Are building owners sick and tired of hearing about deferred maintenance?
If so, it would be understandable. Everyone from national associations monitoring the condition of institutional and commercial buildings to their own facilities managers have told them for decades about the deteriorating state of many U.S. buildings and the need to take action.
“A lot of times, building owners get presented by facility managers with a list of backlogged repairs with a big dollar value,” says John Edwards, CEO of FEA, which specializes in strategic planning for facilities. “Universities especially get handed reports that say, ‘You’re the worst among your peers. You’ve got this $100 million to $800 million to $2 billion backlog.’ The backlog is supposed to be scary, but it’s really just insurmountable because the number is oftentimes so big that doing something about it seems impossible.”
At a certain point, it would be easy for owners to tune out the noise.
“I don’t know if they’re tired of it or not, but it’s been talked about for many years, decades now, and it can become this drone of noise,” Edwards says. “Every year, facilities managers telling them about deferred maintenance, but the number is so big they think they can’t do anything about it anyway.”
But the issue remains, and owners who ignore the bad news about their facilities run the risk of not just doing short-term damage to their facilities but undermining critical long-term goals for their organizations.
While a backlog of facility repair tasks can undermine the short-term need to protect occupants and visitors, it also can affect the organization’s longer-term safety and security goals.
“Certainly from a safety standpoint, there are key building systems that have redundancy built into them,” Edwards says. “But you don’t want to just rely on redundancy. You have to ensure the building systems are functioning and are kept up to date in terms of age and condition and being able to be there when they’re needed.
“There are a lot of building systems the owner is depending on to provide a safe, healthy, productive environment for all the occupants, and maintenance of those items is usually high on the criticality list.”
The financial implications from substandard safety and security systems include the risk of greater liability for the organization.
“Some of those potential non-operating conditions because of deferred maintenance may be identified during annual inspections by the fire marshal or maybe during a security incident,” Edwards says. “You might find that 80 percent of your doors don’t close properly because they haven’t been maintained or they haven't been updated or the hardware hasn’t been improved and is actually just worn out, and you have a lot of security issues. There is potential liability if these things aren’t addressed from a maintenance perspective.”
Climate change has created enormous challenges for building owners, who ultimately are responsible for their organizations’ well-being and long-term success. Measures to improve resilience often include large-scale capital projects designed to protect occupants, operations and buildings. But managers who fail to account for the short-term damage to capital project planning are likely to run into problems.
“When it comes to deferred maintenance, I like to think of it more from the organizational resilience perspective as opposed to just the resilience of the system itself,” Edward says. “Life safety systems have redundancy built in to make sure you have full resilience and that things are going to work when they’re supposed to work. But other systems may get less attention that if not properly maintained, and they can put you out of business for the time being because of a deferred maintenance problem.”
As an example of a delayed repair undermining an organization’s resilience, Edwards points to his experience with a higher education organization.
“They had to cancel the start of the winter semester classes in a significant number of buildings because of a steam system failure,” he says. Pipes in the buildings froze and burst, leading to widespread flooding and damage.
“When they traced back the root cause of the steam system failure, it was not the boilers. They had a number of items in the same system that had been on the deferred maintenance list, but they hadn’t been addressed because leadership had decided other things were more important.
“Every year it had been, ‘Nope, we’re going to wait. We got other more important things to do.’ This was not just facilities leadership but university leadership being presented with options on ways to spend the university’s money.”
Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.
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