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Willis offers FSEC overview of UB facilities
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
Pop quiz: What institution has 38 miles of roadways, 29 miles of walkways, 109 parking lots, 16,000 parking spaces and 8,006 trees?
The correct answer? The University at Buffalo.
What institution's research facilities:
a) include 1950s vintage space suitable for Sputnik-era research; b) are suffering from a deficit of research space of at least 235,248 square feet; c) have had 20 percent of current space declared "unusable for any purpose?"
The correct answer, unfortunately, is again UB, according to James A. (Beau) Willis, interim executive vice president for finance and operations, who gave the Faculty Senate Executive Committee an update on UB facilities yesterday.
Willis' presentation included statistics that illustrate the scope of what the term "facilities" encompasses:
Some 40,000 folks—students, faculty, staff—are on hand each day at UB.
UB now has three campuses—the South Campus in Buffalo, the North Campus in Amherst and the downtown Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus—which cover a total of 1,346 acres.
There are 199 buildings on the UB campuses and 48 buildings off campus, all of which total 10 million gross square feet of assignable space.
7,500 students are UB residents, with 1,400 of them living on the South Campus and the remainder on the North Campus.
To maintain all its facilities, UB processes 38,000 work orders each year and fields 72,000 calls.
Like many universities, UB is an aged institution and faces numerous demands for repair, renovation and upgrades of its facilities, as well as calls for new construction, installation of current technology and new uses for existing space.
Currently, there exists a five-year, SUNY capital plan for UB to help address the most pressing needs, Willis said. At the top of that list is the research infrastructure, followed closely by critical maintenance, classrooms, student housing and campus life.
A SUNY Construction Fund audit—conducted in 2000—identified roughly $250 million in critical maintenance needs around campus, including aging buildings with wiring and plumbing that have reached "the end of their useful life," according to Willis.
Thankfully, UB's professional and dedicated staff of 100 trades people has managed to keep many facilities operating year after year, "sometimes with bubblegum and string," he joked.
Several major building projects recently have been completed or are well under way—including the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, the Acheson Hall renovation to house the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and the new library storage facility—and several more are pending, including a new engineering building and renovation of the South Campus complex that includes Cary, Farber and Sherman halls.
As a result, Willis has established a space management and facilities planning committee to oversee allocations of space across the university, to develop a capital master plan, to coordinate land use and housing development, and to advise on other facilities matters. The committee will begin its long-term master planning this fall.
Membership on the committee includes the vice president for health sciences, the university's chief information officer, the vice president for student affairs, one dean each from the North and South campuses, and the School of Architecture and Planning dean as an ex-officio member. Other members will be the chair of the Faculty Senate's Facilities Committee, the UB Foundation Board of Trustees properties committee chair, the associate vice president for planning and budget, the associate vice president for university facilities, the chair of the Professional Staff Senate and a student representative.
Willis said a "summer blitz" will be held this year to improve UB classrooms and add technology in those spaces. The project will include providing a complete physical overhaul of 32 classrooms and upgrading technology in another 85. Also planned are overhauls of two larger classroom spaces—148 Diefendorf Hall and 125 Kimball Hall—as well as the addition of five classrooms in the basement of Baldy Hall.
In response to Willis' presentation, FSEC members expressed concerns about existing and proposed space at UB. Barbara Rittner, associate dean for external affairs in the School of Social Work, said the lack of basic technology in many classrooms has been "a barrier to hiring really good faculty," while Cemal Basaran, professor and director of graduate studies in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, said that most of his school's labs don't pass safety audits and the buildings lack accommodations to enable him to conduct his research in the area of lasers for microelectronics. Willis responded that those are the kind of comments that will be useful for members of the space management and facilities planning committee.