Property
procedures may alienate small departments
By
Monica Pardee
On-line Forty-Niner
In
a time of class cancellations and cuts to
operating budgets the faculty of the chemical
engineering department seemed relatively
unamazed that equipment from other departments
was being dumped and discarded while they
went without any computers at all.
The
chemical engineering department recently
assembled an entire computer lab from discarded
Pentium II-era computers and nearly 20 discarded
monitors. All of which were in good enough
working order that two lab technicians in
the College of Engineering could rehabilitate
the hardware into a working lab.
“The
trouble for some of the departments like
us is we don’t have any old computers
to begin with,” said Charles Jang,
the chemical engineering department’s
chairman. “When you have some equipment,
any kind of equipment, you are always being
allocated money to replace them.”
The
chemical engineering department maintains
an operating budget of $1,662 while larger
departments, like computer engineering,
operate on $24,848, or nearly 15 times more
than chemical engineering.
“The
electrical engineering department or other
departments are very kind to us,”
Jang said. “They allow us to share
some facilities with them.”
The
difficulty within the College of Engineering
stems from the fact that each department
has such specialized needs that simply sharing
a computer lab does not always work for
everyone, Jang said.
“I
know that there is something wrong,”
Jang said. “I think it depends on
how the college and departments allocate
their resources.”
Jang
said that a perfect example was a $32,000
computer that was written off as unfixable.
“That
computer was more expensive than a Mercedes
Benz,” Jang said. “They were
going to bring it to a junk yard.”
Jang,
with the help of two of the college’s
technicians, managed not only to fix the
machine but also to make it better than
it was when it was purchased.
According
to Joseph Latter, associate vice president
for financial management, expensive items
like this are not disposed of nonchalantly.
“The
only way they could throw something away
is if it no longer works or if it’s
obsolete,” Latter said.
According
to Minh Tran, an equipment technician for
the College of Engineering and one of the
people responsible for the new chemical
engineering computer lab, the items he claimed
from property management were Pentium II
models. He also recovered 17 monitors from
property management, which he put into use
in the lab.
“If a computer is only one or two
years old I’d be surprised if anybody
was throwing that away.” Latter said
Although
the computers were at least five years old,
Tran said that they work well for scientific
computing required for chemical processing.
“In
most cases nowadays computers have become
so cheap that it’s not worth the time
and effort to try to repair them to bring
them up to current specifications,”
Latter said. “There are a lot of people
who still will take those old computers
and as a hobby or for charity, work on them
to get them working, but they are awfully
slow.”
Each
department makes its own priority in regard
to purchasing computers, and with the help
of the purchasing office, negotiates the
best deal for the campus. When and why departments
get new equipment is left solely to the
departments, but require approval from the
colleges.
“This
is up to the judgment of the departments,”
Jang said. “Each unit makes their
own judgment about whether they want upgrade
their computers or not.”
Departments
like computer science and engineering that
have nearly $25,000 in operating expenditures
must constantly keep up with current technology,
and thanks to their high enrollment can
also afford it, Jang said.
“It
has to do with the student enrollment,”
Jang said. “The resource distribution
is based on how many students you have.”
Dumping
hardware requires cooperation with property
management and involves several steps of
filing for approval, Natalie Nguyen, fixed
asset coordinator for property management
said.
“They
want to discard something, that means they
have to send us a survey request,”
Nguyen said. “We would process the
request, when its approved we would contact
the department to bring it down.”
“We
don’t keep an accumulating total,
but we do have documents for every piece
of equipment we dispose of,” Latter
said. “What is being disposed of is
either obsolete or no longer working or
to be given away because we no longer have
any use for it.
According
to Latter a form is prepared by the college
that identifies what the equipment is, what
its value is, and it is then approved by
the finance person in each college as well
as the property office.
“That’s
what we call surveying a piece of equipment,”
Latter said.
The
cost for dumping some hardware is more expensive.
Due to EPA standards regarding pieces like
monitors, the university is charged $10
for each piece. For the batch of computers
monitors that Tran recovered it would have
cost nearly $200 to discard.
“The
cost is relatively minor,” Latter
said. “Once it’s delivered to
the property office some of the materials
are taken out of it per EPA guidelines and
recycled.”
Each
department and college is responsible for
prioritizing funds for purchasing. If the
art department has only one computer, then
it is up to the department and college to
set aside funds to purchase more, Latter
said.
“Each
college determines their own need and purchases
their own computers based on their own needs,”
Latter said. “Nobody is given any
budget, per se, to purchase specific computers.”
Campus-wide
communication on available hardware such
as office equipment, office furniture or
computer hardware is left up to property
management. If one department is in need
and one department has excess then it is
up to colleges to stay in tune with availability.
“The
property department does receive a lot of
those old computers and part of their process
before they throw anything away or have
it recycled, many times they’ll notify
the rest of the campus that certain pieces
of equipment that are obsolete to others
are available for pickup,” Latter
said. “We try to utilize everything
we can, every once in a while we’ll
send out listings of materials that are
down in the property office. Typically though
if a computer is begin thrown away, or sent
to the property office or surveyed, it’s
pretty much not much use to the colleges.”
The
chemical engineering department now has
a lab for the first time, although it consists
of discarded hand-me downs that were considered
of not much use to the colleges.
“We
can live with the computers that we have
now,” Jang said.
Jang
said he hopes that when the time comes to
replace these computers the department will
be able to get funds allocated from the
college to bring in newer technology.
According to Latter, systems are in place
to keep good equipment from the trash heap
even if the university community has no
use for them.
“To
some extent they’re still useful,”
Latter said. “We have arrangements
with high schools and junior colleges in
the area where we give those real old computers
that are no longer useful to the campus
but still in some working order.”
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