ABQ officials want to know how many city buildings need improvements

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – It’s a huge undertaking: the City of Albuquerque (CABQ) wants to know what kind of shape all of its facilities are in and what kind of work needs to be done. This includes everything from community centers and fire stations to storage warehouses and City Hall.

“There’s actually about 200 facilities that we own around the city including all the fire stations, senior centers, community centers, police substations, and main police buildings. Parks and community playgrounds are, obviously, all facilities that are all in our inventory,” explained General Services Department for the CABQ Director John Craig.

Like all buildings, the ones the city owns need constant maintenance. The city’s new General Services Department is aiming to take a comprehensive look at every single one of them.

“We’re looking at taking a fresh look at everything in the city, looking at buildings to see what it takes to not only keep them going for the current year but what it takes for the long-term,” Craig said.

Craig said the Facilities Department has a full staff of 50 to 60 people who maintain the buildings already, but to complete this assessment, they’re also hiring outside experts to look at things like roofing and HVAC systems.

“[We will] put [the buildings’ status] into a database. Obviously, electronics are very important to make sure that we’re up to speed and can calculate the number of useful years left on devices and buildings,” Craig elaborated.

The whole process is to know the status of these buildings and report their findings to the city council, so they can formulate budgets in the coming years around the facilities’ needs.

“I think we’re taking a renewed look and really starting from scratch, saying, ‘Let’s take a look and see, overall, top to bottom, inside and out, what our facilities look like and how we can go about and what we would need in order to maintain them and keep them up,'” Craig stated, “No matter what we’ve done in the past, things are still old and still need taken care of. This assessment, I think, is going to be on a grander scale than anything we’ve done before.”

The General Services director said he thinks they’ll be done with this task within a year, and the city has quite a few issues with roofing and pipes in their older buildings.