone to give you the money to build a big glorious building in their name, but it’s hard to get someone to give you the money to take care of it.”

The exact amount of current deferred maintenance, the postponement of buildings and equipment upkeep due to lack of funds, is unknown. In 2001, the Board of Trustees commissioned an assessment of the campus’ deferred maintenance. The plan was to have the agency who performed the assessment come back every two years and assess 20 percent of the campus at a time so that, within 10 years, the entire campus will have been assessed. 

Assessments were performed in 2002, 2004 and 2006, but stopped since the money was better spent actually doing maintenance, said Ben McCall, chair of the Senate Committee on Campus Operations.

The University is not alone in this issue. Doris Reeser, coordinator of capital maintenance planning said the University is on par with other institutions of its size and mission, according to reports the University receives from an agency called Sightlines.

The University evaluates deferred maintenance with the facility condition index, which is the ratio of deferred maintenance to the current replacement value of campus buildings used as a benchmark to compare the relative condition of a group of facilities.

The campus’ index has shifted quite a bit over the years. In 2002, the index stood at about 15 percent and grew to 23.5 percent by 2007. The University stepped up its efforts in 2007 to address the deferred maintenance backlog, and now the index has returned to 16 percent. An index of 10 percent is considered acceptable by industry standards, according to the report from the Senate Executive Committee Task Force on Faculty Issues and Concerns.

“In prior years, the state would fund large renovation projects for universities and other state agencies,” Reeser said. “We’re not getting that kind of funding every year or even every other year.”

Currently, deferred maintenance is addressed using a multitude of funds. The primary fund for deferred maintenance is the Academic Facilities Maintenance Fund Assessment, a student fee that draws about $20 million per year, according to the report. However, bringing the index down from 16 to 10 percent is estimated to cost $213 million.

The University has been making great strides in addressing deferred maintenance. So far, since the Deferred Maintenance Program’s founding in 2007, about $275 million worth of projects have been funded, said Steve Breitwieser, media communication specialist for facilities and services. There are also a number of initiatives working toward addressing deferred maintenance, including Chancellor Phyllis Wise and Provost Ilesanmi Adesida’s recently announced a $70 million initiative to upgrade classrooms across campus. 

However, there are still many other features of campus, such as laboratories, faculty offices, lounges and meeting rooms, that need to be modernized. McCall said he thinks that the Task Force on Faculty Issues and Concerns needs to work with the administration to come up with a serious plan to address deferred maintenance in the long term.

“We need to identify continuing streams of funds to reduce the deferred maintenance backlog and prevent it from growing again,” he said. “It’s the kind of subtle issue that lurks in the shadows that nobody seems to pay attention to but it’s such a critical thing.”

Steffie can be reached at [email protected].