Road Rage

As Massachusetts at last pulled out of its sluggish economy by the end of the 1990s, the state found itself enjoying a surplus. Despite the predictable calls for a tax cut or more spending, Representative Paul Haley, then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, had something else in mind. “I felt we should look at what our liabilities were,” he recalls. One that struck him, he says, was “our inability to maintain our assets.”

Before getting into politics, Haley had worked as a prosecutor in the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office, giving him firsthand experience with the deplorable condition of the state’s courthouses. His idea was to put some of the surplus toward the badly needed maintenance of state property. That was the plan, anyway. “I called around to see what was in need of repair,” he recalls, “and they couldn’t tell me. That was quite a surprise.” There was simply no central repository for that data, no one keeping track of the condition of public-owned buildings and equipment.

In 1998, Haley dedicated some of the budget surplus to maintenance for various agencies. (“Of course that was short-lived. As soon as money got tight again, that was the first thing to go.”) He also came up with an idea for an office tasked with keeping tabs on all state assets. The existing Division of Capital Asset Management (DCAM) seemed the ideal nerve center for this new effort. The following year, to reflect its expanded mission, Haley had the agency renamed the Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance. But in a move rich with symbolism, the division’s commissioner refused to accept the new name, supposedly remarking that she was not going to become state janitor. To this day, the division’s stationery excludes the “M word,” even though it is part of its formal name.

Regardless of its designation, DCAM at last represented an agency officially charged with the upkeep of state property. Now all that was needed was to figure out exactly what the state owned. “We barely even knew what existed in the inventory,” Haley says. The state spent $18 million on that project, including the purchase of a new database program to manage information about state-owned buildings and the equipment inside them. Today, that database, the Capital Asset Management Information System (CAMIS), has a detailed accounting of more than 5,000 buildings totaling 79 million square feet. Facility managers can schedule routine maintenance in CAMIS, and workers in those buildings can make note of things like a leaky pipe or a broken thermostat. DCAM also has experts on call to assist facilities managers with maintenance and repair questions.

Despite all that, however, there is no mandate from state government that any agency actually use the software, or any of the other services provided by DCAM. For that matter, there’s no rule that state agencies dedicate any particular percentage of their budget to maintenance at all. “We don’t tell them how to spend their money,” says DCAM Deputy Commissioner Mark Nelson. “They have to carve out a piece of their operational budget.” To the head of a state agency charged with running a hospital, facility maintenance can seem like a luxury. Money spent on upkeep can be, quite literally, money not spent saving lives. But the failure to perform routine maintenance, as we’ve seen with our bridges and roads, only leads to much costlier repairs later, and potentially even more money diverted from critical programs. “Our job,” Nelson says, “is to show they’d be foolish not to listen.”