Facilities As Assets - Effective Building Maintenance: Protection of Capital Assets - page 7

sources, use of the NRC approach for maintenance budgeting may
be an good initial approach and the recommended level of mainte-
nance can be expected to require annual funding of 3.5-4% of cur-
rent replacement cost.
2. A better approach is to use “zero-based budgeting” whereby the
actual annual costs of each required maintenance element are de-
termined. This approach has the benefit of defining not only costs,
but it provides excellent guidance as to the staffing needs for imple-
menting these procedures.
There are numerous annual surveys of maintenance expenditures
by facilities published by Whitestone, Building Owners and Managers
Association (BOMA), APPA, etc. that define “what the other guys are
doing.” While interesting, these data are for all practical purposes
worthless since there are no corresponding data as to the effectiveness of
these expenditures. (However, they may provide some basis for justifying
maintenance budgets to upper management!)
STAFFING THE MAINTENANCE DEPARTMENT
With the exception of the APPA publication discussed above (and
some individual state recommendations for K-12 schools), there are no
general maintenance staffing standards in place in the United States. To
define staffing needs, each facility, the components of that facility, and re-
quired component maintenance procedures must be carefully evaluated.
Any maintenance department (and note that we are excluding cus-
todial and grounds services from this discussion) can be organized gener-
ally along the staffing levels shown in Table 1-2.
Basic job descriptions for each of these staff positions are provided
at the end of this chapter.
The number of each type of staff member required at any facility
will vary based on the size and complexity of the facility and the level
of contracted maintenance services utilized by the facility. The relation-
ship between the size (gross area) of a facility and the types of buildings
and other elements (complexity) making up the facility will determine
the final mix of types and number of staff positions. But, in general, the
following guidelines can be applied: