Duke University’s Winning Team

The year 2000 was a good one for Jerry Black, director of facilities management at Duke University in Durham, N.C. He and his department received the Award for Excellence in Facilities Management from the Association of Higher Educational Facilities Officers (APPA) as well as a Grand Award from Landscape Magazine for work by the Grounds and Sanitation Services unit. Jerry talks to us about those accolades, as well as what it’s like to maintain 635 acres and manage a forest, a quarry, campus construction, and those famous Duke sports facilities.

Jay Schneider: Can you tell us about your background?

Jerry Black: I’m a former Marine officer and when I retired I went to work as executive director of facilities for Virginia Commonwealth University and after spending a few years there, I went to the University of Arizona in Tucson where I worked for five years as director of facilities. I came to Duke University in 1994.

JS: Can you provide an overview of your responsibilities as director of facilities management?

JB: I’m in charge of all processes of management, directing, consulting, and all of those businesses, but everyday responsibilities include overseeing all grounds and roads at Duke University.

We have 3.8 million gross square feet of floor space that includes 152 buildings and we also have the same responsibilities for a remote facility, which is the Duke University Marine Laboratory down in Beaufort, N.C., which has a facility with about 100,000 square feet. That campus is about 3 1/2-hour drive from the Durham campus.

I’m also in charge of construction at Duke University, which usually has a budget of $200 million per year, since I’ve been here and we run the rock quarry where we get all of the “Duke” rock used in campus construction.

As for land, we have 9,000 acres outside of the university that’s part of the Duke forest. That land is in addition to the school’s 900-acre campus.

And we’re in charge of the steam plant and high voltage, which the department owns and then sells to our campus as a product. We have our own sanitation company and we haul recycling.

JS: You sell steam to the university?

JB: Yes, we do sell steam to the university. Absolutely. An in-house operation is much better. It’s quite common-most colleges started their facility operations with their steam plant and with their chilled water plant. I think high-voltage is our only unique arrangement. The department owns the steam plant as well as the high voltage system-but with high voltage, Duke power drops power at the gate, if you will, at one of our substations and we distribute it throughout the campus. We own six substations and miles and miles of tunnels and we have a high voltage crew that does all of the installation and maintenance.

JS: It seems like you don’t need to worry about the nation’s potential energy crisis.

JB: We hope not. But, we always worry about the market, which is the market of the Carolinas, when it begins to change. I think we could have a price increase, but we have some pretty good contracts in place that seem to make us not less exposed than other people.

We also have the same situation in the steam plant where we have a nice little hedge against the cost of coal going up. In the steam plant we have a multi-fuel capacity with 410,000 tons per hour and two of the boilers are fuel oil, three are coal and one is natural gas so we were able to get through the year with just a modest increase in our utility costs for steam.

JS: How many divisions does the facilities department encompass? How large is your staff?

JB: We have 280 people separated into several divisions: maintenance, grounds, sanitation, recycling, construction, high voltage, steam plant. Our annual budget is approximately $65 million.

JS: Can you tell us about the facilities at Duke? What is the university like? Are any of the buildings “protected” or on the historic register?

JB: We have two campuses here in Durham, an east and a west campus and they are about a mile apart. The east campus was the original start of Duke University when it was called Trinity College and that has mostly Georgian-style architecture with lots of brick and lots of marble. The campus includes Baldwin Auditorium, a building similar to the famous Jefferson Hall at the University of Virginia. Our dorms are built right down there-there’s a nice mall or quad in front of Baldwin with dorms on each side. When you come into the campus, there’s a statue of old James B. Duke who gave us the money to get started.

The west campus is where the medical center, the hospital and a campus is. The west campus has gothic architecture with Duke stone that comes from our quarry. Responsibilities for the medical center include grounds, sanitation, and recycling, but we don’t go into the buildings for maintenance; I go to the door and stop. These are the only few buildings were we don’t work on the inside.

