Braintree's Public Works Department Needs Your Support

Mike McGourty is Braintree’s Head of Public Works. Mike has had a lifetime of working in construction and his family has sawdust in its veins with many family members working in the industry. He has been head of public works for the town of Braintree for 7 years, and had responsibility for managing the school facilities for 2 years. His job has become much more challenging as a result, but Mike and his team of facilities maintenance and repair workers are up to the challenge.

Mike has inherited a lot since 2021 when Braintree school maintenance was taken over by Braintree’s public works department. There’s a lot to do, but there’s also been a lot done in those two years.

• Most existing contractors were replaced with town employees, lowering costs and improving institutional knowledge.
• Better control over the supply chain. One example, 5 vendors sold toilet paper to the town, a district wide purchasing plan saved money by reducing the number of vendors, and ordering at a great level of volume.
• When Mike first took over, he worked hard to make sure all work orders had to go through him, he put a stop to staff putting in requests to outside contractors to come back and fix issues. Thereby reducing costs. By managing the process, he was able to better deploy services and resources to the biggest issues and understand what needed to be repaired or replaced because of higher and higher reactive maintenance costs.

Mike and I took a tour of Highlands Elementary, first we went to the old boiler area, the area gets regularly flooded and is filled with asbestos. There’s an old original boiler, just sitting there, not used any more. The room is entered by a steep set of metal stairs reminiscent of a 1920’s old battleship, deep in the bowels of the original 1930 building sits a rusting old boiler that would cost 10s of thousands to remove and remediate. When you get to the bottom of the stairs, you see floors in different rooms covered with water from the recent rains.

Within 30 seconds of entering Mike discovered yet another new leak to repair from the rains. Mike pointed to a shiny new pipe and told me the public works department had replaced the pipe this winter after the old one had failed. What’s the purpose of the rooms now that the old boiler isn’t working? Storage for an old but still working electrical panel, looking worn and rusty, and space for piping to take heat around parts of the building.

We went to another part of the Highlands Elementary building, the walls didn’t look as bad, but there was another old steam boiler, still defunct, and besides the engine, was a steam condenser, with steam jetting out of it. Mike told me the system wasn’t supposed to do that but there must be a problem in the pipes, and they need to figure it out. Steam was condensing and coalescing into a pool on the floor.

Next to the old boiler were two new steam boilers. Instead of replacing the steam system with another system the district had just replaced the old boiler with a new steam system. The old boilers might last 50 or more years, the new steam system 10 to 15 years. The cost to replace the pipes, don’t ask.

We walked the halls, Mike pointed to the ramp to the cafeteria that had been replaced and remediated for asbestos over one of the summers, most of the floors in Highlands even in the new parts of the building except for the porta cabins is encapsulated asbestos flooring. Safe for the moment, but tough to maintain, and expensive to repair. What’s worse are the classrooms with asbestos flooring with carpeting over them. Tearing up one part of the floor would require removing all the floor. And as the floors are covered with carpet Mike and the team cannot see what’s broken and what isn’t.

Mike showed me one area outside the school where an old steam pipe went from one building to another outside underneath a playground. Holes had appeared in the pipe, reducing and losing heat, but when a steam pipe leaks hot bubbling water eats away at the ground leaving cavities. Mike and his team decided to replace the pipe to avoid risking kids stepping on the playground area above the pipe, causing a collapse, and the danger of a child falling into boiling hot water.

On work orders for the district, we see at a minimum 100+ work orders for reactive maintenance needing to be completed with 11 members of staff. Then we have about 10% of those work orders being addressed by scheduled maintenance. We have one member of staff who works on Scheduled maintenance. To give you an idea, there were about 350 work orders for the new south middle school last year, and now that number is down to 150 or so, though new work orders have been put in place.

Since 2021 his workers and the scheduled maintenance worker have been doing more work orders than used to get taken care of previously, but there’s always more to do, and the team could do more with more resources. Things have improved through the dedication and diligence of Mike’s team, through Mike’s management of the process. Replacing equipment where repair costs and time were taking up too much time from the team. But like that pipe, there’s always more to do, and the school district is in jeopardy of having another pipe, roof fall off.

I’ve long called for a school building assessment, and to a certain extent now that we have the public works department managing the process, we have a better control and understanding of where the issues are, and what needs to be done. We have software that tracks work orders across the district, but until recently those work orders weren’t tracked by school. Mike and his team are so busy working on repairs and maintenance it’s taking time to get the full benefits of the system. Most of the work they do is reactive repair work, only 10% of the work is preventative. If Braintree could increase its percentage of scheduled maintenance, costs would come down overall, and the danger of catastrophe reduced if not removed.

That’s an important point that came across to me in my conversation with Mike, if we cut the maintenance budget, we’ll get more and more behind, and while Mike and his team are a group of real heroes working in the bowels of the earth, and throughout the buildings. Every dollar cut, removes dollars from immediate repair to keep things working, and dollars from the scheduled maintenance budget. The more we cut, the greater the chance we have another disaster.

Our challenge as citizens is to step up like Mike and his team of facilities heroes have, are you willing to meet the challenge? Mike told me he has some of his team take work orders home to work on them. We have a dedicated crew of people in the public works department, they are amazing. Let’s support them as much as we can.