Broken Maintenance Strategy at Ed Department
The Hawaii Department of Education and University of Hawaii need to change what they’re doing if repair and maintenance backlogs are ever going to shrink, legislators said in a briefing Thursday morning. In other words, they need to find other ways to pay for fixes.
Until now, both the Department of Education and the university have relied almost exclusively on the Legislature to fund regular upkeep of buildings and grounds. The education department’s backlog is $392 million, and the university’s is about $308 million. (Another $26 million in university repairs are paid for with university special funds, which legislators are threatening to eliminate.)
UH has requested $64 million per year for the next six years to eliminate its backlog. The Department of Education has requested $355 million for capital improvements next year, some of which would help whittle down the department’s maintenance backlog. But with the Legislature struggling with how to handle a budget deficit of $844 million during the next two years, it seems unlikely either department will get all the money it wants.
“At some point, repair and maintenance has got to become part of the regular operating budget, otherwise we’ll be playing catch-up forever,” said Ways and Means Committee Chairman David Ige after from UH’s vice president for capital improvement. “The sooner you can figure out a way to fund it on a regular basis, the better off we’ll all be.”
The chairman later criticized the education department’s capital improvements, saying it doesn’t ensure equitable facilities among schools.
The department uses a matrix that maps projects by priority, from health, safety and security-related projects (top priority) to repairs in state and district offices (bottom priority).
“I think the matrix is part of the problem why Farrington High School looks the way it does,” Ige said to Public Works Administrator Duane Kashiwai, after hearing about potholes on campus. “There are some projects that need to happen but never get done because of the matrix. I don’t see anything in the matrix about equity.”
Kashiwai agreed that the priority matrix needs to be adjusted in order to more realistically assess schools’ needs — especially the ones that are aging, he said, because the upkeep for schools costs progressively more the older they get.
“That’s a weakness in the matrix system that we recognize, and we’re looking at adjusting it to make it more equitable,” he said. “A school should not have to get to the point of putting people in storage rooms before we are able to get them additional office space. We need to find a way to prioritize those needs adequately and realistically in the matrix.”
Despite some challenges in deciding which projects to tackle first, Kashiwai pointed out that the department has reduced its pileup of maintenance projects over the last 10 years by about $330 million, or 45 percent.
Several committee members suggested alternative sources of revenue to help address the balance of projects for both the Department of Education and UH, so they would not have to rely so heavily on legislative appropriations every year.
Sen. Jill Tokuda suggested that older geographic areas could institute school impact fees, which are fees currently levied on new housing developments in order to help build new schools in high-growth areas. Similar fees could be levied to help maintain existing schools too, though, she said.
