Well, good afternoon, everyone, and happy Monday on this special edition of our fireside chats. I'm Lisa Sterns, and I'm here with Tim Cross, our Senior Vice President. This chat today will be addressing facility preparation on the Knoxville campus primarily, as our students do begin to return to campus. If you reminders, as you all know, be sure to keep your audio muted.
Do check that because it really does help in the conversation and make it able for everyone to hear. Use the chat function on Zoom if you have questions that you'd like to ask, you can post them publicly, or you can send them privately to me as well. A recording of this session will be native posted to the coronavirus website. You can find that at utia.tenacy.edu.
So let's jump right in, Tim. With our students making their return to the Knoxville campus, there are questions involving the safety of our facilities. To answer some of these questions, I understand we have a special guest today. Yeah, that's right.
So thanks very much for taking us off, Lisa, and welcome everyone. It feels a little bit odd to be visiting with you on a Monday, but I thought this was extremely good timing to have this conversation. And I appreciate everyone taking a few minutes to join us this afternoon. We are really fortunate today to have an expert with this.
And I mean that in every sense of the word, we're pleased to have Associate Vice Chancellor Dave Urban with us, who leads our Facilities Services Group. For those of you on campus, you know how important facilities services are to what we do. And for those of you that are off campus, I hope this conversation this afternoon will give you some assurance should you have to visit campus of what practices are in place, what steps have been taken to ensure health and safety for everyone. So I hope everyone benefits from this afternoon's discussion.
You know, this is really the result of a meeting we had last week with our Deans and Department heads. And Dave Urban was kind enough to join us for that meeting and give us a good once-over as to what's been done, what practices are in place. And at the conclusion of that meeting, we all agree, gosh, this is a message we think everyone would really benefit from hearing. So we asked him to come in and do a repeat performance.
And we're really fortunate that Dave was willing to do so. Vice Chancellor Urban has a Bachelor's degree from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Master's degree from Oxford University, previously served as the Plan Operations Director at the University of Houston, and has been serving as our Associate Vice Chancellor for Facility Services since October of 2011. You probably don't realize that the group that has over 700 employees, he's got a big job, a lot of responsibilities, 600 acres worth of buildings to take care of. So we're really pleased to have, as Chancellor Urban with us this afternoon.
So let me just kick off, Dave, if you will, with my first question and let you make a few remarks. So I wonder if you could get us started, if you could share a summary of the changes that have been made to our facilities since COVID-19 really emerged in early March. I'd be glad to, and let me start too by thanking you for the time this afternoon. I know you all have many things to do, and so I'm glad we can have this conversation together.
We've had a great partnership with UTIA over the years. I know that continues, and this summer and this fall is really even more, the case involves helping all of us being teammates together, as we deal with this challenging crisis. Let me walk you through some of the things we have done, and we've done a number of things, both physically as well as changing our maintenance and operations. And in terms of physical changes that you'll see to the campus, when you come back, or you may have noticed for those of you that have been back, there's a number of things we've done, altogether not counting the manpower, the cost of labor, we've spent somewhere between a million and a half to two million dollars on upgrades and changes to the campus, wide range of things.
So for instance, we've added over 260 plexiglass shields across campus, those are primarily in the high volume places, reception areas, dining, those kinds of things. We have another 380 requests that we're working through now, and we'll get to a number of those, perhaps not all of them before classes started, but a number of them early in the semester. The other big job that we did was take a look at all of our spaces. So we looked at all of the instructional spaces, a lot of the common spaces, all together over a thousand different rooms, and in each of those spaces, we did a new layout that showed how we could position furniture in a socially distanced way.
We then went to each of those rooms, and our team with Blue Tape, Painters State on the floor, has marked out where that furniture should go. There's a diagram on the wall for our custodians to know how to reposition that furniture, so we can make sure that it's socially distanced and that the professors have plenty of space between them and the students to help in terms of that protection. We did a lot of other things in terms of signage throughout all of the buildings. Over 31,000 signs and counting, all together about eight and a half miles of material, if you stretched it out from end to end.
So we have signage on the elevators, Virgin Union takes stairs with signage on the entries, including tent things that say you need to wear masks to give you, if you're new to campus, the rules of engagement, if you will. We have signs in the classrooms, we have smokey paws, six feet apart, in a number of corridors and high volume places. You'll also note in a lot of the water fountains, we've gone through and taken a look at those. So if it's just a water fountain, those have all been turned off.
If there's a water fountain and a bottle filler station, we can't turn off one and not the other. So we've left it on, but we've put signage that asks people to not use a water fountain, just use the water filling station. We've done some other things in terms of trying to anticipate what some of the needs are going to be on campus. I know you've all been through academic buildings and you've seen our students next to next to next to each other in a corridor, particularly in between classes, socializing, studying.
