Two central plants that heat and cool the flagship campus were at the end of their life cycles, and deferred maintenance meant a single component failure could take heating and cooling off line for large parts of campus. The partnership that replaced them brought $112 million of capital investment, and cost less to operate than LSU had been paying to run the plants in-house.
More than a million square feet, abandoned since Katrina and costing the Health Sciences Center about a million dollars a year just to hold. I managed the selection process and led the procurement team; the building went to a developer through a competitive process that survived public and political scrutiny. LSU took $11.85 million in up-front rent and stopped bearing the building’s operations, maintenance and deterioration costs when the lease began.
1,547 new student beds, seven residence halls, 34,000 square feet of retail and 700 construction jobs, built with LSU, the LSU Property Foundation, RISE and Provident Resources Group — with more than $130M of the development spend staying in Louisiana.
These are higher education energy and real estate deals because that is where I spent a decade. The procurement and risk-transfer problems are the same across public institutions.