University Governance || Faculty || Staff || Students || Financial Resourses || Budget Process
Business Processes and Information Systems || Physical Resourses
Organization and Deployment of Resources

PHYSICAL RESOURCES

Infrastructure: plant, space, land and upkeep

The University of Michigan has among the largest set of physical resources of any university in the nation. Most of these are concentrated in the six campus areas in Ann Arbor: Central Campus, North Campus, South Campus, Medical Campus, East Campus, and Briarwood Health Facilities. The dimensions of these holdings and facilities are prodigious. University buildings number about 550, including leased and rental properties, totaling 23.2 million gross square footage. Of these, 177 are General Fund buildings with 12.5 million gross square footage. The University maintains 22 miles of roadways, 1.8 million square feet of walks, and about 700 out of approximately 2,860 acres in Ann Arbor, including 15,000 trees. There are 10 parking structures, 230 surface lots and 1,500 meters operated and maintained, providing 22,000 parking spaces. Transportation owns 820 vehicles. Six and one half miles of tunnels with twenty-nine miles of pipe carry most of the utilities throughout the central campus.

Operation, upkeep, and renovation of these facilities and physical infrastructure is the responsibility of Plant Operations and Plant Extension, which report to the Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of the University through the Associate Vice President for Facilities and Operations.

Plant Operations (http://www.plant.bf.umich.edu/)

Plant Operations, through its departments, maintains the physical environment and provides related services. Parking and Transportation Services (http://www.parking.umich.edu/) support the University community. Utilities and Maintenance Services (http://www.plant.bf.umich.edu/utilities/) performs maintenance and renovation work with a comprehensive set of skilled trade specialties. It provides electricity, gas, and heat to the campus as well as centrally generated domestic hot water and compressed air to the Central and Medical Campuses. The Grounds and Waste Management Department (http://www.plant.bf.umich.edu/grounds/) serves the Ann Arbor campus areas, taking care of all grounds operations including landscaping, gardening, forestry, waste management and recycling, as well as moving and trucking. Building Services (http://www.plant.bf.umich.edu/building/) provides custodial care and cleaning services for all academic and administrative buildings on campus.

Plant Extension (http://www.plantext.bf.umich.edu/plantext/)

The Plant Extension office is the principal facility planning and construction management organization within the University. Plant Extension maintains and administers the University master plans; coordinates all activities connected with design, by outside architects and engineers, of new construction and renovation projects; provides design services on smaller renovation projects throughout the University; manages day-to-day construction activities and administers the contracts on all construction projects; provides inspection services to certify that all construction conforms to current building codes; provides interior design consultation and ordering services both on construction projects and to individual University clients; and maintains the financial data necessary to assure up-to-the-minute management information on all projects and to provide required reports to other organizations in the University.

New construction

Over the past two decades, the University of Michigan has been implementing a long-range plan to renew its complement of older teaching and research facilities. With the average age of these facilities being in excess of fifty years, and considering the continuing effects of technology on teaching and research methodologies, a systematic renewal of the University's core academic facilities was recognized as a critical need. The University, in partnership with the State of Michigan, has renovated approximately 2,000,000 square feet of academic facilities.

A remarkable refurbishment and expansion of facilities has been underway at the University since the late 1980s, in a nearly unprecedented period of construction. Some of the many major new construction, addition, and renovation projects that have been completed in the past several years or are currently underway include the Cancer and Geriatrics Center at the University Hospital; the new School of Social Work Building; Wyly Hall in the School of Business Administration; the Lurie Engineering Center, Lurie Bell Tower, and François-Xavier Bagnoud Building at the College of Engineering; the Media Union; Tisch Hall and Harrison Randall Laboratory addition for the College of Literature, Science and the Arts; and the extensive renovation of Dana Hall, home of the School of Natural Resources and Environment.

Facilities for the new Life Sciences Institute are now under discussion. This major new project envisions two new buildings at the edges of the Central Campus and the Medical Campus.

