Our engagement in standards setting for educational settlements dates back to the early 1990s at the University of Michigan, when our Safer–Simpler–Lower Cost–Longer Lasting agenda was established. Today, at the usual hour, we revisit some of those “code wins” and examine the state of the art in fire protection across the wide range of occupancy classes found in on-campus and off-campus facilities.
Consider the following questions. We have answers—or opinions—on all of them.
Who owns institutional policy for the inspection, testing and maintenance of sprinkler, standpipe and fire pump systems—Facilities, EH&S, the fire marshal or some combination?
To what degree should on-campus facilities maintenance extend its services to off-campus student housing, including fraternity and sorority houses?
When a developer proposes a student high-rise apartment building, how much of the municipal water and fire protection infrastructure should be upgraded to assure code-required standpipe pressure?
What are the labor classifications, licensing requirements and scopes of work of the various fire protection technicians?
How closely are fire alarm technicians and wet- and dry-pipe sprinkler technicians coordinated?
Which fire protection work should be performed by in-house staff and which should be contracted to specialty firms?
How should deferred maintenance and capital renewal of aging sprinkler piping, valves, fire pumps and associated water infrastructure be prioritized against other life-safety work?
Who is responsible for managing impairments when a sprinkler, standpipe or fire pump system must be taken out of service, particularly in continuously occupied buildings?
How should facilities management coordinate sprinkler-system records, inspection results and correction of deficiencies with the local fire department and authority having jurisdiction?
When an existing building is renovated or repurposed, who determines whether the existing fire protection infrastructure remains adequate for its new occupancy and use?
How is sprinkler water managed—during testing, flushing, draining and system maintenance—and where does that water ultimately go?
Would you like to see a copy of the 8′ x 8′ “Compliance Chart” developed by University of Michigan Plant Operations to coordinate the work of fire alarm and wet/dry extinguishment system technicians?
Use the login credentials at the upper right of our home page.
Abstract: One of the most common questions in the early stages of designing a new facility is whether the normal utility supply to a fire pump is reliable enough to “tap ahead of the main” or whether the fire pump supply is so unreliable that it must have an emergency power source, typically an on-site generator. Apart from the obligation to meet life safety objectives, it is not uncommon that capital on the order of 100000to1 million is at stake for a fire pump backup source. Until now, that decision has only been answered with intuition – using a combination of utility outage history and anecdotes about what has worked before. There are processes for making the decision about whether a facility needs a second source of power using quantitative analysis. Fault tree analysis and reliability block diagram are two quantitative methods used in reliability engineering for assessing risk. This paper will use a simple one line for the power to a fire pump to show how each of these techniques can be used to calculate the reliability of electric power to a fire pump. This paper will also discuss the strengths and weakness of the two methods. The hope is that these methods will begin tracking in the National Fire Protection Association documents that deal with fire pump power sources and can be used as another tool to inform design engineers and authorities having jurisdiction about public safety and property protection. These methods will enlighten decisions about the relative cost of risk control with quantitative information about the incremental cost of additional 9’s of operational availability.
We want to see our Posts and Reposts together in one stream — the way they used to be — but, alas, we may be forced to adjust the manner in which our X feed interacts with our desktop web page. For us, reposting and original posting perform different editorial functions. For a curator, standards organization, university or news-oriented account, the sequence can itself carry meaning. Separating the pieces can destroy that sequence.
Stay tuned.
At 97 F, it was a HOT day to pick ears by hand! Ears were filled to the end. New grad student, Elizabeth, can run her first yield component analysis from the banded fertilizer trials funded by @TheRealKyCornpic.twitter.com/vVLJcyebzb
🚨 BREAKTHROUGH: 25-year-old Argentinian biologist Pilar Ferrer has developed an injectable gel that helps repair damaged heart tissue after a heart attack pic.twitter.com/RSlZOtICAh
AI data centres demand power. Human brains are much more efficient than GPUs, using neurons to communicate information. A mistake in a #semiconductor lab led to researchers developing a process that can make a regular transistor behave like a neuron.https://t.co/LQ6hzY8ZX3pic.twitter.com/BNZO5xsOBf
Today is National Red Wine Day. Aging wine takes time and is often done in oak barrels. In 2024, Elyashiv Drori secured U.S. Patent No. 11,866,680 for a wine aging system that replaces oak barrels with steel tanks but retains the oak aging benefits. pic.twitter.com/Pjteet1shb
— Ms. V – Special Education Teacher 💙✂️🖍️🧩🍎🇬🇷 (@msv430) August 24, 2026
I asked Grok to create a picture of my ideal wife based on what it knows about me and it just made a fictional version of my actual wife. pic.twitter.com/BneWYu3uqt
Sometimes there are no standards; only comparisons. An examination of representative essential works (infrastructure) charges that appear on student invoices.
