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Maine Department of Education

Facilities Management Template

Introduction to Capital Asset Management (CAM)

April 7, 2003

Capital asset management is divided into two distinct areas of the Facilities Management Template (FMT). First is the Capital Asset Management Tool (CAMT) software and second is the State/Local Reinvestment Expectation (S/LRE). The combination of these two is intended to provide districts with capital asset management tools and data with which to meet the expectation that districts are committing appropriate resources on an annual basis to the preservation of their facilities.

Purpose

The purpose of the Capital Asset Management (CAM) aspects of the FMT is to encourage Maine’s school districts to establish and practice sound management policies, which develop, preserve, and protect capital facilities assets used for educational purposes. Educational facilities assets are long-term investments, which require long term management plans.

By providing a method for recording institutional memory about facilities assets, plans for long term care of school facilities, and financial modeling, and expectations for long-term reinvestment the CAMT along with the S/LRE can form the basis for a widely accepted stewardship plan. This plan should reverse the current trend of letting school building wear out in the hopes that a new facility will be provided by the State. Such thinking and practice is both wasteful of collective educational resources and poor behavior modeling for our students, and the public at large.

Capital Asset Management Software

Capital Asset Management software has been purchased by the Department for use by districts. Vanderweil Facility Advisors (VFA) of Boston, MA was chosen to supply their VFA.facility software via an Application Service Provider (ASP) arrangement over the world wide web. In order to access the CAMT software district personnel will have to attend a training session hosted by the Department. Once the training session is complete, the attendee will receive a password, which will allow them to access their data and the features of the VFA.facility software.

Every effort has been made to preload as much data as possible from Department databases into VFA.facility. Additional data, specific to the building descriptions, cost models, deficiencies, and corrections will have to be collected and entered by individual districts or selected vendors.

Use of the VFA.facility software or a similar capital asset management tool will fulfill the requirements of the Major Capital Improvement Program (MCIP) and the School Revolving Renovation Fund (SRRF) for the 10 Year Capital Plan, Functional analysis, and System Analysis. The use of this kind of analysis will be required in all future MCI and RRF applications. These reports also satisfy the requirements of the Comprehensive Education Plan (CEP) required of all Maine public schools.

Assessment Services

In order to assist with this Facility Condition Assessment, the Department has compiled a list of Approved Vendors who have, via a competitive process, submitted proposals to do the scope of work required to complete the building inspection, code analysis, and enter the data into VFA.facility for a fixed price per square foot of facility. The State will reimburse one-half (1/2) of the cost of these facility conditions assessment services based on the lowest price negotiated by the Department with the lowest bidder. The list of firms and their prices will be available to districts at the VFA.facility software training and on the MDOE web site at www.maine.gov/education/const/fmt.htm .

 

Process for Schools

Schools wishing to use the CAMT software will attend a full day basic training session in the use of VFA.facility sponsored by the DOE at locations around the State. These sessions will be held so long as demand exists for them. Second levels of training in advanced report writing and data analysis, cost model management, and other topics are also offered as demand warrants.

Upon successful completion of the basic training and signing of the Application Service Provider (ASP) license agreement, district staff will be issued a password to access the VFA.facility software via the world wide web.

When district personnel access their part of the VFA database with their SAU information preloaded, they should verify that the information is correct.

Districts will have to make a decision about how they will load the information about their facilities into the VFA.facility software. Districts can contract with a vendor from the Pre-approved list established by the DOE, and share in the cost of the assessment work, or they can do the assessment work themselves and enter the data into the software. In any case a district that wishes to use the software will have to arrange to collect and enter a significant amount of data about those facilities in order to create reports.

SAU’s that have begun using software from another vendor can either continue with that vendor’s software or convert to VFA.facility.

More Information

Information about the MDOE Facilities Management Template can be found at the www.maine.gov/education/const/fmt.htm

 

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