Long-term insufficient funding from state capital bills coupled with a massive construction boom in the 1960s left Ohio University with a staggering deferred maintenance backlog that it is now struggling to address.
Enrollment at OU doubled during Vernon Alden’s time as president from 1962 to 1969, and the increased number of students and faculty needed to be accommodated with new buildings.
“Our enrollment doubled because of the demographics of the time, so we had to do a crash program of building,” Alden said.'
Seven of the 10 buildings with the highest deferred maintenance backlog were built or completed during Alden’s presidency. Those include Alden Library, Seigfred Hall, Stocker Center, Irvine Hall, Clippinger Laboratories, The Convo and the Radio-Television Building. Each of those buildings has a maintenance backlog of $10 million or more.
“It’s a continuous cycle,” said Charles Ping, president of OU from 1975 to 1994. “If you have a group of buildings built about the same time, then you have about the same 30- or 40-year intervals that you need to look at refurbishing them.”
Deferred maintenance was not a major problem during Alden’s presidency because many of the buildings on campus were new, he said.
“We tried to do annual maintenance … and on the new buildings, for a while, we didn’t have to do too much maintenance,” said Alden, whose administration did not develop a plan for how to fund future maintenance of these buildings.
OU’s Athens campus now faces a $355 million deferred maintenance backlog.
The university plans to use a combination of debt issuance and state funding to address the problem and administrators have drafted a six-year, $977.5 million capital-improvement plan to fund some of the maintenance projects.
OU is slated to receive $18.6 million in funding from the upcoming state capital bill, and the money will go toward those projects.
Historically, money from state capital bills has not been enough to keep up with mounting maintenance costs for the university’s aging buildings. The continuous shortage of funds has contributed to the massive backlog.
“What we have spent for deferred maintenance has been what the state appropriates,” Ping said. “(The state’s formula) is a rational way to do it, but it’s never been enough for the operating budget or the capital budget.”
Before this year, the state has depended on a formula to determine capital appropriations for Ohio’s public universities. That formula was based on the total square footage of buildings on campus.
“It was a challenge every year because there were never enough funds,” said Robert Glidden, president of OU from 1994 to 2004. “(The state) allocated the funds that had been appropriated accordingly, and they had to divide up the money among all public institutions to make it stretch as far as they could.
For this year’s capital bill, Ohio Gov. John Kasich decided to create a committee, led by Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee, to determine which projects at which universities should receive funding.
“Two years from now, four years from now, we’re not sure if this same process will be used,” OU President Roderick McDavis said. “We’re relying a lot more on private funding going forward as well as relying more on debt to fix the buildings because we just don’t think that there will be enough money allocated in a timely manner.”
The university is now considering raising private money to help fund maintenance of future buildings, McDavis said.
“Historically … the assumption was that the state would always take care of its buildings,” McDavis said. “We really depended on that. The last 10 years or so, we’ve shifted our thinking to also relying on private money.”
OU has used large, private donations to construct or renovate some buildings on campus in recent years, such as Walter Hall and the Walter International Education Center.
“Any time you have buildings paid for by donations, the ideal thing would be to raise enough endowment so that you have a perpetual endowment to cover maintenance,” Glidden said. “As time went on, it became more and more apparent s would be important.”
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