There’s a connecting link between the east and west campuses with a main thoroughfare that’s actually on the main campus. There’s a parallel road that runs on the city line that handles all of the main traffic. You can go between campuses without a problem; I can walk out of my office and within 30 yards can be in a hospital.

As for historic buildings, most of them are. I have one building on campus known as the “Ark,” which is where the first college basketball game was played in the state of North Carolina. But that particular building is not on any historical register. We have a lot of buildings dating back to the 1890s when Trinity College was started, but we don’t have the kind of identification where a building is on a historical register. We haven’t done that. Our buildings date from the late 1890s to current day.

The last facility built was Schwartz-Butters, which is the athletic building and that was in 1999. We are in the process of working on a new library due to start very shortly.

JS: Do you have special requirements for your buildings?

JB: Yes. We don’t go in and modify buildings and destroy the integrity of the building. We’re more about renovating than remodeling.

JS: It is said that people who maintain buildings should be involved in their design. How involved are you in Duke’s construction and renovating plans?

JB: I’m very involved. Nothing at Duke gets built, in a real sense, unless I’m a part of it.

When a project is on the drawing board with the university architect in the early design phase, we’ll put together a team that includes my project manager, and in most cases myself and my director of construction. We’ll go through the whole operation of design, custom buying, and costing out the issues, but at this stage, the university architect managers about 90 percent and I have about 10 percent input.

When we actually go to construction, that role reverses. That project is transferred from the university architect and into the construction phase. I take it all the way through to completion.

New buildings use some Duke stone, but not 100 percent-brick and glass also is used. The campus architects do a great job of making sure the aesthetic of the campus is protected at all costs-and that’s a lot more expensive than one would think.

JS: How do you cope with the responsibilities that come with ever-expanding campus facilities?

JB: We have about $200 million per year in construction, and it’s scary at times. It’s not difficult, but it is complex because there are so many pieces to the puzzle.

We’re an urban university, but also a university in the forest, and we want to protect all of our trees and the natural setting. However, once you start a building you’re going to remove some trees and it gets very difficult at times dealing with all of the people who have special interests. In the end, I think the mission and direction of the university prevails while we listen and minimize any disruption-and we seem to do pretty well with it. We have 900 acres on campus and maintain 635 acres. The rest is left natural, we call it the buffer zone.

JS: You and your department received the Award for Excellence in Facilities Management 2000 from the Association of Higher Educational Facilities Officers (APPA). How were you selected for the honor?

JB: We met the criteria of the organization and submitted material on what we’re doing-we sent publications, manuals, operational strategic planning information, and others, I don’t recall all of them. We submitted a very extensive documentation list-something you don’t just turn in and say ‘we’re great’-and we documented all of our activities and all of the things needed for the application.

When we submitted it to APPA, they turned it over to their regional advisory group who looked at it and, out of all of the applications they get, narrow the field down to two or three. An on-site team then visits the facility to find out if you really do what you said you do. They spent several days on campus looking around and talking with our customers and talking with people in the shops, talking with the community. Everything we said we did checked out, and when the smoke cleared, we were at the top.

JS: What where some of the accomplishments/highlights you listed in the application?

JB: Our customer focus is one. We have a provider of choice concept here and Duke is unique in that many schools and colleges within the university are in a position to go outside and hire services and support. We call those formula schools or, in the classic sense, they have decoupled from the university funding process. If they want to hire a contractor, they can do that, if they want to hire maintenance people, they can do that, or they can use us. One of my goals from the beginning was to make sure our organization was the provider of choice for everyone at the university.

JS: So, even though you are a part of the university, you actually compete with outside industries?

JB: Yes. Because Duke is a private university, schools get their money from a variety of sources and can do just about what they want with it.

