States Dedicate Funds, Demolish to Shrink Maintenance Backlog

For universities that want to quickly erase costs for building repairs and renovations, Elaine Frisbie has some advice.

“The fastest way to get rid of your deferred-maintenance backlog is to tear down a building,” said Frisbie, vice president for finance and administration at the Kansas Board of Regents. The six universities the board governs “have managed to get rid of $123 million in deferred maintenance just from that,” she said. As an added bonus, it also reduces operating costs.

Frisbie spoke last week during a panel at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association’s Higher Ed Policy Conference in Chicago. The session delved into how states approach deferred maintenance, a problem panelists described as “ballooning” and ready to explode.

“These issues are going to continue to grow, and no matter how much people want to ignore them, it’s a ticking time bomb,” said Jeremy Wright-Kim, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, during the panel. Ben Wilkerson, a doctoral student there, added these projects can “snowball from minor deferred maintenance into major capital repair.”

As institutions face enrollment declines, federal funding cuts and other financial pressures, administrators worry that long-standing needed repairs will be deferred longer, leading to more expensive problems later. But fewer students and less research may also mean colleges and universities, which are already cutting academic programs and laying off employees, can close and destroy more buildings.

Wright-Kim told Inside Higher Ed on Monday that it’s “tricky” to calculate the total deferred-maintenance expenses that institutions face nationwide. An analysis in 2021 by construction cost data firm Gordian and educational facilities association APPA said it would cost about $112 billion to solve what they called the “deferred-renewal” problem.

Frisbie said part of Kansas’s effort to address the issue required “getting consistent information,” as its institutions would previously assess the quality of their own facilities. Her agency concluded in fiscal year 2025 that the universities had a $1.66 billion backlog just to get their “mission-critical” facilities into a “state of good repair.” For “mint condition,” the cost would be more than $3 billion, she said. These mission-critical facilities only include state-owned buildings predominantly used for academic or research purposes, Frisbie said—excluding athletics facilities, student unions, parking garages and more.

Wright-Kim said during the panel that “there are billions of dollars of backlogs, depending on which state you look at. But there wasn’t really a cohesive resource to say, ‘All right, across the country, here’s what states seem to be doing.’” So he and his research partners “reviewed over 1,100 statutes, policy documents, system information—anything that we can get our hands on,” plus conducted more than 60 interviews to figure out state funding practices that weren’t spelled out in law.

With support from the Gates Foundation, they have now produced a dataset and preliminary profiles for all 50 states on how they fund higher ed capital costs. Those costs include deferred maintenance, which can range from painting or replacing technology to renovating expensive heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems. Wright-Kim called these data resources “living documents” that will be updated.

“Our goal here is to provide resources for folks like yourselves and others to at least be able to benchmark across the country to say, ‘Yes, let’s look at our peers. Let’s think about what other opportunities exist,’” Wright-Kim told the higher ed leaders in the audience.

He said they found 28 states have “a specific deferred-maintenance approach,” including funding formulas for deferred maintenance, dedicated taxes for the costs and more. Wilkerson said a couple of states base deferred-maintenance appropriations on a given percentage of the replacement cost of state-owned facilities. Montana’s Legislature, for example, can’t appropriate new capital funding until 0.6 percent of facilities’ replacement value has been allocated.

“That doesn’t mean that all of that deferred-maintenance funding is going to higher education,” Wilkerson said. “But at least the Legislature has to appropriate deferred maintenance before they can appropriate new capital spending.”

In Louisiana, he said, institutions must put part of the replacement value of new, non-state-funded facilities into a maintenance reserve account, “so that what starts as an institutional investment doesn’t become a public liability.”

Florida requires universities to spend part of unspent operating funds they want to carry over on deferred maintenance, while Massachusetts is taxing wealthy people to pay for capital projects. Multiple states have streamlined reviews specifically for deferred-maintenance projects, Wilkerson said.

While Wright-Kim said the goal of the research wasn’t to figure out which approach was most effective, he said it seems that “processes that increase predictability of funds [and] that lower the barriers to accessing those resources are likely going to be beneficial.”

No More Low-Hanging Fruit

Frisbie said Kansas universities have torn down, or plan to tear down, 29 mission-critical buildings. And this year, the Kansas Legislature provided money for demolitions, which themselves are considered a capital cost.

But these teardowns have gotten more controversial, she said, to the point that universities don’t want to broadcast which buildings they want to level.

“There were some really easy targets for the universities at the beginning, some real easy, ‘Oh yeah, knock down that old thing,’” Frisbie said. “But, as time wore on, it got a little more complicated because faculty, they may have a particular attachment to a building, or alumni might have an attachment to a building.”

She told Inside Higher Ed on Monday that you can apply rational thinking to the situation, but “ultimately, you’ve got to take people into account.” Many Kansas campus buildings also have historic designations, so taking them down requires approvals from numerous groups, she said.

The Kansas Board of Regents expects universities to eventually spend 2 percent of their total buildings’ replacement cost annually on maintenance, but now they’re facing lean times in the Legislature, she said. And universities in Kansas and elsewhere can’t bank on donors to solve their deferred-maintenance issues, despite their importance.

“These are not big, shiny, sexy things that donors want to fund,” she said. “This is fixing HVAC and electrical stuff, and making sure the paint’s not peeling, and plumbing is working, and there’s adequate fire protection.”