He’s Got a Big Grin, a Golf Cart, and a Whopping To-Do List
Hiram, Ohio — Like many small liberal-arts institutions with aging campuses, Hiram College seems to have nearly as many maintenance headaches as students. Clogged gutters spill rainwater off the sides of buildings; sandstone stairs flake away outside a science complex; and brickwork peels from a residence hall where new windows were installed ineptly a few years back. Elevators go on the fritz; a patch of lawn outside the theater is auditioning for a role as a pond; and the four faces of a historic clock atop the library disagree about something as basic as the time.
Unlike other small colleges, though, Hiram has a secret weapon: Rudolph J. Braydich III, a former Hiram major-gifts officer with a residential-life background, a keen eye for detail, a ready grin, and the kind of outgoing personality that lets him talk as easily with plumbers as with big donors. Braydich, known to everyone here as Rudy, left the college’s development staff a year ago to become the director of physical plant — an unusual move that meant becoming an employee of ABM, the company Hiram had hired to replace the previous physical-plant contractor, which in turn had replaced another contractor not all that long before.
“Our team is the basis for so many things on campus to function,” says Braydich, 39, who has a staff of 22 housekeepers and 20 physical-plant employees, including electricians, plumbers, a carpenter, groundskeepers, and a special-events person. They care for the main campus’s 44 buildings and 100 acres, 70 of which need to be mowed (the 550-acre field station has its own staff). ABM’s contract represents about a tenth of Hiram’s total operating budget and covers cleaning, preventive maintenance, small repairs and upgrades, mowing, clearing snow, gardening, and maintaining the athletic fields, but Braydich boils the job down to something that Lori Varlotta, Hiram’s president, told him early on: “I just want the campus to look cared for.”
Braydich is making steady progress, but his golf-cart tour of this summer’s projects gives an idea of what that entails. The housekeeping staff has been cleaning residence-hall rooms in anticipation of alumni weekend, when many alumni will stay on campus. There are also summer students living in part of one complex — Braydich refurbished a lounge for them — and summer courses that mean some classrooms have to be cleaned (the housekeeping staff starts work at 5 a.m. to clean classrooms and offices before turning to the residence halls). Meanwhile, the grounds crew has been mowing between repeated deluges and jokes about putting pontoons on the riding mower. Two student employees tackle hillsides with weed wackers, and a biomedicine and humanities major helps in the college’s seven gardens, all of them guarded by an alumni volunteer who greets Braydich warmly but is still leery of letting anyone touch her flowerbeds without her direct supervision.
He stops to visit a contractor doing a wiring upgrade on the steam-heating system in the student center’s basement, then again to check on doughnut-fueled installers who are — thanks to donors — putting down new carpet in one of the residence halls. In the same building, he looks over a kitchen-remodeling project that his carpenter is carrying out in the resident assistant’s apartment. Donors are also paying for bathroom renovations in two other residence halls, and his plumber is rebuilding the old faucets as part of those renovations, rather than order new ones. Every dollar Braydich and his staff can save the college on a project — or on energy costs or the water bill — is a dollar Braydich can put into other improvements.
“The team that I’ve assembled, we’re able to self-perform a lot of the stuff,” says Braydich, who sweats the small stuff as well as the big stuff and whose to-do list fills two long columns on a whiteboard near his office. “We’re fixing things that, properly maintained, you won’t have to fully address for the next 10 to 15 years.” Despite a tight market for skilled employees — “Amazon moved into Twinsburg, and their starting wage is $15 an hour,” Braydich says, “and I don’t have many positions that start at $15 dollars an hour” — he considers himself “blessed” to have the staff he does.
He’s particularly proud of persuading the athletics department to turn over its fields to his crew. That involved amending the ABM contract and hiring a new grounds manager, Ryan Olszewski, whose experience is with a minor-league baseball team’s field. Braydich calls him “a grass whisperer.” The year’s highlight, Braydich says, came when the baseball team, in April, was able to go out and practice outside. “They looked like a bunch of dogs that were just let off the leash at a dog park. In the past four years they’d only been able to play like two or three home games because of the lack of field care.”
Still, he knows he doesn’t have nearly enough in his repair budget to address all of the college’s deferred-maintenance issues. So he and college administrators confer and prioritize projects that address safety issues and disability-access problems, and whatever’s left over goes to “what gets the most bang for the buck,” says Liz Okuma, Hiram’s vice president and dean of students.
Okuma was the college’s residence-life director when Hiram first outsourced facilities maintenance, about 12 years ago. “We could no longer keep the plant moving in the direction it needed to move,” she recalls, noting that a big company can bring a college expertise in current best practices, in addition to offering professional-development opportunities for employees and better buying power for supplies.