At the University of Arizona, everybody was under the state budget office, with only a few auxiliary units-such as housing, the student union, and the bookstore-that were for-profit organizations. At Duke University, everyone is for-profit because you have to survive and pay your rent. If the question was asked, ‘Jerry, what is it you really do?’ I’d respond, ‘well, I run a $65 million per year business.’ I pay part of my staff from recovery costs, I pay part of my staff from just doing projects supported by construction and contracts, I pay part of my staff from the sale of electricity and steam, and at the end of the year the facility management department must be in the black. It’s a successful year if we have that. We run a real business here.

JS: Do you have the opportunity to seek business outside of the university system?

JB: No we don’t-but I guess if we really wanted to we could, although that’s never been an issue of mine and has never been anything I’ve wanted to pursue. I know that my mission is to provide maintenance for Duke University and work on the facilities to which we’ve grown accustomed and put our dollars in. so, it’s not something I would even want to pursue.

JS: Your Grounds and Sanitation Services unit also won an award in 2000-a Grand Award from Landscape Magazine. Can you talk about that achievement?

JB: To win the award, our campus was observed for two years and we maintained the standard of excellence that the Professional Grounds Management Society wanted and looked for.

My director of grounds, Joe Jackson, wears many hats, including taking care of all athletic facilities, grounds, sanitation, moving and storage, and recycling-all of these are individual hats. Joe is very active and we were trying to pursue some recognition for his work. The grounds award we’ve received is an excellent example of what our guys can do. They did a lot of preparation for the evaluation, making sure they could carry out the requirements for two years. It wasn’t a hit or miss thing with a bunch of nice pictures, it was a prevailing theme of ‘let’s do the work.’

JS: You can’t talk about Duke without talking about sports. How much work is involved in maintaining the school’s athletic facilities?

JB: A lot of work. We’ve spent a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of energy in refurbishing the athletic facilities. In the last five years, we’ve built a state-of-the-art student recreation center of 100,000 square feet on the main campus, and on the other campus we built a 50,000-square-foot addition to the student recreation center and put in a new, six-court undercover tennis facility. We’ve added to Cameron Indoor Stadium, an addition that ties into the Schwartz-Butters athletic building where men and women basketball players train. We’re constructing a new football building and renovating a lot of individual spaces.

Recently, we refurbished the football field playing surface and this year we’ll work on the soccer field. We’ve completely reworked and redone the baseball stadium and, even though basketball gets a great degree of notoriety here, lacrosse and soccer seem to always be in the top 10 in NCAA. A lot of energy and dedication goes into supporting the athletic department.

JS: One of the most difficult tasks facing management and maintenance departments is technology. How are you handling new technologies, building upgrades, and maintenance?

JB: We look at technology in everything we do. We have construction guidelines and design standards that include the review of technology. I think I deal with all of my suppliers in a technological sense-in that if there’s something on the market that fits what we’re doing in a new building, we explore it, whether it’s fume hoods, controls, automation, wireless connecting links, or communications. I think we’re on top of it. Technology is not something we back up to, we attack it head on. If it fits and works, great, and if it doesn’t, we don’t mess with it.

In fact, Krzyzewskiville even is wired. Krzyzewskiville is a tent city named in honor of Coach K and erected on the quad by students during the basketball season. When basketball starts, kids pitch tents and cannot leave the tent to go back to the comfort of the dorms-line monitors make sure of this-so we installed computer ports on light fixtures so students staying in the tents can tie in to the university network and do their homework without any problems. That’s part of the technology we provide. Also, you go into the student union and you’ll see ports all over place.

Additionally, we have a great energy management program, which has been recognized nationwide and we’ve received a few awards from the Department of Energy and from the EPA for our energy management program. And one of the things we do is use wireless remote monitoring technology-we can control every single building from a central point.

When I first came in 1994, I saw a mechanic go out with a toolbox and today I have so many of my mechanics go out with a laptop. There’s a lot of technology within my shops.

JS: What about other building upgrades-such as fire protection or other code-compliance issues?

