If the deferred maintenance crisis plaguing the nation’s facilities is put in terms of the age-old “Fish or cut bait” demand, it seems that more organizations these days are deciding to cut bait.
The decision is easy to understand. Budgets for repairing and maintaining aging facilities have never been robust, thanks to resistance to increase funding from taxpayers and a decades-long lack of attention from top facility executives. And in the last decade, those budgets have gotten even tighter.
The issue leaves maintenance and engineering managers with a touch choice. They can keep allocating precious resources to repairing aging, underused or unused facilities, or they can shut down, sell or demolish the facilities and put those resources to better use.
Consider the latest examples of organizations considering the cut-bait approach.
In Kansas, Wichita Public Schools recently recommended closing six schools, citing declining enrollment, increasing costs and large building maintenance needs, according to KWCH.
In Texas, the Richardson Independent School District recently proposed consolidating four schools with other schools in the next school year, and a pre-K school would stop operating in the 2025-2026 school year, according to WFAA. The district is proposing to consolidate or re-purpose five campuses due to budget challenges.
School districts are not the only organizations facing the fish-or-cut-bait question. Concerns about the viability of rural hospitals and access to much-needed care have been cited as one factor that could motivate lawmakers to expand Medicaid in the 11 states that have not already done so, according to KFF.
Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.
