Money is becoming available for new construction and major renovations of college and university science buildings, but experts and observers in the industry see a major planning flaw in many of these projects: They are moving forward with no assessment as to whether or not owners have the skilled staff to operate and maintain what is being planned, or the financial resources to hire the staff that will be needed. That is a recipe for institutional embarrassment.
New or newly renovated science buildings may be useful in the recruitment of researchers, faculty, and students, but if a lack of skilled O&M personnel leads to HVAC disruptions, power outages, unreliable environmental control, safety breaches, noise incursions, and slow maintenance response times, researchers will take their teams elsewhere, faculty will leave, and students won’t enroll there.
Capital Projects and Operations: A Lesson Not Learned?
“We thought we had all learned the lesson that keeping operational issues separated from capital project planning and design was a big mistake,” says Steve Westfall, founder and CEO of Tradeline. “But apparently that lesson has not been learned, at least not universally, or it is not being passed down to a new generation of administrators. We are seeing many major projects push ahead where operability is not even on the planning or design table, where operations people are not involved in design decisions, and where there is no upfront institutional commitment to a long-term operating budget.”
According to Steve Frei, principal of Affiliated Engineers, many top college and university administrators don’t fully appreciate that in the last five to 10 years, new energy- and safety-focused building codes, along with institutional desires for LEED certification, dictate a much more sophisticated class of science building. Those codes and desires call for more numerous and advanced types of building systems and equipment—specialized energy-saving features; environmental control devices; programmable logic controllers; and elaborate real-time computer-based operating, monitoring, and control systems—all of which need skilled staff to operate, monitor, and maintain.
“In one particular LEED-Gold project, the institution did not have operating people on staff who understood the energy-saving design intent and operating requirements,” says Frei. “Some years after start-up, they were regularly bypassing the original energy-saving logic controls. It is an all-too-common problem.”
Frei cites two conversations he’s had with major universities that are planning new science buildings, where construction and equipment funding was available but not the needed operating funds. “One wanted a mechanical design in which all major components were to run to failure, because the O&M group could get money to replace broken-down equipment but not the money to maintain equipment,” he says. “The other simply did not want any of the current advanced control systems for energy savings in their project because they did not have, and could not hire, the people needed to maintain those systems.” Frei sees these as signs of the continuation of financially wasteful old-school policies, practices, and organizational structures that are out of step with what science buildings now require.
Design and operating experts agree that no institution should go ahead with a major science building capital project without the early upfront involvement of operating staff in design decisions; an upfront understanding of what the operating requirements will be; an operations staffing plan, including new hires if needed; and the commitment of the institution to funding the O&M costs for at least 10 years.
Jim Cowell, associate vice president for facilities at Caltech, agrees. “You can’t build past the knowledge, skills, and abilities of your operations and maintenance force, whoever that happens to be,” he says. “To build a science building today will require that you have operating people who can look at, pay attention to, and respond to operating data. You may have to reshape or augment your workforce to meet this need.
“When we go to get a project approved by the board,” says Cowell, “they address, and make a part of their project decision, the long-term commitment to the operations and maintenance costs, and that includes maintenance and operations labor, as well as energy and utilities.”
Four Planning Issues to Get on the Table
Academic institutions that have successfully worked the operability issue into their capital project planning process, along with the leading engineering firms that are designing the new mechanical systems for the current wave of science building projects, agree on four questions that should be near the top of an institution’s earliest planning priorities:
- How many O&M heads will our new building require?
- Given the state of our current facilities portfolio and O&M staffing levels, do we have the labor capacity to take on a new building?
- What special skills will be required, and where will we get them?
- Is there an institutional commitment to funding the labor model we are going to need to take on a new building?
How Many Heads—The Overlooked Occupancy Factor
An ongoing college and university O&M study by Tradeline shows that using commonly published benchmarking data of labor per square foot to predict or evaluate staffing numbers for science buildings is not useful because of the astronomical range (high vs. low) of the actual headcounts per comparable amounts of square footage reported by higher-ed institutions. Tradeline’s findings show that reported headcount numbers for science buildings can range from a low of 11 O&M heads per 1 million sf to a high of more than 55, a range of more than 5:1. “This kind of data spread says that labor per square feet is not a metric you can use to determine if any particular staffing model is right or not,” says Westfall.
