By MARTY LEVINE
Retired 30-year Navy veteran Scott Bernotas became Pitt’s vice chancellor of facilities management after doing essentially the same job at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., but says that, “aside from the Naval Academy” itself, there was “nothing as grand as the University of Pittsburgh” when it comes to buildings he has watched over.
COMING UP
The next Staff Council Coffee and Conversation, with Carl Lawson, associate vice chancellor for diversity, equity and inclusion, Health Sciences, will be from 11:30 a.m. to noon Aug. 14 in 501 Cathedral of Learning.
As Bernotas explained at the latest Staff Council Coffee and Conversation event on July 17, he followed in his father’s footsteps in choosing a civil engineering career. He picked the facilities management track in the Navy (as opposed to building new bases or becoming a combat engineer) because Annapolis (founded in 1845) and other such places house “historic monuments, and you get to be a caretaker for however long you’re there. That just appealed to me.”
Today, on the job at Pitt, “it’s never the same, any day. One day it’s a water leak, the next day there’s a strike, the next day there’s a building issue, so it’s just always kept my interest. Next week will be my 10th year here.”
What was best about the Navy? asked moderator Sam Young of Staff Council.
“I literally got to fly around the entire globe, so that was pretty exciting,” he said. “To live in Italy for two years was the highlight, probably, and then … at the Naval Academy, as their senior public works person, you get to live on Academy grounds.
“Pittsburgh was my first interview,” added Bernotas, a San Diego native. “My wife is East Coast, and so we agreed we wanted to stay on the East Coast. I printed out all the job opportunities across campuses, and she said, well, what about Pittsburgh? I said, I don’t know — I’ve never thought about it. Next thing we know, I stayed. It’s a great job with a great team, so it’s easy.”
During the event at the Cathedral of Learning, Bernotas was asked about his proudest accomplishment on the job so far: “Over the last 10 years I’ve shifted to a focus on how do we best preserve these assets that we have, because they’re not getting younger. A lot of them, like this one, are just about 100 years old, and so (there has been) tons of work by the team to make very rigorous and thoughtful evaluations how we can spend the limited resources that we get to maximize.”
He stopped to recall the “number of times where you’re at some crisis and the guys and gals are there — they’re turning wrenches, they’re plowing streets in sub-freezing weather conditions that none of us would normally go out in. …There just hasn’t been anything that they haven’t been able to tackle.”
Reviewing how he has made the facilities maintenance office function better over the last decade, Bernotas added: “We’ve instituted a computerized maintenance management system. We started out with pen and paper and carbon copies, and we made that transition in 2017 into 2018. … Our facilities managers that are in every building, they identify issues, they bring them back and we started implementing a five-year, long-range maintenance plan. It tries to identify what all the issues are, which ones we can wait on, which ones we really can’t wait on, and then every year we make the pitch of, hey, these are your priorities. … We’ve seen the condition of our facilities improve.
“Another key element that we started doing in 2016 is a campus-wide condition assessment on a recurring program.”
The toughest part of his job, he said, is “just balancing it all. … We’re resource constrained like everybody else, and so we have a lot of great ideas, some of which we are able to find a way to make work, but a lot we aren’t. Just juggling those priorities, figuring out what has to happen, what should happen and then what we would like to have happen. … One-hundred and forty-one buildings, 11 million square feet, how do you keep it all” maintained properly?
He credits his management style to the Navy: “I try to make sure that I surround myself with really sharp people. … I might have a better idea once in a while and I’ll throw it out on the table and we’ll agree on what’s the best way forward. I like to have an open-door policy, which was something new, I guess, when I got here. The former executive assistant said, ‘You can’t leave your door open — people will just walk in.’ That’s OK. I like it. People walk in. I think some people need to vent and they know that they can come in and they know that they can vent to me and I’ll get past it — we’ll work it out.
“If anybody were to come to spend the day in facilities management,” Bernotas continued, “you would see everybody in that building (moving) just from one thing to the next, one thing to the next — they’re focused, incredibly smart.”
He is happy that his department has now gotten a senior manager for utilities and energy to continue and complete the campus’s stormwater capture and reuse project.
And he is also happy that Pittsburgh turned out to be the sort of place he and his wife thought it would be: “It’s a super-livable city. It’s kind of small but it’s a big city. It’s cheap. … I would say since we got here my daughter said she’s never leaving, so that kind of helps.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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