To organize and streamline this effort, the University teamed with Lord, Aeck & Sargent, an Atlanta-based architectural firm that had designed a number of the campus’ animal research facilities, to create a campus-wide master plan solely for animal facilities.

“The new building let us look at decompressing some of the facilities that had become packed full of animals over the years, as well as taking certain facilities off line,” says Bob Marriott, associate dean of planning, resource analysis, and management at UNC’s School of Medicine. “Without the swing space, most of that wouldn’t have been possible.”

In addition to the expected benefits of such a plan, the master planning effort yielded other, unexpected benefits—benefits highly relevant to any institution hosting multiple animal facilities.

Tools for Assessing Current Conditions

Among the planning team’s first undertakings was a detailed analysis of the 13 buildings containing vivaria. The study encompassed only the vivarium components of each building, examining the HVAC and other building systems supporting the vivaria as well as the physical structures. Separate walk-throughs with representatives of the University’s Department of Laboratory Animal Medicine and with facilities management staff effectively elicited the distinct perspectives of these groups.

Assessing the facilities meant devising a standardized approach.

“Because not everyone would agree on the status and condition of these buildings, we needed a methodology everyone could buy into,” says Jerry Percifield, principal at Lord, Aeck & Sargent. “We spent a lot of time coming up with a comprehensive scorecard.”

The scorecard tracked physical attributes such as walls, roof, circulation, accessibility, environmental health and safety, and room types; engineering elements such as mechanical, plumbing, fire protection, electrical, life safety, and security systems; equipment such as washers and autoclaves; and opportunities for facility expansion.

The team also had to devise a standardized approach for summarizing and communicating the information.

“We came up with a number of documents to present the information back to the facilities staff and to management,” says Percifield. “We provided a higher-level evaluation of the buildings so that they didn’t have to read everything about roof systems, walls, or HVAC.”

Projects were classified as Level A, needing replacement or major renovation; Level B, needing modest levels of investment; or Level C, functioning well and requiring no investment.

The team performed a room-by-room analysis of each UNC animal facility and evaluated the efficiency of each space via numerous metrics, including cage count, animals per square foot, animals per principal investigator, animals per grant dollar, square footage devoted to animal holding and other support functions, and per diem rates, as well as net and gross square footage.

Benchmarking, another standard master-planning technique, was also attempted by the team, who contacted peer institutions to obtain animal-facilities data. Unfortunately, although information was forthcoming, overarching conclusions weren’t.

“We were hoping to find some trends, some correlations, between animal square footage and grant dollars and research,” says Percifield. “We couldn’t find any correlation.”

However, because the sample size may have been too small, and because finding any such correlation would be of great benefit to managers of animal facilities, Percifield and Marriott are continuing to broaden the dataset, inviting other interested institutions to provide data on their animal facilities; findings will be shared with all participants. (To participate in this study, contact Percifield or Marriott via the contact information accompanying this article.)

Tools for Assessing Future Directions

A central objective of most master plans is to advance the mission of the sponsoring institution. When the institutional mission isn’t clearly articulated, defining specific planning goals is more difficult. This was the case at UNC. No one on the planning team, which included department chairs, investigators, and administrators, could articulate the University’s mission.

“The investigators are focused on where their funding is coming from next year, and the administrators are focused on where NIH will be directing its grant money next,” says Marriott. “The number of people who actually think about the strengths of the institution as a whole and how to build on those strengths in the future is relatively small among users of animal facilities.

“However, if the University wants to double its grant funding, that has a tremendous impact on labs and animal facilities,” he explains. “If you want to recruit 30 more principal investigators, that has an impact. We didn’t get those bottom-line numbers to drive this master plan.”

Facilities needs and priorities, however, were more forthcoming. Among the priorities identified by the team were maintenance or lowering of per diem rates by improving operational efficiency, automating repetitive processes, and centralizing operations; addition of new holding rooms and modification of existing holding rooms to accommodate multiple animal species; and increasing the animal holding capacity by building new facilities and increasing efficiency and density of existing facilities.

A needs assessment calculated growth rates for the number of different laboratory animals on campus and projected three-year and eight-year facilities needs (for years 2010 and 2015).

“We spent many, many meetings discussing what the annual growth percentages would be,” says Marriott.

Immediate needs, due to “pent-up growth,” were also calculated.

“Crowded conditions in the vivaria had kept the University from fully accommodating certain researchers’ needs,” says Marriott, “so construction of the new genetic medicine building would allow us to fill these needs immediately. Another immediate need we identified was that because of two new researchers, we were going to need to increase the canine census by 200 percent and the swine census by 100 percent.”

“We also found that there were certain other species whose numbers would not be growing at all in the coming years,” says Percifield.

Space allocation recommendations were made based on all of these projections—with a caveat.

“The master plan is a living document,” Percifield says. “If the University decides to expand its research focus, all of these numbers will have to be revisited.”

Facilities projects were then classified according to urgency and arranged in an implementation plan, with a timeline depicting when projects would occur, how much space they would provide, and how much they would cost.

Awareness: A Bonus Benefit

In addition to providing a much-needed assessment of current animal research facilities to enable space allocation and other planning, another benefit of the animal research master plan was the powerful justification it provided for capital recruitment and capital request programs.

“The study really helped us get some direction,” says Marriott. “Animal facilities staff tend to wring their hands and claim they don’t have enough money or space. This planning process enabled us to put animal-care issues in front of the University’s decision-makers.

“Our hope was that we could get funding for at least one more animal project to proceed. It’s been much better than that. We received funding to design a new animal surgery facility and to convert one of the 1975-era mouse facilities to animal surgery. We also received approval for a second dog facility and a medical services facility to support those dogs. That’s three additional facilities.”

In addition, the master plan has spurred adoption of a campus-wide policy requiring departments to fund animal facilities commensurate with their anticipated animal research participation.

“This means that it won’t be possible for the School of Public Health, for example, to close its outdated animal facility and expect to just be able to use the School of Medicine’s animal facilities,” says Marriott.

Because such fairness in animal facilities funding would not be possible without the information brought to light by the animal facilities master plan, Marriott feels the planning effort has paid for itself many times over.

“You can’t assume that the facilities planning department coordinates these things. With this awareness that the master plan brought about, departments won’t be able to pass the buck anymore. Awareness is everything.”

By Deborah Kreuze

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