Normally we'd love that, but obviously in a COVID situation, that's not what we want. So we've added across campus, including on UTIA, over 12 tents, they range in size from 10 to 10 to 10, 10 to 30, and we've included furniture, they all have Wi-Fi, so it's a place that our students can go, or our faculty and staff can go, that'll be socially separated, and they don't have to be in the corridors. We've also, in the spirit of trying to have at least a little fun, if you can, in this kind of tough situation, we've added 75 hammocks across campus. We were already being told that those are pretty popular, and I'm sure many of our students will like that as an option.
The other thing that we're doing, as we looked at classrooms, there were a number of classrooms that could see a small number when they were normally classrooms, but when you do socially distancing, you can only get two, three, four, five in there, which makes them not really viable for being classrooms. We've made an inventory of all those, we're preparing a map that will be on our campus map, and that you can pull up on the various apps that will show where those rooms are, and that will provide a place for individual students to go when they want to just study, or they have time between classes, or maybe they have a class in person, and then a class online, it gives them a place to go. Same with faculty, so we're doing that as a way to sort of give people other places that they can go, as we work through the situation. We've provided over 1,600 portable hand sanitizers, they're all in a beautiful UT orange, so they're even defined.
Just for the product to initially fill those, we've spent $278,000 just to fill those initially, we will keep those regularly filled. We've also supplied spray bottles and Clorox wipes to all the various departments, and we can continue to fill those for you as you need. The other thing we've tried to do is to look at those high touch points. So we've added or changed out rather, over 450 water faucets across campus, so that they're now touchless faucets.
Haven't had a chance yet to do that in every restroom. We've concentrated on the restrooms that have the most public use, they're on the first floors, they're near classrooms, and so on, so it's just one way to try to make things a little bit better and not have to use a faucet in the normal way. We also took a long answer, so I'm sorry for that, Dr. Cross.
We've also taken a hard look at all of our building systems. And there's mixed research on whether HPC systems, for instance, can spread the virus. I think they're still trying to figure that out. We didn't want to wait to figure out if that was true or not, so we've gone ahead and changed out all the filters on campus to a higher level filter, to MR-13, which is what the CDC, ASHRAE, and all the various industry guides suggest.
And we spent about $320,000 doing that this summer. We'll continue to change those out to make sure that we're filtering out all we can possibly filter out in our HPC systems. And then finally, the other major change we've made is working with the research side, and how do we test? What can we do to try to know or have some precursors that we might have an issue?
And there's a lot of research now that shows, if you look at the wastewater streams and test those, sometimes you can find out that you have someone with COVID, even before that person is asymptomatic and will show up in a test. So we have, with our folks, added over 40 taps across campus so that we can monitor and we are doing that now, the waste flow out of those, we work with KUB to do that. So that if we say something, then we can go in and more closely focus on a particular building, eventually on a particular floor, and get a quicker indication that we might have an issue. So those are the things we've done physically, long answer, but we've been very busy.
Well, great, thanks for that overview. And frankly, I suspect most of us are happy it was a long answer that really reflects that a lot has been done, and that some very proactive exceptional measures have been taken, so really appreciate that overview, Dave. So I think that gives us a good sort of snapshot of physically what's changed or been done on campus, as folks are starting to return in a staggered rotational sense to offices, labs, and classrooms. Then the next thing I get questions about is, oh, great.
So we've got excellent facilities, but what's really important is how they're maintained, right? How they're cleaned at this time. So I wonder if the other side of the equation here is how are we maintaining these facilities? Great question.
You're right. It doesn't do us a lot of good if we take these physical improvements, but we're not doing what we need to on the maintenance side of the house. And I think I mentioned in our call last week that in some ways the COVID crisis is an accelerant to change. Certainly incredibly disruptive, not what anyone of us would want, but it required us as facilities folks to take a hard look at how we maintain buildings.
We were already doing some of that, but to see not only how we do better in a COVID situation, but how do we do better overall? So let me walk through that because we've made some changes there, too, and I think that will help us and provide protection for our campus community. In terms of our building services folks, a number of years ago, about four or five years ago, now we went to a whole new system of product and a whole new system of cleaning, because of COVID, obviously, that wasn't around at the time, but some of our residences were having students that were getting sick. We had some mold issues in a few buildings, and so we said, what can we do to really do a better job of cleaning so we can maybe preclude some of those issues?
