TOPEKA — The Kansas Board of Regents allocated $16.5 million appropriated from the state treasury to turn to rubble 500,000 square feet of obsolete buildings on university campuses.
After the dust clears from removal of those 20 buildings, officials said, the work would eliminate an estimated $80 million in deferred maintenance obligations.
“This amount … that we’re really going to be saving Kansas taxpayers, I think would be good information for communities to have,” said Blake Flanders, president and CEO of the state Board of Regents. “Every time we talk about taking buildings offline there is always groups that have a lot of nostalgia about the building.”
A preliminary list of nearly 40 state university buildings tagged for demolition in the future could lead to $250 million in cost avoidance on repairs to roofing, electrical, plumbing, heating, cooling and other systems that deteriorate over time, said Chad Bristow, director of facilities for the Board of Regents.
The University of Kansas spent about $1.7 million to demolish the Oliver Residence Hall in January. Approximately $750,000 was budgeted to drop the Eleanor Taylor Building on the KU Medical Center campus in Kansas City, Kansas.
Elsewhere, Pittsburg State University earmarked $1.5 million to get rid of Shirk Hall. Wichita State University planned to use $750,000 to eliminate Brennan Hall, while Emporia State University has dedicated $1 million to collapse Butcher Educational Center, which housed the now-closed campus childcare center.
On the construction side of the ledger, Bristow said the Kansas Legislature and Gov. Laura Kelly authorized appropriations of $41 million in the last fiscal year from the educational building fund for university building improvements. The universities spent $37 million of that annual allocation. Collectively, the universities have saved $47 million in building fund dollars for projects in the planning stage.
“That carryover amount is committed,” said Bristow, the Board of Regents’ facilities director. “There is also a small amount of that that’s tagged for emergencies. When you have a lot of deferred maintenance, you have a lot of surprises. It wouldn’t be prudent to not have some money set aside for emergency issues.”
He said the educational building fund provided one-third of the resources needed by state universities to deal with building maintenance on nearly 500 mission-critical buildings. The university campuses have 1,149 facilities in use, but 498 were identified as essential for academic, research and support services. Fifty percent of these critical buildings were constructed more than 50 years ago.
