Backlogged repairs at UH could be with us forever

Welcome to Sisyphean University, the Manoa branch.

As you know, King Sisyphus was punished by the Greek gods because he was too clever. Gods condemned him to an eternity of pushing a rock up a hill, only to have the boulder escape and roll back down.

There is new evidence that the University of Hawaii’s own maddening process of repairing the Manoa campus is not only not going to work, we may be condemned to forever discovering more repairs.

There is no disagreement that UH-Manoa is a mess. The latest estimates have the repair and maintenance backlog at nearly a half a billion dollars.

At first it appeared that the problems were:

» Will the state or the UH pay for the repairs?

» Where will the professors sit and the students learn while their offices and classrooms are being repaired? If nearly every building on campus needs significant work, shuffling all these people around is going to be a problem.

Now there is a new study that hints perhaps the UH problem will torment university bureaucrats for eternity.

At a December legislative hearing, UH outlined a plan to "fast-track" the $407 million in repairs just for UH-Manoa, by selling bonds and repaying the bonds with student tuition payments for the next 30 years.

"No way," said Sen. Brian Taniguchi and Rep. Isaac Choy, leaders of the Senate and House Higher Education committees.

If the politicians didn’t like the idea of forcing generations of students to pay for today’s crumbling walls and ceilings, it also scared the spreadsheets out of the bureaucrats.

"Our operations have been undermanned for so long that we’re at the point of drowning, basically," Tom Katsuyoshi, director of Manoa’s Facilities Management Office said. "If you give us more money to try to take care of the deferred maintenance backlog without the personnel to do it, we’re dead. You’re destining us for failure."

If all that was the tough part of shoving the boulder up the hill, here comes the part where it rolls back down.

In December, the UH Office of Internal Audit sent the UH regents an audit reviewing the UH’s current construction and repair and maintenance programs.

The study found that most of the work was done late and for more money than had been budgeted.

Also, UH most of the time can’t "recover costs for consultant or contractor work product errors or delays resulting in increased cost project costs."

"Office of Facilities Management procurement process lacks management and monitoring guidelines as well as goals and objectives to ensure that the CIP procurement process is performed timely and effectively from construction initiation to completion," the audit said.

The audit listed 17 construction projects ranging from stabilizing the UH-Manoa quarry wall to renovating the women’s locker rooms and expanding the Nagatani Academic Center at UH. Each project cost more than budgeted.

That was the rock rushing past you on its journey back down the hill.

The report finally concludes that the UH Office of Facilities Management does not "update building condition assumptions (adjust the remaining useful life of a building component such as a roof) or periodically validate historical information" in its facilities database.

"Accordingly, the reported $407 million in deferred maintenance backlog may not be accurate," the report said.

So just like the Donald Rumsfeld quote that "There are things we do not know we don’t know," the UH repair and maintenance problem may an unfathomable abyss of unknown costs.

And that is the rock back at the bottom of the hill.

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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.