I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people who live here in Milwaukee brag about the Milwaukee County Park System to newcomers or out-of-towners. I’ve done it myself. So I was surprised to read that a county auditor wants the county government to consider selling off the parks. The reason: $200 million in deferred maintenance.
Deferred maintenance is hardly a new problem. It’s been more than 20 years since APPA published The Decaying American Campus: A Ticking Time Bomb. That report put a number on the problem, estimating $60 billion in deferred maintenance on college campuses. (In today’s dollars, that $60 billion would be more than $100 billion.) Since then, says APPA, there has been significant progress, but much remains to be done.
The problem of deferred maintenance is most often associated with institutional buildings. After all, schools, hospitals and governmental bodies typically can’t just walk away from buildings, putting them on the market to get what they can and leaving to someone else the problem of upgrading those properties. But institutions aren’t the only organizations at risk. Take a look at this roofing article, where Karen Warseck describes a warehouse owner who put off a roof recover because the property didn’t have a tenant. Well, it has a tenant now. It also needs a new deck along with a new roof because leaks caused the old steel deck to rust through.
Deferred maintenance is insidious. No one decides to ruin a roof deck or let boilers go without maintenance for so long that they have to be replaced years before they should have needed replacement. But with the number of distressed assets in the commercial property market today, and the pressure on facility budgets in all sorts of organizations, it’s easy to believe that a lot of needed infrastructure work is being deferred.