BY KARISSA MILLER

Iredell-Statesville Schools officials want to conduct a districtwide Facilities Condition Assessment (FCA) to help administrators produce forecasting reports and a list of preventive maintenance tasks to help better manage the district’s facilities.

I-SS Chief Technology, Facilities, and Maintenance Officer Tim Ivey presented the district’s plan to the Iredell County Board of Commissioners earlier this week.

The district, Ivey explained, has implemented a new work order system through a partnership with Facilities Management Extreme (FMX) that has helped “I-SS drill down what it takes to manage our facilities.”

“Part of that is doing what is called a facilities management assessment. Essentially what happens is a company comes in that is through FMX and they go through and assess every asset in our school,” Ivey said.

This assessment includes plumbing, HVAC and electrical systems, as well as roofs, doors and windows. FMX then creates a preventative maintenance plan for all of those items and then asset tag everything, Ivey explained.

“In a nutshell, what that does is it allows me to create a 10-year capital forecast where I can say within the next 10 years these are the major items, we are going to need to be able to maintain and replace our facilities,” he explained.

Ivey told commissioners that the school board is looking to partner with the commissioners on this districtwide assessment.

Project Cost

The cost of the Facilities Condition Assessment is approximately $542,723.27. I-SS is asking commissioners to consider splitting the cost with the school board.

“It would be a one-time fee,” said Superintendent Jeff James. “We don’t have the workforce to asset tag. It would take us five or six years to do this and by that time it would be moot point.”

I-SS manages 3.4 million square feet of public property. This proposal provides a better way to budget county tax dollars and plan for the future, James said.

“It’s also a way the taxpayers to know how we are spending their tax dollars. These are interactive maps and we can put them on our website. You can see when the roof replacements are scheduled …They can see exactly what we are spending and doing,” James said.

Ivey said that FMX works with another company, Dynamix, to do the assessments. Since 1997 Dyanmix have completed over 75 million square feet of FCA assessments and worked with numerous schools, he explained.

The company did a case study at school in Texas that is of similar size to I-SS.

Dynamix grades each asset as excellent, good, fair, poor or critical and provides data charts that include cost replacement and what it costs at the current time.

All of the data is uploaded into the FMX system I-SS is currently using, Ivey said. Additionally, it gives the district the ability to do energy-based planning.

“We can look at the sites and see what it is costing us energy-wise,” Ivey said. “Then we can make plans for improvements.”

Scope of the Work

Dynamix would send a team to conduct the assessments for approximately two months. They will asset tag everything and then they will leave for a week, debrief and then come back and repeat that cycle.

“They do it in part so that they can put the data in correctly,” he explained.

Every item on the campus will have a QR code that will be tied to the item’s history and what services were completed on it and how much money the district has spent on it.

“It gives you what you need to forecast your spending,” Ivey explained.

FCA creates a planned maintenance plan for all the items, which go into a year-round calendar. It turns it into a “more proactive system then a reactive system.”

Commissioners did not vote on the request, but are likely to consider it during their October 19 meeting.