— supports construction and debt service for capital projects, principally student centers, health centers and recreation facilities. A separate Recreation Center Fee also supports construction, debt service, maintenance and operations.
— separately identified among required student fees. KU also identifies facilities, maintenance and equipment charges within student health and recreation fees.
— supports debt and qualifying renovation and construction projects. The university also identifies building maintenance and upgrades within its University Centers Fee.
Reports are usually released at 10 AM EST the first day of every month except this month. (May 2026)
There’s been a significant redesign of the look and feel of the monthly Census Bureau reports construction activity. Today we sort through the rather more granular statistics that inform our recommendations for facility spend.
Total #construction activity for May 2026 ($2,210.2 billion) was 0.1% above the revised April 2026 estimate ($2,207.1 billion).
It has been 20 years since we began tracking educational settlement facility spend. Starting this month we will examine federal government data together with the best available data about space utilization to enlighten our response to the perfectly reasonable question: “Are we over-building or under-building or building ineffectively”. Use the login credentials at the upper right of our home page.
California Polytechnic University | San Luis Obispo County
Oulun yliopisto | Pohjois-Pohjanmaa
Tulane School of Architecture Louisiana
University of Michigan | Washtenaw County
Auburn University | Lee County Alabama
University of Kansas School of Architecture |
Douglas County
As reported by the US Department of Commerce Census Bureau the value of construction put in place by August 2025 by the US education industry proceeded at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $137.604 billion. This number does not include renovation for projects under 50,000 square feet and new construction in university-affiliated health care delivery enterprises. Reports are released two months after calendar month. The complete report is available at the link below:
This spend makes the US education facilities industry (which includes colleges, universities, technical/vocational and K-12 schools, most university-affiliated medical research and healthcare delivery enterprises, etc.) the largest non-residential building construction market in the United States after commercial property; and fairly close. For perspective consider total public + private construction ranked according to the tabulation most recently released:
$137.604 billion| Education Facilities
$155.728 billion | Power (Note data center buildout)
$69.625 billion | Healthcare
Keep in mind that inflation figures into the elevated dollar figures. Overall — including construction, energy, custodial services, furnishings, security. etc., — the non-instructional spend plus the construction spend of the US education facilities is running at a rate of about $300 – $500 billion per year.
We typically pick through the new data set; looking for clues relevant to real asset spend decisions. Finally, we encourage the education facilities industry to contribute to the accuracy of these monthly reports by responding the US Census Bureau’s data gathering contractors.
Reconstruction of Ancient Agora
As surely as people are born, grow wealthy and die with extra cash,
there will be a home for that cash to sustain their memory and to steer
the cultural heritage of the next generation in beautiful settings.
BOMA International sets the standard for measuring buildings. In 1915, BOMA published its first office standard, Standard Method of Floor Measurement. Throughout the years, the standard has been revised to reflect the changing needs of the real estate market and the evolution of office building design.
BOMA International is the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) secretariat for a suite of area measurement standards.
The BOMA catalog remains active, with recent revisions reflecting changes in building use, energy accounting and increasingly complicated mixed-use occupancies.
Government capital aid for schools is usually capped by classified building type and measured area. States sort facilities by grade band (elementary, middle, high school) and program (special education, CTE), then apply published gross-square-foot-per-student allowances.
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Eligible size is typically gross area to the exterior walls; circulation, walls, and mechanical space are included via net-to-gross markups. Only that baseline is state-funded; extra square footage is a local cost. Misclassification or a different measurement method (net vs. gross, interior vs. exterior) changes the funded envelope and can cut or inflate aid.
