Governing Principles and Goals of Capital Renewal
The Capital Renewal Program is designed to address and prioritize the renewal of the building systems and campus environs that are at the end of their operational life cycle. The priorities of the program support the academic mission while optimizing fund sources and demonstrating fiscal responsibility.
The Capital Renewal Program provides a comprehensive long-term strategic plan for addressing and prioritizing campus renewal needs with a process for consideration of proposals.
The principles that guide the program and prioritization of projects include:
- The energy, water, and other resource efficiency of campus buildings and equipment should be optimized and evaluated at regular intervals to confirm optimized performance and to prevent additional burden to the renewal backlog.
- Buildings, pathways, and structures not meeting accessibility requirements will be brought into compliance.
- Projects will be based upon a multi-year plan that reduces the campus renewal backlog over time that is transparent to the campus community.
- Projects that address campus general assignment teaching spaces will be prioritized to address physical upgrades and modernization of technology with the goal of renewing on a 5-7 year cycle.
- Projects addressing the campus environs (pathways, landscapes, and lighting systems) will be evaluated on an equal footing with building-based projects, particularly when they address code and safety requirements.
- Projects will be prioritized that address life safety issues and compliance issues, and which allow for coordination with projects outside the scope of capital renewal in order to maximize the value of the campus’ investments in its facilities.
- The Capital Renewal Program will adopt a risk-based approach to allocate funding and evaluate necessary trade-offs. Therefore, the Program will assess projects with this risk-based view and seek to, among other things, quantify and minimize avoidable long-term costs to the campus posed by the failure/outage of mission-critical systems and infrastructure.