Current projects funded through the State Building Authority that have begun include:

• Perry Building renovation. The schematic design will be completed during November 1999. Construction is anticipated to start in the spring of 2000 with occupancy scheduled for summer/fall 2001.
• Mason Hall and Haven Hall renovation and addition. The schematic design will be completed during December 1999, Construction is anticipated to start summer of 2000 with occupancy in the first part of the renovation scheduled for summer 2001.
• West Hall renovation. The programming phase started in October of 1999 and will be completed in December 1999. The design phase will follow immediately. The project will be bid in December 2000 with construction to follow in January 2001.
• LS&A renovation. The documentation of existing conditions has started. Due to the phased moving schedule for LS&A programs, construction is scheduled to start in spring of 2002. Programming and design phases will start in the fall of 2000 and the project will be bid in the winter of 2001/2002.
• Dana Building. The design development phase has just been completed. The project is scheduled for bidding in May of 2000, with construction continuing through the summer of 2001. Full occupancy of the completed building is scheduled for August of 2001.

Campus master plan

In 1997, the University retained the firm of Venturi, Scott Brown Associates (VSBA) to advise the University in the development of a new Campus Master Plan. This project seeks to find ways to maintain coherence and an overarching sense of community that connects the University’s six campus areas, and to consider the place of the campus within the Ann Arbor community. A guiding concern is that the growth of the campus in recent years has led to disconnected spaces that might diminish the kinds of connectivity that have made the University a leader in collaborative and interdisciplinary research and learning.

The past two years have been a phase of defining the mission of the Campus Master Plan and gathering information. This process will seek to:

• Define the physical setting for the life of the University and for those who use and support it.
• Establish an overall framework and hierarchy for development, relating physical priorities to academic and financial policies.
• Promulgate an understanding of the physical campus from its history through to the future.
• Provide facilities for education and research that promote the public good, foster areas of creative collaboration, and support individual excellence.
• Encourage an intensity of cultural, recreational, and social activities.
• Nourish arts on campus and in the surrounding community.
• Increase physical opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration University-wide.
• Define and develop the roles of each of the six campus areas, including providing linkages between each.
• Balance densification and outward expansion.
• Evolve a planning process that establishes an appropriate balance between centralized decision making and invites participation from the University community.

Information technology infrastructure and organization

The University has developed and is expanding a high level of digital and video networking. The Information Technology Division (ITD) (http://www.itd.umich.edu/) provides the U-M community with a broad range of computing, telephone, video, and data networking services. Agreements with Ameritech and MediaOne provide high speed ADSL and cable-modem access, respectively, to homes and apartments off campus. Over 75,000 users subscribe to ITD's email service, and additional email accounts are provided by academic units. UMTV (http://www.itcom.itd.umich.edu/umtv/) is available in more than 80 campus buildings (including residence halls, classrooms, offices, meeting rooms and selected computing sites), with a channel presence on the community-wide MediaOne network. The University has 10 video production facilities and 100 video conference sites. Broadband is available in 60 buildings for high-speed data transfer, broadcasting, video conferencing, interactive multimedia, and cable television.

In the mid-1990s, the University moved to a distributed computing environment. Many units moved to their own electronic mail, word processing and database management applications, including taking on the responsibility of upgrading and maintaining them. This distributed computing system replaced the previous central model in which most workstations or terminals were connected to mainframes maintained by ITD. In 1998, the Office of the CIO formed the Information Technology Strategic Directions Group develop strategic directions for information technology plans, services, and policies. This group, made up of Deans and other University administrators, recommended the formation of an information technology federation to plan and manage the University's digital infrastructure and provide centrally some key services to the entire University.

Department of Public Safety (http://www.umich.edu/~safety/)

The University of Michigan Department of Public Safety (DPS) became a full-service police agency in January 1991. The campus police and security division has an authorized staff of 30 police officers, 26 non-sworn public safety officers, nine dispatchers, plus supervisors, administrators, investigators, and support staff. Two other divisions, Hospital Security and Housing Security, handle the security needs of the U-M Medical Center and University residence halls and family housing. All divisions of DPS operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In 1995, officers responded to approximately 72,000 calls for assistance, or an average of almost 200 calls per day.