As Facilities Management prepares for summer renovations, workers realize they can’t be as efficient as they’d like to be.
A lack of “surge” space – locations around the campus used to house temporarily displaced departments – has forced the university to shuffle departments around while completing several renovation projects, frustrating occupants and extending the time projects will take.
Renovations in the Animal Science Center are scheduled to start this summer and the lack of such surge space will force the project to be completed in phases. Instead of working for an 18- to 24-month period, Facilities Management will be replacing the building’s HVAC piping floor-by-floor over four or five years.
Associate Director of Heating, Cooling and Air Conditioning John Vucci explained that longer construction periods result in higher prices because contractors raise their bid prices to account for the uncertainty of changing costs over several years of construction.
The university built Susquehanna Hall in 1991 to give departments a place to work while their buildings were being renovated. But the English department moved in a year later and has yet to leave, all but eliminating the university’s ability to relocate departments during renovations.
Many maintenance problems can be fixed while buildings are fully operational, and most of the major renovations are not scheduled until the university can secure capital funding from the state, said Carlo Colella, director of the Department of Architecture, Engineering and Construction.
Funded or not, renovations can’t move forward until staff can vacate their buildings. Projects in Shoemaker and Francis Scott Key Halls are on hold until surge space is available.
Vucci compared it to surgery: “If you’re operating on the heart and working on the arteries, you’d better have a replacement nearby to keep the blood flowing,” he said. “Same thing applies when we work on electrical and HVAC systems. We can’t get to stuff in the walls when people are there.”
The key is moving the English department, officials said. Once the renovation of Tawes is complete in spring 2009, the English faculty will move there, freeing up surge space. This space will create a “domino effect” of projects that should fall into place, said Jack Baker, director of Operations and Maintenance.
The counseling center at Shoemaker is scheduled to move in, and Jimenez and Frederick Scott Key staffs will move in when funding is secure for those upgrades.
“Until we get English into Tawes, there’s nothing that can be done at all in Susquehanna. It’s occupied,” Baker said.
The English department originally moved in while waiting for its home,Taliaferro Hall, to be improved. That building was taken over by other programs, and the English department became a fixture in Susquehanna. Last spring, the university finally secured state funding to repair the aging Tawes Theatre.
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