JB: Well, those are everyday activities. Our new construction is fairly easy because we observe current laws and codes so we don’t have a real problem there. But, with some of our old buildings, we spend a lot of time doing regulatory enhancements. Our ADA-program is constantly being evaluated and we spend a lot of time in retrofitting those issues and removing barriers throughout campus, whether it be a lock, a door, or a handle. We’re not there yet, we’ve got a million dollars in problems and headaches, but we’re working on fixing each one of them.

JS: We’re hearing about changes in campus residences. Are dormitories becoming more plush and tech-heavy these days?

JB: Oh, yes. We’re in the process of building a new 350-person dorm on the east campus. We’ve been at it now for seven months and it’s going to be state of the art-wired for sound and with all of the technology out there for computers and hardware and wireless remote stations. It has cooking facilities, dining areas, and all that stuff.

The new dorms are going to have state of the art lounge areas, community spaces, and rooms that are much bigger than in the past. As soon as we finish that, we’re going to back and renovate the rest of them.

One of the themes for the new dorm is that we want students to stay there-meaning we want them to be happy going into the new dorm, somewhere they can come in with friends and relax and experience fellowship. It’s going to be a showplace.

JS: What are some of the student issues you experience and contend with at Duke? I was reading about a situation with graffiti on a campus underpass.

JB: That issue was the only incident we had and it was an honest mistake. A campus gay rights organization painted the underpass-which is OK, there’s not a problem there-but they used a lot of sayings, expressions, quotes, and words, including the F-word, that our painter, who worked with us for 30 years, marked out thinking they were derogatory graffiti.

He had no idea what he had done until we started getting beaten up in the newspapers. We made an honest mistake. Now that underpass has, for the last three or four years, been designated as a free speech zone; organizations monitor themselves.

However, elsewhere throughout campus, students aren’t allowed to do use graffiti and occasionally people will spray paint and write things on sidewalks, but that is cleaned up immediately. We have vandalism on campus, but no more than any other place. Students protect their property pretty well. We have very few issues with students.

We also have a controlled student bonfire for our final four appearance and our National Championship. I think the tradition started in 1991 or 1992-when Duke won its first championship. Over a period of years, we’ve had a few more bonfires-when we beat Carolina and more recently when we beat Maryland.

We also work with students during Earth Day, going to a local elementary school and putting in plants and trees and re-landscaping some areas. It turns out to be a great workday. We have volunteer events twice a year: Earth Day and then the first Saturday in November in which we pick spots on the Duke campus that need work. We think keeping students involved and sharing the campus with them is essential.

JS: How much does weather affect your work? North Carolina is a humid climate prone to hurricanes and other severe conditions.

JB: I’ve been here seven years and in the last couple of years we’ve had several major storms and then in 1996 we had Hurricane Fran. We are about 200 miles from the coast, but when Fran hit we were the only folks in town who had utilities. All of our high voltage is buried underground and nothing was knocked out.

We have an emergency disaster plan and a tree removal plan, and I’m in charge of all of that. I’m in charge of snow, sleet, and ice and we have snow moving equipment to get us through. If the storm is a biggie, a New York-type of snow storm, we just sit back and watch because there’s nothing you can do about it.

This past year we didn’t any snow-just a dusting here or there-but we did have the coldest two months recorded in the history of the state. Normally our sustained cold weather lasts about three days and then goes away. It taxes the system a little.

JS: Do you have any facility/maintenance stories that you now find funny but at the time weren’t so humorous?

JB: Well, I haven’t found any bodies when I open up a wall and haven’t found any graves when we’ve starting digging.

JS: Is there anything I haven’t asked that you would like to add?

JB: We do a lot of things at Duke University-some good and some bad, like at any other organization-and I think through the dedication of our workforce and through the people who really care about Duke, we’ve been able to accomplish a lot in a short period of time.

We’ve won some recognition and awards for our efforts and it all goes back to the staff that wants to be the best. And I think that by being the provider of choice and the concept of ‘we must do it’ in order to stay in business, that kind of attitude has been successful.

If I left tomorrow I’d feel good about what I’ve done and by what the department has accomplished.