One of the important internal support functions of City government is the Facilities Division. As a citizen, you may not see or interact with the employees of our Facilities Division directly, but I can assure you benefit from their work on a daily basis. They clean the buildings; fix the toilets; weed the flower beds; heat the swimming pools; freeze the ice; hang the photos; move the furniture and all the other 1,000’s of little things it takes to make a modern multi-building organization function effectively.
The Facilities Division was reorganized in April 2004. Among the changes to our Facilities Division that can trace their lineage back to April 2004 are the arrival of our new Facilities Manager, Mr. Paul Sticha as Facilities Manager; the hiring of a private custodial contractor, Diverse Building Maintenance (DBM, to clean all City-owned facilities; the termination of the contract with United Properties (UP) as the property management vendor for City Center and the Den Road Liquor Store and moving those duties in-house; and the reorganization of the division staff to create a staff that included two Facilities Supervisors (Marc Thielman at the City Center and Michael Sheggeby at the Community Center), two Facilities Engineers (Roy Timm at the City Center and Jeff Elwell at the Community Center), two Facilities Technicians (Shaun Sullivan and Tim Peltier) and a Facilities Service Coordinator (Joan Karst).
We are currently working on an internal review of this reorganization. We are comparing the costs of the previous facilities functions with the reorganized functions. We are comparing employee head-counts before and after. We are also surveying City employees to collect their input about whether they’ve noticed the changes. And if they have noticed, we want to know if they think the reorganization was a good decision.
Safe and pleasant facilities are important to the employees who work in our buildings, but they are also important to the citizens who visit us. In the end, our facilities are public property. Maintaining public facilities properly and prudently is one of the City’s key stewardship commitments that we must keep for our citizens.
