In 2016, Facilities Management (FM) started a venture with the University of California, Office of President (UCOP) to create a UC-wide program to evaluate every significant piece of real property on campuses. This program would evaluate the property’s current condition, potential failure and mission-critical-importance level. Today, ten UC campuses utilize this program to have an accurate assessment of Deferred Maintenance (DM) needs for all UC buildings and infrastructure including equipment based on actual asset conditions. The program helps departments effectively prioritize projects, manage risk, and plan long-term funds to maintain campus’ assets.

Peter (Pete) Lentino, FM Asset Manager and lead for this endeavor, started by creating a Facilities Condition Assessment (FCA) Team consisting of Inspectors and a Program Manager to assess all the buildings on our campus. The FCA Team members include Program Manager Chris Voss, inspectors Kevin Fullerton, Tom Kane, Robert Dominguez-Gadson and Courtney Cardenas. FCA works closely with Data Officer Ed Johnson, Asset & Infrastructure Manager Eric Guillen, Asset Analyst Peter Maxwell and Utilities Program Manager Michael Lindquist.

UCOP gave campus a deadline of completing the first phase of inspections by December 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic in the middle of this process forced the team to work remotely most of 2020. The FCA team found ways to remotely complete remaining assessments on all state-funded buildings on campus, and offsite facilities at Bodega Bay, Tahoe, and Tulare by the deadline. The team completed a high-level infrastructure review on these buildings, which includes ensuring the structure of the building is sound, review of the HVAC systems age, maintenance completed or not completed, and more. The FCA team also trained many of the other campuses in condition assessment along with following practices and methodologies created by this team. Currently, they are working to complete the assessment of Student Housing and Medical Center buildings at all locations.

As with any new program, the FCA team had challenges to overcome. The costing catalog (RS Means) is an industry standard catalog for estimating the replacement of assets. UC Davis has many different buildings, and therefore has design styles that span 100+ years with many custom builds for our HVAC system. As you can imagine, this has posed a challenge when using the costing catalog. To overcome this, the FCA team had to develop and add over 800 new catalog items to the database.

Another thing to keep in mind is that each UC campus is different; UC Davis, for example, is spread out across over 3,500 acres with some buildings designed for large animal veterinary services. Respectively, UC Irvine, a smaller campus, is located in a city, and has very different building requirements. UC Merced, which is a newer campus, has newer buildings so it can be challenging to find common methodology for assessing buildings and classifying assets across the different campuses. Understanding the condition, risk/probability of failure, impact of failure of all assets, and systems has helped to create long-term funding plans that will help all UC campuses maintain their large assets. Knowing the impact of deferred maintenance costs for these assets and ensuring that we have a plan for maintaining our assets mitigates risk of failure, ultimately saving money. This has been a huge undertaking by Pete and his team.

The outcome of creating the FCA team, along with coordinating with other campuses to ensure everyone uses the same database and information, has created an excellent tool for UCOP and the State of California to help outline funding needed to keep the assets maintained. While the savings data from being proactive rather than reactive to campus infrastructure needs will take time to obtain, the FM Asset team is confident the savings will be vast. We thank Pete and his team for taking on this impressive task and turning it into something that everyone can use. Well done, team, well done!