The Emporia Gazette

February 13, 2012

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On Friday, Emporia State University will turn in its “deferred maintenance” project list to the Kansas State Board of Regents. The list outlines how ESU plans to spend the $8.9 million it will get over the next five years for overdue repair work at the university.

It’s a start. But it’s also not as much as it sounds like.

“When your list is $44 million, that’s not a great deal for five years,” ESU President Michael Lane said. “The good thing is, I’ve had conversations with a few of the legislators and they understand this is not sufficient, and that they’ll have to address it again.”

Of that money, about $5.4 million is new funding while the rest is interest income that the state is allowing the universities to spend on maintenance

Even getting to the work that has been paid for is going to take some time. The project list has to be cleared by not only the Board of Regents, but also a joint legislative committee and a task force on energy efficiency. By the time all the hoops have been jumped through and bids have been taken, it’ll likely be September before the work actually starts.

So what’s on the list? With $1.8 million in new money and $649,000 in interest to spend in the first year, Lane outlined the university’s top four priorities.

One is to fix the roof of the HPER building, estimated at $1 million. The roof of the Health, Physical Education and Recreation department illustrates the dilemma of deferred maintenance perfectly. The longer you wait to make repairs, the more repairs you have to make.

ESU has known for a while that the HPER roof would be the top of its list for work when funding became available. That was before this last spring poured a lot of rain and a bit of snow on an unrepaired roof.

“These last three months, I don’t want to even guess what kind of damage has been done,” Lane said. “But I know we have to replace one of the gym floors.

Work on the utility tunnels beneath White Library will cost an estimated $339,000. This includes shoring up the concrete, replacing some of the old utility equipment and removing the asbestos insulation around the pipes, as well as installing better drainage systems to prevent flooding. The aim is to add 50 to 75 years to the life of the tunnel system, Lane said.

Another project in White Library is to begin work on the electrical and heating/air conditioning systems, an estimated cost of $640,000. The university had hoped to replace everything at once. But with money the way it is, the project is getting stretched over three years, with the last electrical work scheduled to happen in 2010.

Even so, this is one that the university wants taken care of soon. Both systems are not only outdated, but unreliable. In one third-floor break room, Lane said, if the coffee pot and microwave are plugged in at the same time, it overloads the circuits and shuts down a nearby computer lab.

“We cannot find parts,” Lane said of an electrical panel in the library. “We cannot buy parts. We cannot build parts. If that board went down right now, we’d have to shut down the building.”

Finally, there is extensive work at Roosevelt Hall. This includes an engineering estimate on the foundation at Roosevelt Hall ($272,000), replacing the heating and air-conditioning ($175,000) and the plumbing ($35,000) Note that that’s just the engineering study — actually stabilizing the foundation may cost around $728,000, currently planned for fiscal year 2010. And yes, that actually is a mere five-figure price tag for the plumbing. Because the walls will already be opened up for the heating and cooling work, it saves a little on the other project.

It’s possible that the overall plan may move faster. Both the regents and the state universities are already laying the groundwork to lobby the Legislature for more maintenance money next session. But for right now, the priority is to cross the T’s, dot the I’s and get the work started at last.

“We’re a million-eight better than we were a year ago,” Lane said. “It wasn’t what we wanted. It wasn’t what we needed. But it’s more than we had.”