Sustainable Maintenance

Our buildings get inspected in rapid sequence because they are within blocks on the same street. This makes affordable and quality responses difficult to arrange. However, with a maintenance schedule keeping us in better shape we could embrace this and combine inspections for more efficient use of our and the city inspectors time. Being proactive reduces the severity of decay, and lets inspectors take a more relaxed attitude toward us.

What is truly proactive? Proactively responding to maintenance requests like one would any emergency, yet before work is needed gives the illusion of efficient maintenance via a reactive mechanism. It is not truly proactive if it does not strategize to reduce the causes of rapid maintenance cycles. The result is higher costs, that puts budget pressure to skimp of maintenance quality... The BOD's response to higher maintenance costs, before signs of higher maintenance quality, was to hesitate more on maintenance. Now a stronger Balance Sheet decreases the opportunity cost of a few overpriced maintenance responses within our Budget. This is not a political battle so much as an evolution of restoring MSC's finances.

Proactive maintenance requires a plan that categorizes what to fix, vs what to replace, vs what to discard and that schedules work to correct systemic causes of paint peeling, wood rot, mold growth, rust, grime accumulation, moisture incursion before an eminent maintenance event. Planning costs money and discussion time, yet pays back in reducing maintenance event frequency, increasing piece of mind, and greater tradesmon satisfaction as they can schedule in advance for clearly defined work that they know makes a difference. More cost effective work projects, are worth more to MSC and so labor can be better compensated for a better quality result. Eventually, everyone wins.

Spare Parts inventory:

Often people dispose of things because a small part breaks, and they can't find time to make a repair. Volunteers have time to repair when one doesn't already need a replacement. This means fixing a spare to meet emergency needs.

We've a spare fridge, a spare 50 CFM exhaust fan, spare microwave ovens, and various spare parts in hand to more quickly restore services residents rely on. Yet volunteers need to sell of many commercial top washers that are obsolete for our purposes. We want to sell stuff while others could still save money from the source of replacement parts. Freeing up space, simplifies organizing so more volunteers can find what is needed fast and space for more useful spare parts that we pick-up from people who randomly need to clear out what they don't use. Whenever a bolt is not labeled and allowed to rust at all we can't assume it is as reliable as a new one, so how we label and store parts matters. Sustainability has recovered a significant amount recycling metal that we can't trust to use.

Excess caulk, weedkiller, adhesive and paints are all a liable to denature in storage and sources of off-gassing. A regular volunteer painting schedule could reliably use materials while they are fresh. As nice as it is for repair people to leave extra materials that we paid for, these are worthless to us if we don't use them before their utility expires. It is more sustainable to let professionals keep extra of many products that deteriorate. We can be both users and contributors to the usable hazardous products exchange so that hazardous waste is minimized. This applies to participation in the StPaul Tool Library, where we borrow stuff to use it and return it rather than store it. Extra chain oil..., can be used to service tool library equipment as we would our own to benefit an organization that benefits us.

Obsolescence Planning:

At some point you know your car is rusting out such that it will not last 3 years; you identify a better model that will replace it, then there is no reason to buy a new transmission for the obsolete car. May things are like that, if one has a plan. It is not a choice between always repair, and never repair. One needs a plan to choose the right response. When something breaks, MSC has saved money by volunteers shopping for a better replacement deal rather than trying to fix what will soon break again. This puts purchasers under a lot of stress, that can be avoided when we simply realize that somewhere among our 18 fridges one will break within the next 2 years and once we are on the spare we need to authorize a purchase at the next buying opportunity.

MSC is in the business of serving the needs of student residents. Our definition of affordable is very competitive with definitions set by for profit enterprises serving young professionals. Sustainability Committee takes the position that investing in quality and planning to most effectively use resources, results in lower long term costs. MSC is in this for the long term. We must sustain planing, saving, maintaining and upgrading "perpetually".

To know which strategy is actually most cost effective for each situation, we can challenge our past decisions with analysis to inform better future decisions. Competing strategies all exist for appropriate reasons, we need to identify what serves our residents best for what. We have both very new and 120 year old stuff. The new stuff is not always better than the old, yet sometimes is so much better that waiting for old reliable to fail wastes money and effort. Each service provider specializes in a strategy and prices their services to be profitable given their needs. It is not logical that any one service provider is optimal to meet all of MSC's needs. Volunteers, direct contractors and contracts through contracted management all play complementary roles. We have reasons to do business with both small and large companies.

Until we have superior housing quality with no anticipation of failing facilities, MSC must prioritize cost effectively improving how we provide improving housing quality for more students. Environmental sustainability is very compatible with this, yet we must carefully identify investments in which it pays to lead. Leading in paying labor better requires first to operate in a more financially strong manner to sustain the higher wages without sacrificing the overall long term quality of housing provided to students for which low cost is a high priority.