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Higher-education inventories often use FICM assignable-versus-gross rules for similar reporting and reimbursement. K-12 inventories take into account stairs, voids, mechanical rooms, portables, and renovations. So classification plus the chosen measurement method can change what is eligible for public money.
At the moment all titles in this catalog seem to be stabilized. Largely because a sizeable portion of square footage in every school district, college, university and university-affiliated healthcare research and clinical delivery system derives at least part of its funding from governments at all levels there are workgroups devoted to measuring square footage and documenting its use. For example:
Getting square-footage right is essential for securing an organization’s sustainability and “green” claims for example. The links in previous posts provide for information about future public consultations.
We maintain the BOMA catalog on the agenda of our Space Planning, Hammurabi and Architectural colloquia, hosted 6 to 8 times annually. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting, open to everyone.
We drill into the specifics commonly found in education communities: sub-lease of space to private industry in publicly-owned facilities. The Building Owners and Managers Association International is an ANSI-accredited consensus standard developer and revised its standard — BOMA Z65.5 Retail Properties: Standard Method of Measurement. Measuring the area of a retail building can quickly become complex when variables must be considered such as ancillary space, mezzanines and storefront lease lines. Many large research universities have long since leased space within many of their building envelopes for private industry to service their communities — student unions, hospitals, dormitories and athletic venues, for example. From the project prospectus:
Z65.5 is intended exclusively for retail properties and their associated structures and may be applied to single-tenant, multi-tenant or multi-building configurations. It features a single method of measurement, with two levels of measurement data, known as Partial Measurement and Overall Measurement for retail properties. It does not measure sidewalks, surface parking, drainage structures, or other ancillary site improvements. This standard is chiefly designed to generate Gross Leasable Area figures, a key metric in retail leasing; however, it also produces area figures which may be of interest to those examining space utilization, valuation, benchmarking, and the allocation of building expenses to various cost centers. The scope of this standard is not intended to be submitted for consideration as an ISO, IEC, or ISO/IEC JTC-1 standard.
Public consultation is open until February 8th.
You may obtain an electronic copy from: floorstandards@boma.org. Send comments (with optional copy to psa@ansi.org) to: floorstandards@boma.org. We encourage user-interest subject matter experts in education facility management to participate directly in the BOMA standards development process by communicating directly with Tanner Johnson at BOMA (tjohnston@boma.org) or 202-326-6357 for more information.
We keep the BOMA catalog on the standing agenda of our colloquia devoted to building construction best practice. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
– To promote an unambiguous framework for determining the areas of Industrial Buildings with a strong focus on Rentable Area calculations;
– To facilitate transparency and clear communication of building measurement concepts among all participants in the commercial real estate
industry;
– To allow a comparison of values on the basis of a clearly understood and generally agreed upon method of measurement; and
– To align concepts and measurement methodologies with the International Property Measurement Standards: Industrial Buildings (January 2018)
document.
Send comments (with optional copy to psa@ansi.org) to: tjohnston@boma.org
Standards Michigan follows, but d0es not advocate in most of the BOMA standards suite for the following reasons:
Educational facility occupancies are fairly well accounted for in existing federal and state regulations
Advocacy in energy-related best practice titles are a better use of resources at the moment.
We encourage user-interest subject matter experts in education facility management to participate directly in the BOMA standards development process by communicating directly with Tanner Johnson at BOMA (tjohnston@boma.org) or 202-326-6357 for more information.
We maintain the entire BOMA suite on our periodic Model Building Code colloquia. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
Issue: [15-200]
Category: Architectural, Space Plaaning, Facility Asset Management
We collect a sample of cameras that follow construction from start to finish. Fixed on rooftops, poles, or nearby buildings, they record the work as it unfolds—foundations poured, steel raised, façades closed in, interiors finished. They do not interrupt the site. They simply keep a clear, continuous record.
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Their role is practical: project teams check daily conditions, facilities staff document milestones, and the campus community can see a building take shape over months that would otherwise pass unseen. Time-lapse footage turns a long construction schedule into a fun, brief story of how a new building joins the campus.
New update alert! The 2022 update to the Trademark Assignment Dataset is now available online. Find 1.29 million trademark assignments, involving 2.28 million unique trademark properties issued by the USPTO between March 1952 and January 2023: https://t.co/njrDAbSpwBpic.twitter.com/GkAXrHoQ9T
