He has spent his 23-year career at TCU facilitating the University’s expansion and overseeing the Physical Plant staff responsible for everything on campus that gets dug, built, re-modeled, constructed, repaired, maintained, retrofitted, relocated, paved, cleaned, planted, mowed, piped, wired, fenced and furnished.
The list of chores is never-ending and will continue to be. Will, however, is retiring. He leaves TCU in the capable hands of his managers, directors and project engineers, and in far better shape than he found us when was hired in 1989.
Will arrived on campus one week after retiring from a 30-year career in the Air Force. He has a degree in civil engineering from Texas A&M University, a management degree from the University of Southern California and was once deputy chief of staff for civil engineering at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
TCU hired Col. Stallworth because of numerous military assignments where he demonstrated a proven ability to correct operations and facility performance issues at major installations. Those assignments, much like here, he says, involved “pulling the place together”…trying to standardize facilities, improve operations, make things work better and make everything look good. “If things look good, they probably are,” he notes.
In the late 1980s, TCU didn’t have a master plan for the existing campus. There wasn’t even a schedule for regular trash collections back then, Will recalls with a chuckle. His first official act, he says, was to conduct a detailed audit of facilities to identify needs and develop a comprehensive campus master plan. That exercise produced a list of approximately $100 million worth of repairs and work that needed to be done. “If something broke it got fixed, but there was no scheduled maintenance or money put into facilities, and little thought given to the future,” he notes.
Since Will’s arrival, there has been a succession of master plans designed for the campus…in 1991, 1999, 2005 and 2009. The Master Plan has been examined, re-thought and revised as University priorities change with funding opportunities and input from trustees and administration. Nowadays, the Physical Plant is strategizing projects resulting from the master planning efforts and incorporating them into a Five Year Capital Planning program, while also spending $10-$12 million a year maintaining what’s already here. They are currently beginning to plan for 2013 and beyond.
The department has 283 employees who handle 2,000 to 3,000 work requests in any given month. And that can be anything from killing a wasp on an office ceiling to setting up chairs for special events to solving bigger, messier problems that impact faculty, staff and students. The size of the campus has grown by more than 50% over the last 23 years, including 49 major projects since 1996.
By May 2012, TCU will have 3.9 million square feet of building space. As for the new construction, Will has a professional staff of 20 that includes architects, engineers, project managers and interior designers who devote themselves to working with the outside architects and contractors presently on campus.
Being a military man himself, Will has a unique perspective on what it takes to keep a campus running smoothly. His staff includes at least 30 individuals who are also retired military and even more who served in the armed forces. “It’s the best place to get the training for this job,” Will observes. “You just change clothes and you fit right in.” The colleagues Will relies on to get the work done are wearing civvies now and sitting at his conference table at his twice-weekly meetings. Harold Leeman, Dick Bryan, Joe Laster, Dave Mestemaker, Hollis Dyer, David Muzzy and Dan DeHart, are among them.
The military is also a source of craft people who do a good job and take pride in what they do. Will notes that finding a person who can work on a steam boiler is next to impossible in a civilian industrial setting but Navy ships still use them and, thus, can provide experienced manpower for TCU’s needs. Will offers yet another interesting aside: At least two-thirds of his counterparts on other college campuses also have prior military service.
TCU benefits from military minds in other ways. To simplify maintenance and reduce operational costs, there is a strong emphasis on standardizing materials, equipment, furnishings, and use of a consistent pallet of paint colors in residence halls and academic buildings with accent colors and furnishings used to introduce color. Painted signs are chocolate brown. Light poles are painted bronze. Transformers are uniformly painted a shade called “meter white.”
While at first blush this basic palette may seem to be a bit boring, but maintaining standard paint colors, finishes, materials and equipment throughout the campus has big benefits in maintenance and economy. Will explains that it adds to campus cohesiveness and makes touch-ups and their ability to keep the campus looking fresh simpler and less costly. Even the brick pavers used in medians, landscape plantings and iron fencing around parking lots that are campus identifiers, yes, but also have practical applications.
Will points with pride to TCU’s leadership in energy conservation and sustainability efforts. The campus enjoys utility rates among the lowest in the state due to extensive investments in energy efficiency and conservation efforts over the past 15 years. These efforts will pay dividends for years to come and will help keep operational costs and energy use at lowest possible levels.
To date six new or renovated buildings have been recognized by the U.S. Green Building Council as Leadership in Environmental Engineering Design (LEED) Gold certified, one as Silver and two added buildings are pending Gold certification. TCU had the first LEED Gold certified residence in the state.
Even Amon Carter Stadium is on track to be LEED certified. TCU is one of only a handful of universities in the nation to be Green Clean Certified. Further, the University’s single point recycling program is a proven leader in recycling efforts in academic and administrative buildings. Finally, a recently completed installation of a campus-wide irrigation system will reduce water consumption by an estimated 35% per year.
All of those daily, yearly and long-range projects—how they happen and where they happen—can be traced back to Will Stallworth’s conference room, peopled by Physical Plant staff and the army of workers who keep TCU looking “spit-and-polished” for all of us to take pride in and enjoy,