“We always felt that if you were going to keep ahead of the deferred maintenance problem that about double that would be about the right amount. We’ve always been using some of our own resources,” Hibbitts said, adding that funding is now being supplemented from a different budget.

This year, the university will receive about $2.2 million. But Hibbitts said even the $6.6 million received in 2008-2009 was not adequate to keep up repairs.

Until about four years ago, the provincial government provided an annual capital allowance for maintenance that amounted to $6.6 million for SFU in 2008-2009. This was reduced to $4.5 million midway through the following year and then further reduced to $501,031 in 2010-2011, the accreditation report states.

SFU’s annual operating budget is more than $500 million, Hibbitts said. The replacement value of the Burnaby campus is estimated at $1.95 billion.

“Is that money that if we weren’t spending it on maintenance, we would be spending it on something else? Absolutely,” Hibbitts said.

Pat Hibbitts, SFU’s vice-president of finance and administration, said the $717-million figure is “very high.” She estimated that a more realistic figure to address current needs would be closer to $150 or $160 million and said the university has put aside $75 million from its operating budget over the next five to 10 years to begin to address the problems.

The university, which opened in 1965, reported an accumulated $717 million in deferred maintenance on its buildings and utility systems, according to a 2011 SFU report prepared for the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, an accrediting body.

“Aging campus facilities are experiencing ever-increasing issues related to health and safety deficiencies, lack of functionality, and unreliable and inefficient building systems,” the capital plan states. “Recent dramatic reductions in annual capital allowance funding from the province will contribute significantly to the deferred maintenance backlog and the demand for renewal.”

A five-year capital plan for the university prepared for the B.C. government in 2011 found that 53 per cent of the campus’s buildings are in poor condition, while another 27 per cent are ranked fair.

“With the leaks, you see garbage cans every two feet down the hallway. When you have constant leaking, it’s not just water that’s dripping down, because those walls have mould in them. What is leaking is probably very damaging for people’s health and safety.”

“We have money to put up Band-Aid solutions; we don’t have money to actually fix anything,” said education student Julia Lane, the coordinating and external relations officer for the GSS.

Heading into the school year, students are being confronted with the Graduate Student Society’s I (Heart) SFU campaign, which has collected more than 200 photos of everything from broken ceiling tiles, algae growing on a wall and graffiti to exposed rebar and particle board.

METRO VANCOUVER -- Mouldy walls, duct tape repair jobs and leaky ceilings are at the heart of a student campaign at Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby campus, an aging facility they say is in desperate need of repair.

Advanced Education Minister Amrik Virk said that since 2001, the ministry has provided more than $672 million to address deferred maintenance at post-secondary institutions in B.C., including $62 million for SFU.

Virk said it is widely known that the province is in tight financial times.

“All of us wish we had more money to spend,” Virk said. “At this time the government of British Columbia and the Ministry of Advanced Education does not have more money to spend on this.”

Hibbitts stressed that deferred maintenance is a problem in public buildings and other infrastructure across the country and is not unique to SFU.

“SFU is not falling down any more than any other university in the country is,” Hibbitts said. “I think that we have some unique challenges around the fact that the age of our core buildings is all the same. It’s not that we haven’t done anything for 50 years; we’ve obviously done lots. But they’re all coming of age at the same time.

“We are trying to address it and we do take stewardship of our buildings very seriously.”

Hibbitts said the situation is less acute at other post-secondary institutions, such as the University of British Columbia, because they have buildings of varying ages (and thus, different stages of disrepair), which means they do not require maintenance all at once.

Undergraduate political science student Chardaye Bueckert, external relations officer at the SFU student society, noted that post-secondary institutions were able to borrow money to pay for maintenance in the past, but today that is not allowed.

“UBC may not be at the same crisis state that we are because they were able to borrow money to take care of things, but I’m sure that given that the funding has been cut, they will be,” Lane said.

The student leaders said the university is competing against all types of public buildings in B.C. for much-needed funds.

“What we’ve been hearing is that as soon as there is a health and safety crisis, they put money there. Right now we are competing with any other publicly funded infrastructure for that maintenance funding, so hospitals, elementary schools,” Lane said. “Whoever is in the most dire position gets the money, which is really challenging. It also means that the problems get worse and worse.

“When you have a building that’s leaking and you’re not able to fix the leak, you start to get mould problems, and then you get the deterioration of the insulation. The problems just compound on each other when you can’t deal with them right away.”

Renewal projects listed in the five-year plan for SFU’s Burnaby campus include the renovation and repurposing of an existing building to house a data centre at a cost of $20 million, the renewal of classrooms at a cost of $12.8 million, an upgrade for student residences at a cost of $50 million, renewal of the library for $60 million and renovation of the theatre for $10 million.

Infrastructure projects listed in the capital plan include the $17-million replacement of the campus’s central heating plant to replace the existing boiler plant, which is at the end of its useful life, reconstruction of a roadway for $12.5 million, renewal and expansion of the sewer system for $5 million, and building a new transit hub for $5 million.

The student leaders would like to see more funding from the government that is targeted to deferred maintenance issues.

“Our biggest ask would be ... a large cash injection to allow our university to effectively deal with all of the deferred maintenance issues on campus,” Buekert said. “Another thing we’d like to see would be immediate short-term funding to address the most urgent and severe situations on our campus.

“Another big ask we have is ... we’d like to see maintenance funding included whenever a new building is built so that deferred maintenance issues don’t ever materialize.”

The students stressed that they are not complaining just for the sake of complaining; they want to improve the university.

“We love our university,” Lane said. “We want to make things better and we want this place to still be here in 100 years for future students.”

tsherlock@vancouversun.com