Joint Maintenance/Finance Committee Discussion

Date: Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Topic: What should MCC’s overall maintenance philosophy be?
Sponsor: Coordinating Committee
Time: 1 hour

Background:

This year the proposed maintenance budget contains a number of large increases over last year’s
budget. In particular, the line-items for Worker Group salary, benefits, and training; as well as the
Major Maintenance line-item; are increasing by very significant amounts.

Members of the Coordinating Committee are divided on whether or not to support these increases. It
should be noted that all CoCo members believe that investing in the maintenance of our houses is vital
to improving MCC both in the short and long term. However there is a desire among some CoCo
members to creatively explore changes to our current maintenance model. The idea is to think of ways
to complete the same amount of work as is being proposed but at a lower cost.

Why a joint Maintenance/Finance committee meeting?

After discussing this issue at our last meeting we came to a consensus that a good forum for thinking
about MCC’s overall maintenance philosophy would be a joint Maintenance/Finance Committee
meeting. The goal of the meeting is to talk through each aspect of the MCC maintenance process and
brainstorm areas for improvement. Ideas that come up at the meeting that have both broad consensus
and positive budgetary implications could possibly lead to specific maintenance budget reductions that
all parties can agree on.

The timing of this meeting is especially good in this regard because next Finance Committee will be
discussing the overall MCC budget (the board of directors will then take up the full budget at its April 6th
meeting and ultimately the entire membership will vote on the budget at the April 30th GMM).

The reason we’re calling this coming Tuesday’s meeting a joint meeting is that we want to encourage
Finance Committee members, as well as any other interested MCC members, to join in the process of
revisiting how MCC does maintenance.

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How the meeting will work:

The meeting will be divided into two main parts.

1.) The first part will be a chance to answer the question: what do we want to spend
maintenance money on? (15 min)

This is not the time to go through the merits of various projects at different houses, nor is it a
conversation about what specific line-items in the maintenance budget should get more money. Rather
it is a check-in about overall maintenance priorities. The idea here is we cannot discuss how we are
going to spend money on maintenance without first making sure we are all on the same page about
what to spend money on.

To help guide this part of the discussion here are some general project categories we will consider the
relative importance of. Please come ready to discuss which items are higher priorities in general for you
and/or your house:

 Urgent structural issues (Fixing structural issues that pose a short-term threat to the physical
stability or safety of the house)
 Long term structural issues (Preemptively addressing structural issues in ways that prevent
crisis situations down the road)
 Functional improvements to houses (e.g. remodeling kitchens and bathrooms, adding or
consolidating bedrooms, buying new appliances etc.)
 Energy efficiency projects (Replacing old windows, installing energy efficient appliances,
pursuing green energy initiatives like solar panels etc.)
 Fire safety issues (Making sure fire alarm/sprinkler systems are in working order etc.)
 Toxic hazard safety issues (Lead and asbestos containment/abatement, dealing with mold
growth etc.)
 Minor maintenance projects (smaller scale repairs such as fixing broken locks, leaky faucets,
cracked tiles (non-asbestos) etc.)

Final questions for this section: Do the projects listed in the proposed maintenance budget
generally reflect the priorities expressed during the above discussion? If not, what changes need to
be made? (This last question may not be answerable on the spot but should be answered before the
Finance Committee meeting next week)

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 2.) The second part of the meeting will be a chance to check-in about how MCC does
maintenance. (45 min)

This will involve revisiting the various roles present in MCC maintenance and examining how they work
together. The goal here is to think of changes to the way we do maintenance that could lower the cost
of some of the projects in the proposed maintenance budget.

To help guide this part of the discussion, we will first recap the organization’s current understanding of
the following roles and how they interact (Nikki/Tony should lead this part in a presentation style lasting
no more than 10 of the allotted 45 minutes!):

 Maintenance Officer (MO)

 House Maintenance Coordinator (HMC)
 Maintenance Committee (MaintCo)
 Individual house members
 MCC Maintenance Coordinator (MC)
 Lead worker group member (LWG)
 Regular worker group members- long-term employees
 Regular worker group members- short-term employees
 Outside professionals including contractors

Next we will have a discussion about what changes people have in mind to the organization’s current
roles and procedures as outlined above. To start this part of the discussion off, consider the following
question:

Are there ways to better take advantage of the fact that every MCC member is supposed to
perform 1.5 hours of maintenance a month?

And then assess how feasible the following proposal for a different style of doing maintenance
seems:
I. Maintenance Committee will identify specific projects in the budget, both large and
small in scope, where some or all of the physical labor needed to complete the project
could be done by a group of average members who were given the right guidance.
II. The HMC at a house where one or more of these projects is identified will coordinate
with their housemates and MCC maintenance staff to find a day(s) when the MC or an
experienced worker group person can come over and lead house members through the
project.
i. If more people are needed than are available from the house in question the
MO will put out a call to the broader MCC membership that help is needed at
the agreed upon time.
III. Any house members or other MCC members who participate in the project will receive
maintenance hours for their efforts.

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 IV. Only if the above steps do not work will short term worker group members or outside
professionals be hired to complete the project.
V. A system like this will mean more opportunities to do maintenance hours will be
presented to members on a regular basis. As such MCC will more strictly enforce the
policy requiring that members who leave with uncompleted hours pay a fine per missing
hour.
VI. These procedures will be followed systematically for all projects identified by MaintCo
as being potential member performed projects (see numeral I)
Challenges to keep in mind when considering the above scenario:
I. Important construction safety procedures must be communicated to the
members working on a project. These range from teaching basic tool safety
skills to making sure proper procedures are followed when working with
materials that could contain hazards like lead or asbestos. Having this info
summarized somewhere online is not enough- whoever is bottom lining a given
project must be responsible for passing the information on to the people actually
working on it.
II. Even with a more purposeful, active effort to coordinate projects at the house
level, it may be that not enough members are willing to help out to make this
model feasible
III. Along similar lines, members who have already completed their fair share of
maintenance hours may be disinclined to work on additional projects, limiting
the potential member labor pool
a. One solution to this issue could be to institute a system where maintenance
hours done above and beyond a member’s obligated amount could be
redeemed for cash from the house upon move-out (probably subject to a
cap)

Questions for this section:

1. Would instituting the above system actually save money on projects that we would normally
hire short-term worker group members or outside professionals/contractors to perform?
a. Concretely, where specifically in the proposed maintenance budget could those savings
be found? (this question may be too big for this discussion but should be answered
before the Finance Committee meeting next week).
2. What are other changes to MCC maintenance roles and procedures do folks think would save us
money while still allowing us to complete high quality work on our houses?
3. Beyond changes to internal procedures, are there outside sources of funding, such as grants, we
could pursue to bring down the cost of maintenance to members?
a. DevCo did begin researching a number of such opportunities through MCC’s consultants
last year.