This past July marked the one year anniversary of Aramark Facilities Management starting its contract on campus at EMU. As the new academic year gets underway a little over a year later, things have definitely changed from those initial months after the transition. Last year the Weather Vane published extensively about the transition from the in-house EMU Facilities Management team to the third party contractor, Aramark, all of which can be found online at theweathervane.org. After this past year of adjustment, the Aramark team have all settled into their roles here after getting familiarized with campus operations.
“The start of this semester was much smoother from last year,” shared Director of Facilities Management David Robey. “Having a year of experience and a level of expectations did make things more organized with better outcomes.” An Aramark employee himself, Robey started his time at EMU shortly after the start of the ‘24-’25 academic year. His arrival to campus marked the start of building the Aramark team that is here today. Robey notes, “as we all know, it starts with the people. While still experiencing some turnover, I felt we built a more cohesive team with existing staff and new hires.”
Although Robey has built a cohesive team that has been more effective at dealing with issues that arise on campus, there have still been some concerns from students. Logan Darrow, a senior center back on the EMU men’s soccer team, commented on what it was like for him and his roommates to move into Hillside Apartments for their week of preseason before the start of school. “We came to school with our AC not working, with the temperature getting into the 80’s throughout the day. My coach and father got in contact with Allen [Clay Jr.], who said they have been waiting on parts to fix the AC.” Clay Jr. is the new Associate Dean of Campus Life, who entered the position after former Director for Campus Life, Scott Eyre, left at the end of the past school year.
“I think an earlier review of… the housing… conditions and maybe having preemptive… parts ahead of issues to be able to fix them quickly” is a possible solution Darrow offers. As an interim solution, the facilities crew put window air conditioning units in each bedroom in Darrow’s apartment, but the parts have yet to come in to fix their main closet unit. This is the second year in a row that the Hillside has had significant issues with air conditioning units at the start of the year, a problem that faculty and students in Roselawn and the library have also had to deal with for the past few weeks.
Community Advisors (CA’s) from Maplewood have also had to file their share of work orders since the start of the school year, but have had varying experiences in terms of how the facilities crew has processed them. Sophomore CA Bennett de Tenley writes that “work orders getting fulfilled has been very inconsistent so far, like some have been getting completed within a day or two while others have had requests on them for over a month now and still have not been properly addressed.” Another sophomore CA, Shawna Hurst, shared that “I only had to submit a couple at the very beginning of the semester and they were all taken care of by the next day.” These varying response times on behalf of the facilities team could be chalked up to waiting on parts to come in if something needs to be fixed, but asking your CA to check in on the order after a couple of days could yield faster results.
