By Deborah Adishian-Astone
Interim Vice President for Administrative Services
Jose Nava raised some important issues in his opinion column last Friday and in his recent outreach to the administration about areas of deferred maintenance that need to be addressed on our campus.
It is important to recognize that every CSU campus has an extensive backlog of unfunded deferred maintenance, and for Fresno State that need is over $200 million.
This is a daunting amount, and we are years away from having adequate funding to address all of the needs. However, significant progress is being made thanks to support from the CSU Chancellors Office and President Joseph Castro.
The current $30 million electrical infrastructure project (funded centrally by the CSU) is making an important investment in replacing our antiquated underground infrastructure by replacing transformers and upgrading the overall electrical capacity and reliability for our campus to help support current and future facilities.
In mid February when Mr. Nava reached out about a lack of restroom doors on some American with Disabilities Act (ADA) stalls in the Family Food Science, South Gym and Science I buildings, the campus immediately responded and doors were installed during spring break in the women’s restrooms and inadvertently the men’s restrooms were missed and will be completed shortly.
Mr. Nava and other students also advised us about potholes in parking lots and the potential safety issues.
At that time, a contract was already in the works and has been awarded for approximately $100,000 of parking lot repairs.
The priority for completion were student Lots P2, P13, P20, and P27 and P2 was completed during spring break.
In addition, this summer will be modernizing and upgrading elevators in the Conley Art, North Gym, Family Food Sciences, Industrial Technology and Science I buildings.
This represents an investment of over $650,000 and we plan to modernize additional elevators over the next few years based on a recent campuswide condition assessment.
Our elevators are routinely inspected by the State of California and we have an ongoing annual elevator maintenance contract to provide routine preventative maintenance on all elevators.
However, in some instances, if an elevator permit has expired, it does not mean that the elevator is unsafe or has not being inspected.
The delay in receiving an updated permit is sometimes attributed to an administrative backlog by the state.
We are committed to identifying additional campus funding each fiscal year for capital renewal and infrastructure improvement projects.
There are many improvement projects occurring this summer including new exterior LED fixtures, installation of a new master irrigation controller to help monitor and adhere to new state mandated water conservation requirements and upgrading of our wireless infrastructure to support our DISCOVERe classrooms.
We have a lot of work ahead of us, but together with everyone’s efforts to #BeBold we are making positive changes and improvements are happening.
View the original article from Jose Nava here: http://bit.ly/1F4MPnj