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The elephant in the living room: building principles.

Article Excerpt
By itself, this month's metaphoric title may already have caused some readers to turn the page because it suggests that the facility guy is on a tirade about something we all know about but don't want to discuss. Though I've hinted around it for all the years we've been meeting like this, we've never really talked about it. This month, we're going to take a short look at "deferred maintenance." For anyone not familiar with the term, it's commonly used to explain away all of the things that just don't seem to get done. It may surprise you to know that the term has a very specific meaning outside the camp arena. In the real estate property management industry, "deferred maintenance" implies that sufficient operations and maintenance (O&M) funds were budgeted, but were redirected to meet another emergency or unforeseen issue with the physical plant. More and more often, camps are using it to gloss over or perpetually postpone (or worse completely ignore) needed repairs or replacement of capital items. These can be minor or really serious. Take these, for example:

* Not mowing a ball field: If fuel for the tractor is a spot in the budget to "find" money for an emergency elsewhere, mow the ball field every 10 days or three weeks instead of weekly. How long can you put that off or maintain that schedule, because you can't use the field when the grass is 10" deep. If it gets deeper yet, does the tractor have enough horsepower to mow it at all? What do you do then? You could call a local farmer to bring in a...

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