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Joint Maintenance/Finance Committee Discussion

Date: Tuesday, March 22nd

, 2011

Topic:What should MCCs 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 years

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 CoComembers 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 MCCs 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

andpositive 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 were calling this coming Tuesdays 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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2.) The second part of the meeting will be a chance to check-in about howMCC doesmaintenance. (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 organizations currentunderstanding 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 changespeople have in mind to the organizations 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 andsmall in scope, where some or all of the physical labor needed to complete the project

couldbe 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 coordinatewith 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 theMO 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 receivemaintenance hours for their efforts.

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IV. Only if the above steps do not work will short term worker group members or outsideprofessionals be hired to complete the project.

V. A system like this will mean more opportunities to do maintenance hours will bepresented 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 systematicallyfor all projects identified by MaintCoas 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 themembers 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 effortto coordinate projects at the houselevel, 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 ofmaintenance 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 maintenancehours done above and beyond a members 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 normallyhire short-term worker group members or outside professionals/contractors to perform?

a. Concretely, where specificallyin the proposed maintenance budget could those savingsbe 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 usmoney 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, wecould pursue to bring down the cost of maintenance to members?

a. DevCo did begin researching a number of such opportunities through MCCs consultantslast year.