While much of this spread in staffing models can be attributed to differences in the types of spaces in science buildings—dry labs, wet labs, offices, classrooms, and extra-high-maintenance spaces such as vivaria, high containment, cleanrooms, data centers, pilot plants, and even full cafeterias—Tradeline’s findings suggest that a major, generally unrecognized contributor to O&M headcount is the number of people occupying a building and who those people are.
“Population occupancy—how many of what types of occupants are in a building—can account for as much as 50 percent of the operations and maintenance staffing required,” says Westfall. “As you add more research people to a given amount of research lab space, which commonly happens to research buildings after the original occupancy, you significantly increase the need for operations and maintenance headcount. Adding more office workers to a building also has an operations and maintenance impact, but not as much as adding researchers.”
Conversely, when lab buildings first come online and are not fully occupied, they don’t need as many operations and maintenance heads as they will need when fully occupied, or as may be the case, over-occupied.
“The idea that population occupancy is a major factor in O&M staffing has not, to my knowledge, been recognized in the literature, nor is it being used in O&M planning and budgeting,” says Westfall, “but it is generally acknowledged that population occupancy has a significant impact on operations and maintenance labor: Occupants exercise building assets, and the more occupants the more exercise. More occupants raise and lower fume hood sashes more often, open and close doors more often, cause building equipment to cycle on and off more frequently, break and spill things more often, create more heat that needs to be exhausted, and use up more air that needs to be replaced.”
Westfall’s thesis is that the only way to get a realistic fix on the required O&M headcount is to model labor as a function of the number and types of occupants along with the mix of space types in a building, which is something he has done for the more than 20 institutions in his study.
The Campus-Wide Capacity Factor
Whether there is enough O&M capacity on an existing campus to take on a new science building depends on how tied up O&M staff is with the existing portfolio. Caltech addresses that problem with a policy that every facility has to be maintainable, and that every building project must look at the long-term impact it has on the total building portfolio and the total O&M spend. “That policy has two implications for our capital project decision-making and O&M operations,” says Cowell. “First we don’t build new if we can do a whole-building renovation to get like-new buildings with the same footprint without increasing O&M or in some cases even reducing it.”
Second, Caltech employs a policy of effectively freeing up O&M labor from obsolete building assets to make that labor available for the buildings it needs. This is achieved by demolishing or mothballing unnecessary buildings, and putting buildings currently in use but destined for destruction or renovation on do-not-resuscitate status with respect to O&M labor commitments.
Getting the Right Mix of Experienced O&M Staff
Kelly Cramm, senior associate with Henderson Engineers, points out that new science buildings and large-scale science building renovations automatically come with new, modern control systems that are microprocessor-based and run by increasingly sophisticated algorithms with predictive and optimization functions going on in real-time. “That’s what codes and institutional sustainability standards require,” she says. “And that means you need staff who are comfortable with these technologies and who also understand HVAC design concepts and the way equipment is supposed to operate.”
To answer the question of whether or not an O&M team has the necessary skills for the soon-to-be up-and-operating modern control systems and equipment, an experienced engineering design firm can help by way of staff interviews, discussion groups, and even simple written tests, says Cramm. She recommends tests that assess technology and equipment aptitude, knowledge, and experience, and that can help weed out job candidates pre-interview.
In the case of highly specialized equipment—fire alarm systems, occupancy-based and demand-based ventilation systems, and building management systems—Cramm suggests equipment-specific service contracts as an efficient and effective way to solve the maintenance skills issue. “You don’t need an extensive maintenance contract for these kinds of systems,” she says, “but you do need a contract that guarantees a response time, otherwise you have no idea when service will arrive. The other minimum is the hourly rate you will be charged.”
Cramm is adamant about the skill required to operate and maintain building controls. “You must have a strong controls person on your staff,” she says. “Everything now is controls based, and if you are going to have an operating problem or get off track on your energy-use expectations, it is going to be in the area of building controls and building control systems.”
Cramm says the O&M staffing models for science buildings that have healthy skill sets contain a mix of young people in their 20s and 30s who are very comfortable with technology, and seasoned 50- and 60-year-old experts who really know HVAC system mechanics, electrical systems, and plumbing. In that environment, the young people learn the mechanical realities from the seasoned experts. “You may well lose some of these young tech-savvy workers once they are trained, but you have to do this. If and when you do lose a trained tech-savvy worker, you can consider that your contribution to society.”