We adopted all of those products, and now, fortuitously, the CDC has put out the recommendations of what you should be doing from a cleaning standpoint when you have COVID. It's exactly the kind of product and the procedures we've been using. So our day-to-day processes can take care of COVID, and it's exactly what the CDC and industry suggests that you do for that. What we've also done, though, is made a couple of changes on top of that.
First is we've taken a look at how often we clean, how we position staff, and so we had already started a program of total cleaning where we restricted or changed somewhat what we did with offices, empty or trash every day. Some of you have already been in that program, and we've now rolled that out to the entire campus so that we can take some of that manpower that was used, switching out trash, doing daily cleaning of offices, we still clean you once a week, but we can take that manpower and use it for high touch areas, extra cleaning and elevators, extra cleaning on stairways, on entry stores, extra cleaning in classrooms. The other thing we've done, we've added 30 building services positions, and we've created a new team, a forced shift, if you will. As you probably know, much of our cleaning happened evenings and late night when folks went around, and in our own situation, that's great, and we'll still do that.
But with the COVID situation, we understood that we really needed to, particularly in those high-volume areas in those classrooms and those restrooms that are heavily used, we needed to clean them more than once a day. And so we've added these extra people so they can do that enhanced cleaning. We have, as you know, a little bit longer between class periods. Doesn't mean we can do every classroom after every period, but it does mean that we can now clean classrooms, too, if they're heavily used three times a day, which is something we didn't have the capability to do before, probably should have been doing all along.
So that's a case of transformed new reality, if you will, that I think will serve us even after COVID. The other thing that I might talk about is in a question that's often rises, and what happens when somebody has COVID, when there's a positive test? How do I know you're taking care of us? How do we know it's safe?
What's your protocol in that? And as I said, our normal products, according to the CDC, would take care of that. But we wanted to go to the next level and make sure that we were doubly protecting our folks, the product and the system that, again, the CDC and industry is recommended is something that's called Clorox 360. We added this about two years ago, and so we have 10 machines that can do that.
By the way, because everybody wants to do this now, you can't get those machines. I mean, you can order them, but they won't be in until February. So we've added those, we have those machines in place, and we also now have three teams of volunteers that have that extra training on how to use those systems, that have the whole hazmat gear. And so when we find out that someone has a positive and has been in our buildings, we have a situation, we have a way now to, through the procedures and protocols, to very quickly isolate where does that person been?
What floor is what specific building? And we clean not only those rooms with 360, but we clean anything that would have been in the transportation path of that person. So we clean the corridors, the restrooms, the second floor, the stairs, and the elevators, so that all of those areas have been cleaned with 360 to make sure that we are being doubly safe for our folks serving as an added protection. So we're trying very hard to make sure that we put some things in place, continue to look at what best practices are as industry does additional research, we're reviewing that so we can make sure we're on the cutting edge, because this is obviously a really critical thing.
Yeah, great. Good to hear that actually in a couple of key areas, you all were actually ahead of the curve on this, and that certainly both well for our health and safety. So glad to have you share that with our folks here. Well, Lisa, we've got an opportunity for questions, so let me check in with you and see if we have any.
We actually do, and Dave, you alluded to this, but maybe it could be a little more specific. Someone is asking about if staircase usage is going to be encouraged, how are you wiping down those rails and how often, and just how are you maintaining those public spaces? It really depends a little bit on buildings, so the buildings that are more heavily trafficked, we're doing it more often. We're doing it at least twice a day, having a traffic building, we're trying to do it three or four times a day.
The product that we're using, there's research now that that product actually protects from COVID up to a week, so I think the protocol that we're using is keeping things clean. We'll continue to reexamine that. Let me mention something that we're doing too, because I didn't have a chance, it's really kind of a neat tool that we now have to figure out how we deploy that staff. Because a lot of the question is, well, how do you know what your buildings are being used heavily?
What we now have is a tool we've worked with IT, and we can take cameras and cell phone data, not to track an individual person, that would be a violation of privacy, so we're not doing that, but what we can do is use that data to determine how many people are in a building at any one time, and what's the profile of use in that building. So it allows us for the first time to really position our staff in a way that's most effective. There may be some places where we thought there was going to be really heavy usage, and maybe there is early in the day, but not later in the day, and vice versa. With that tool, we have a much better idea of how the buildings are being used, and we can move staff around to those heavily used areas, and if we find out that there's lots of heavily used areas, which could very well be possible, then we can make the case for additional people to take care of that.
So I'm excited by that tool, and when I talk about a transformational new normal, that's a great example, because even after COVID, that's a wonderful tool to make sure we're servicing folks well. It allows us also to look at the hand sanitizer stations. Do we need to fill those more than once a day, if they're being heavily used? So I think it's a new part of our arsenal that will help us serve all of you much better.