Varlotta says that one reason Hiram chose ABM as its new contractor in late 2017 was that the company was “very good at proactive assessments, so we can plan.” Besides relying on preventive-maintenance software that kicks out a constant stream of basic-maintenance work orders, the company has done a deferred-maintenance inventory that led to, among other things, a new roof on the residence-hall complex housing summer students. The inventory also gives Braydich’s former boss — Jennifer Schuller, the development vice president — fodder for conversations with two donors who have asked for a list of projects no one else is willing to pay for.
Braydich’s move from Schuller’s office to the physical-plant building was partly his idea and partly Varlotta’s. But ABM was skeptical, Braydich says. “They wanted to see if I was going to be truer to the college or truer to the company. I won them over by being able to show them, ‘This is the path you want this account to go to. Here’s my goals for my first year. Here’s my goals for my second year.’” Now ABM is confident enough in his work that they include him on sales teams visiting other prospective higher-ed clients.
There are risks to outsourcing facilities maintenance, says Varlotta, who has been Hiram’s president since 2014 and is on her third facilities contractor. It’s important that the college and the contractor share decision-making, she says, and also that college administrators have a voice in evaluating the contractor’s supervisors. When she was negotiating the contract with ABM, she included an incentive for the company to fill jobs that opened, rather than trying to save money with fewer employees. “I learned the hard way,” she says. She adds that having a way out of a contract is also critical.
For the time being, though, no one here seems to be looking for an exit strategy. “Clearly Rudy’s personality is a win-win for everyone,” Varlotta says. Her vice president for business and finance, Nancy Rubin, is Braydich’s direct boss: “I sometimes have to calm him down,” she says. “He’s so committed to this college, and he has so much on his plate.”
Indeed, Braydich’s wife is not surprised this evening when she has to put the kids to bed by herself because a crucial air-conditioning fan in the administration building sent her husband an automated failure alert during dinner. He drives back to the campus to check it out. He could send an electrician, but under the terms of ABM’s contract, that person’s time would have to be billed to Hiram, whereas Braydich makes the trip free. The problem turns out to be a minor one — a dead back-up battery — and the building is perfectly comfortable the next morning when the president gets in to work.
Oh, and that clock on top of the library? He and his clockmaker have a plan for fabricating a part that should get all four faces in sync. And then he’ll have one less thing to fret over.
On Campus and Beyond
The Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, a landmark at the U. of Notre Dame, is getting wider, more accessible stairs, natural stone pavers, and new memorial benches. Read more.
A 53-room, $26-million hotel (above) that Colby College is building as part of its effort to revitalize downtown Waterville, Me., will be named for an architect whose designs helped textile mills thrive there. Read more.
Virginia Tech has chosen a larger site for its Amazon-inspired campus in Northern Virginia. “We don’t need 65 acres ourselves, but we need to be able to place partners near us as part of an ecosystem,” said Tim Sands, the university’s president. Read more.
A nonprofit retirement community with 350 residents is planned for a small portion of the 27,000-acre Berry College campus in northwest Georgia. Read more.
A 2010 Recreation and Wellness Center at the U. of Iowa will get all-new air-handling units for its swimming pool after seven proprietary “PoolPak” units failed repeatedly, the university says. The change will cost between $5 million and $6 million. Read more.
Performance spaces, classrooms, and a new music school will make up the new arts district at Ohio State U. The project will cost $161.6 million. Read more.
California Polytechnic State U. at San Luis Obispo is considering whether to fine electric-scooter companies $75 each for scooters left on the campus, where they are banned because of sidewalk congestion between classes. Read more.
Nearly 5,000 Michael Graves drawings (above) that “span the entire range of his subject matter and design concerns” are going to the Princeton U. Art Museum. Graves taught at the university for 39 years. Read more.
New Buildings and Recent Renovations
A $90-million student-union expansion is underway at California State’s San Bernardino campus (above) to add a ballroom, a bowling alley, retail space, and more. LPA Architects provided the design expertise. Read more.
A 4,200-seat arena at the U. of Idaho (above) will be built with wood harvested from the university’s experimental forest. The project, designed by Opsis Architecture, is expected to cost $51 million. Read more.
A $45-million, 45,000-square-foot structure at the U. of Colorado at Boulder (above) will link the business and engineering colleges. The aim is to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. Read more.
A five-story, 110,000-square-foot Center for Science & Innovation (above) is under construction at Seattle U. The $100-million project, the largest in the institution’s history, is by EYP and Mithun. Read more.
