CHAPEL HILL – The 17-campus University of North Carolina System has at least a $3 billion backlog of postponed building repairs and renovations.
The System could use the N.C. General Assembly’s help figuring out how to catch up on that deferred maintenance over the next 10 years, Interim UNC President William L. Roper says in the accompanying video.
“We have arguably one of the finest public university systems in the world, surely in the United States,” Roper says. “We have some substantial capital needs – especially the existing buildings that need to be brought up to speed and brought up to date.”
Gov. Roy Cooper and the state House have both backed a bond issue to address university, community college and K-12 public school construction. Leaders in the state Senate, meanwhile, have endorsed a pay-as-you-go approach.1
The House also included a change in its version of the state budget that would allow public universities to carry forward 7.5 percent of their state appropriations to the next fiscal year, tripling the current limit of 2.5 percent.2
“As long as we get those needs met, I’m pretty indifferent about the best way to accomplish it,” Roper says.
What’s most important, he says, is providing the universities with predictable, bite-sized chunks of money to eat away at the backlog.
“Ultimately what I think needs to be gotten to is, what’s an annual amount that we can be relatively assured of so that we can, say, over the next 10 years deal with this backlog that’s there?” Roper says.
“If they gave us three billion dollars tomorrow, we couldn’t use that money in that size,” he says.
“There’s a limit to how much we can do in a given year. And so much more important than one big bolus of money is a continuing stream that’s relatively predictable that can be used by our finance team and our operations team and the construction workers of North Carolina to get the job done.”
1 https://hew.aveltsagency.com/2019/03/bonds-school-construction/. 2https://webservices.ncleg.net/ViewBillDocument/2019/4239/0/H966-PCS10621-MGxfap-6, p. 97.
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