Associate Vice President of Campus Planning and Facilities Management will soon have someone to fill the seat. The associate vice president’s main task is to make sure there is a focus on the maintenance work that has been deferred due to the much larger focus on large-scale projects these last few years.  

Almost 40 candidates have applied for the position, but after careful review by Dr. Joseph Han and other cabinet members, the number has been narrowed down to three.

Han’s job is to support and remove obstacles that slow the group down by overseeing several departments. He’s responsible for the Division of Operations that include Information Services, information security, Institutional Effectiveness, Facilities Management and Police and Parking Services.

According to Han the Associate Vice President of Campus Planning and Facilities Management (AVP) is responsible for two units.

The first unit the AVP is responsible for is the campus planning group, their job is to layout the master plan for the campus, secure funds for capital projects and go through all of the required steps to find new architects and contractors to build new buildings.  

The second unit that the AVP is responsible for is Facility Management. This unit is responsible for the routine maintenance around campus. They also have lot of work that is considered non-routine maintenance, which include small renovations such as renovating offices or fixing broken things around campus.

There are three candidates in particular that stand out according to a CWU press release.

John Morris, who previously served as the Associate Vice President for Facility Services at Northern Arizona University and as a director of Facilities at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  Morris has an extensive knowledge of the campus facilities operation processes. He also has experience with different aspects of maintenance regarding operations and housekeeping of facilities and grounds in a higher institutional setting. He has experience with capital planning for many different facilities and also campus infrastructure capital programs. Morris has overseen projects that range from new and renovated residence halls to athletic and recreational sports facilities.  

Jon Lebo previously served as the Director of Major Capital Projects and Capital Planning and Development at the University of Washington and as a Associate Director of Special Projects Group and Capital Projects Office, also at the University of Washington.

“My primary goal is to continue to raise the bar for delivering well-managed projects that benefit my customers and the University,” Lebo said. At his previous institutions he “provided strong leadership for my team members using transparency and process innovation in a wide range of construction projects.,” Lebo said

Amr Abdel-Azim, who currently serves as Senior Architect at Michigan State University and previously worked as Senior Executive for Capital Projects at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.

“I have extensive organizational leadership and operational management experience for large multidiscipline, multi- million dollars operations. I utilize persistence, technical expertise, sincerity, and interpersonal skills to establish and build long-term relationships with diverse groups of people,” Abdel-Azim said.  

Something to look forward to here at CWU are a few of the planned renovations that include Sparks Hall, new dorms that will be built over the current CHCI building, a new track that will be replacing the parking lot on the corner of Wildcat way and 18th Avenue next to the Wahl apartments and also renovations of the Tomlinson Football stadium. Every two years there is a request to the state for new projects, which is called a ten-year capital outlay.  

“We have the design work done for the Health Science building, that will require the old Hertz Hall to go down and that’s one of the major projects. The new track will be built on the site just to the north of Wahl apartments and also the new dorms will be built where the CHCI building is,” Han said.

The focus for the last couple years has been campus planning, this means that the focus has been on large-scale construction and building. By focusing on campus planning more, the maintenance projects that need to be done have been deferred and now are the first priority.

“Once we know the maintenance work is scheduled and taken care of regularly, then we’ll know how many people to put on the non-maintenance work

. We are definitely prioritizing, we’ve made a list of everything that needs to be done on campus and it’s a lot of work and we are now scheduling people to make sure the work gets done,” Han said.

We should know whichwho the candidate is got the job later this week since there is a push to make a big change on campus starting with the maintenance and then making its way to the large projects.