The Summit Facilities Committee needs your help
June 21, 2018
Dear Students, Faculty, and Staff,
We write to introduce ourselves to you—as chairs of the newly established Summit Facilities Committee—and invite you to take part in the work of addressing campus needs and planning for long-term facilities projects.
Our committee includes faculty, staff, and students who will advise the college on such matters as long-range planning for academic and student life spaces, improving green spaces, developing sustainable operating practices, and establishing a collaborative process for community participation in the prioritization of facilities projects and deferred maintenance on our nearly 150 year-old campus.
We’ve set up a webpage with the names of our committee members and a general email address through which we invite you to share any ideas, questions, or suggestions. We’ll use the website to share information and ask for your participation and feedback. We’re happy to be able to serve the college in this capacity; the recommendation for such a committee came directly out of the Bicentennial Strategic Planning Commission, informed by the results of a campus-wide survey that many of you participated in.
That survey, the results of which also helped lead to the creation of the sustainability coordinator position, serves as the foundation for the first significant task on the committee’s plate: the consideration of facilities maintenance and housekeeping services. As most of you may know, several years ago the college contracted with Aramark to provide all maintenance and housekeeping services. The college has asked the facilities committee to assist and advise in developing a request for proposals (RFP) for the provision of these services—essentially, to put out to bid again the contract for these services. The effort comes after a recent, thorough assessment of our current contract and levels of service provided, an assessment that has been deeply informed by feedback from members of the campus community.
We need your input to help shape the RFP, so that it addresses campus needs and prioritizes the services that are most important. To that end, we invite you to complete this short anonymous survey that asks you to prioritize services, rate your level of satisfaction with facilities and maintenance services, and offer suggestions for improving such services. The survey will remain open through Monday, July 16, and we’ll share the results on our website. Our intention is to solicit proposals by the end of the summer.
This is the first—but not only—opportunity for you to be involved in this process, and this is the first of many projects our committee will take on. We look forward to hearing from you and partnering with you to help address and plan for the college’s facilities needs.
Sincerely,
Tom Fusciello
Rob Lukaskiewicz
Melanie Stein
Chairs, Summit Facilities Committee
