The 10 Ohio University buildings with the largest deferred-maintenance backlog each require more than $10 million of work to be properly restored.
OU’s Athens campus faces about $355 million in deferred maintenance, and many of the aging buildings remain in dire need of attention. The university plans to chip away at the mounting costs using a combination of debt issuance and state funding, and administrators have drafted a six-year, $977.5 million capital-improvement plan to address the problem.
Deferred maintenance refers to the cost of property repairs and projects OU has delayed because of lack of funds.
“We have many buildings that were built in the 1960s, so we have a lot of equipment that is reaching the end of its useful life and actually working beyond its useful life, failing at the same time,” said Harry Wyatt, associate vice president for Facilities.
Alden Library tops the list of buildings with deferred maintenance. The 286,000-square-foot building, constructed in 1968, needs $22 million of repairs and upgrades.
“These facilities are real facilities, and they are critical to the teaching and research mission of the institution, and they need to be maintained,” said Stephen Golding, vice president for Finance and Administration.
Alden’s heating and cooling system struggles to keep up with the building’s capacity, but the library has only enough money for temporary fixes, said Scott Seaman, dean of the Ohio University Libraries, in March. The library spent about $1.3 million last year to replace some of the building’s air handlers and air ducts.
Other buildings rounding out the top five of the list include the Radio-Television Building, which requires $20 million in maintenance; The Convo, which needs $18 million in maintenance; Clippinger Laboratories, which needs $16 million in maintenance; and Irvine Hall, which requires $15 million in maintenance.
Lindley Hall, Stocker Center, McCracken Hall, Jefferson Hall and Seigfred Hall are also among OU’s buildings in need of repairs, requiring between $10 million and $13 million in maintenance.
Problems that begin as annoyances can eventually limit the functionality of a building, Wyatt said.
“It compromises the level of comfort for the occupants,” he said. “There might be circuits that blow, a limitation of how much equipment can be housed in the building.”
Common needs among buildings with deferred-maintenance backlogs include rehabilitation of mechanical, electrical and plumbing components; window replacements; new doors; and improvement of air circulation, heating and cooling within the building.
“There’s funding allotted for interim measures to address building needs until we get to the point of doing a major rehabilitation,” Wyatt said. “What we will do with that money is bridge those gaps between now and when we can schedule a full rehab of the existing building or a replacement building.”
The six-year capital plan allocates $35.5 million in the first two-year period for deferred maintenance. Also included in the plan is $5 million in the first two years for safety projects.
“When a problem is emergency-related, safety-related, we will apply resources to that building to the point of making it safe and alleviating that problem,” Wyatt said. “That even goes to the more urgent needs that might not be so apparent right away. … There is money set aside there so that something can be done very quickly.”
No capital-budget bill is in place at the Statehouse, but Ohio’s Board of Regents asked each of the state’s public universities to submit a list of projects they would like to fund with state money. Deferred-maintenance projects are high on OU’s list of capital priorities, and OU is hoping for about $23.7 million in state funding.
“We’ve submitted our capital list, and we’re cautiously optimistic that some projects from OU will be on that final list submitted to the governor,” OU President Roderick McDavis said.
In November, OU’s Board of Trustees passed a resolution allowing the university to take on debt of up to $160 million to help finance the projects. The debt will be priced and issued in February, and OU plans to start the projects in the spring, according to a Board of Trustees Resources Committee report from a meeting earlier this month.
“We’ve been pretty rigorous in developing our own capital planning requirements,” Golding said. “The state will fund whatever the state will fund … and then we will have to figure out how to cover the rest.”
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