Bill for deferred U of A maintenance close to $1 billion

‘Inventory reduction program’ intended to avoid needlessly racking up more costs

With a deferred maintenance bill nearing $1 billion, the University of Alberta is channelling the immortal words of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy novels — “don’t panic.”

James Allen, associate vicepresident of operations and maintenance, told a board of governors meeting Friday that even though the approximate cost of $938 million is high, it is a “shifting landscape.”

“As we conduct maintenance, as we do things with our infrastructure, that deferred maintenance goes down and then, with time and activity and with use, it goes up,” he said.

“It’s continually moving and sometimes it takes a while to catch up.”

Allen told the board that much like keeping a vehicle or a house in good order, preventive maintenance is great, but sometimes “you just don’t have enough money to do what needs to be done all the time.”

An estimated $450 million of the total is accounted for by “what should have been done, but hasn’t been done,” while the remainder is part of a five-year maintenance plan that includes the current year and projections over the next four years on what needs to be achieved.

Mechanical, electrical and envelope ( building exterior) work comprises the majority of the deferred maintenance total, Allen said.

The rising cost of maintenance is partly because a large chunk of its infrastructure was “built very quickly with not necessarily the best of materials” in the postwar period, he said.

“What that means is that now we are starting to see a lot of this come to the end of its life where a lot of its major systems need to be replaced,” Allen said.

The university faces added pressure because heavy construction season is limited to between May and August and there is a limit to the amount of staff it has to plan, design and engineer maintenance projects.

Additionally, the university lacks a lot of extra room to relocate staff and students — known as decant space — during any renovation work.

Essentially, Allen said, work is capped each year to between $35 million and $55 million.

To combat the rising tide of deferred maintenance, Allen said the university is undertaking an “inventory reduction program” so it is “not sinking money into something that we should not be maintaining any more.”

The university is considering the demolition of existing buildings, but an exact list of those is still under consideration.

We are starting to see a lot of this (infrastructure) come to the end of its life where a lot of its major systems need to be replaced.