Iowa State Facilities Planning and Management (FPM) will have to slow down work on a list of campus repair projects in response to budget cuts.

Continued reductions in state appropriations, in addition to salary increases for faculty and staff, created an initial need to cut FPM’s budget for services by $500,000.

“The allocation from the university was reduced by about half a million dollars,” said Paul Fuligni, associate vice president for facilities at Facilities Planning and Management. “That money would normally go towards smaller building repair projects such as repairs for classrooms, lighting systems, heating and cooling systems or sidewalks around campus.”

A university initiative to share administrative costs between the university and different departments led interim senior vice president for finance and university services, Pam Cain, to instruct FPM to use its funds to cover a larger share of its administrative costs. This change led to an additional $1 million being moved out of the FPM general fund.

“We were asked to change the way we charge some departments administrative costs,” Fuligni said. “Before, we charged some of our costs to our general budget, and the rest was built into charges we do for other campus services.”

For example, when FPM does work for another department, they charge that department an hourly rate and they are reimbursed for the costs.

Those charges made up the other portion of administrative costs for FPM, but all of those administrative costs are being put into the rates instead of the university budget allocation. This is to “more fairly” spread out the charges amongst all departments, not just the departments FPM services more often Fuligni said.

In order to cover a comparable number of services throughout the year, FPM will be raising its rates it charges the university and its departments when it does a service.

Despite the increased rates, Fuligni said the budget reduction will lead to fewer projects throughout the year, specifically smaller projects.

“FPM is provided a general budget which mainly consists of maintenance repairs for the main buildings, custodial services and maintenance of the campus grounds, sidewalks and roads,” Fuligni said. “There are several other things we do, but those are the main things.”

There won’t be any specific reductions in services that people will notice, Fuligni said. FPM will still receive money to repair buildings on campus, just more slowly.

Some of the services that could be delayed into next year are class repairs and key card integration into door locks.