We'll still depend and hope that your eyes and ears will help us and alert us when you see things, but I think this will help us be a little bit more proactive. So in talking about very large public spaces, someone is asking, how will you clean Nailand Stadium prior to the game? Well, great question. The good thing is that Nailand is outdoors, and typically you're not having more than one game a week, and the research shows that even if you have the virus, it dies within a period of time if it's on a surface.
And so from week to week, particularly the bowl, the outside piece, would be if there was some of that had a virus or there was a virus in the area, letting it sit for that amount of time would take care of that in terms of the exterior. In terms of the interior, the protocol there will be very similar what we do in our normal academic buildings. We'll do a complete cleaning during the game. We will, we've already figured out our staffing to do things differently.
So we'll have more staff in the building, in the restrooms, doing continuous cleaning. Typically, we didn't do continuous cleaning during the game. We cleaned before, we made clean just before half, I mean, just after half. But now we'll be able to clean those railings and entries, the restrooms throughout the game, which is only when there's the most potential issue for someone.
And then after the game, we would do a complete clean. We don't need to do the 360 unless we find out that there's someone who is positive in the stadium, and then obviously we would do that same 360 like we would for, for a normal, any other normal building. Okay, we have a question. We're, someone read an article about bacteria caused by standing water in unused buildings, causing potentially legionnaires disease.
Has there been anything done specifically to disinfect the bathrooms that obviously may not have been used for several months? Great question. Thank you. My, my zone maintenance people, we thrills you ask that question.
Yes, the short answer is yes. We, our protocol is that weekly, every, all of our zone maintenance people and who's ever assigned to the custodial people separately, each week go through, flush all the toilets, run all the water, do all, you know, use all of the fixtures in the, in all of the restrooms, including those that may have been, not had any use during the, during that summer or limited use. So we do that on a weekly basis. And again, we have two different teams doing that.
Not the real trust either of them, but that we make sure that something doesn't switch into cracks. Very good. Another question is sort of some advice, I guess, for those of us that do return to our offices. Is it a good practice to open our windows for better ventilation?
So this person is concerned about COVID-19 in the office air now that we've got more people coming back to campus. That's a really great question and a little bit difficult. I think the short answer is probably not because the cleaning that we do, again, the product we're using is good for at least a week, probably a month. And particularly here in the south, and particularly here in August, September, opening the windows actually causes more problems.
We get more mold and other issues in the building that are actually that actually are worse. And you don't really help much in terms of COVID. All of our buildings where we have gone through and looked at the buildings HVAC systems to increase the amount of air flow air exchanges per hour, even in our older buildings. And so we, so we think that that increased air chains per hour will take care of the very real question that this person's asking.
So I don't think you'll need to open the windows. I think the other things we've done that filters be increasing the air changes per hour with the mechanical system will take care of the COVID, and you won't have the mold issue that we'd have if you open windows. So thinking about classrooms, this person asks, are new room occupancy numbers physically posted outside of classroom and meeting room doorways? They're supposed to be, I don't know if they're all up yet.
So I'm not going to say that they're all there, but they are supposed to be posted along with a diagram on the inside that shows how many people are supposed to be there along with where the furniture is supposed to go. Okay. And someone's asking for clarification on the cleaning product that protects against COVID for a week? Yeah, it's our normal cleaning product.
Again, we've been using it for three or four years now, and we bought it or we went to it because it protected against other viruses and like flu and things like that, some more serious diseases. And it's, again, it's shown that it has that that ability. The research on COVID is still preliminary, I guess I would say. You know, as you would guess, we're learning more about the disease every week.
And so it's not been certified by the CDC or FDA, but it is what CDC is recommending, and the research shows that the research has been done, shows that it's effective at least for seven days and probably longer in terms of COVID. Very good. We'll give you a chance to rest for one second here, Dave, and this one's for Dr. Cross.
If we should be seeing improper COVID-related behavior in the classroom or the hallways or any on campus settings, for instance, not wearing masks or not social distancing, how should we proceed? What should we do? Yeah, great question. I would just refer it to Vice Chancellor Urban here.
That's such an easy question to answer. You know, I think first of all, we do want to encourage certainly everyone to do those proper behaviors that we keep talking about week after week. I think that, you know, the right thing to do may vary a little bit, depending on the situation. I believe if it's in the classroom and you're the faculty instructor in the classroom, someone comes in without a mask, you should have some spare masks with you and you should invite them to put on a mask.
And if they refuse, I think you can invite them to leave and access the course material in some other way. I think we want to do it in as positive a way as possible. Remember, these are our customers, right? They're our clients, so we want to maintain a good student success approach and attitude here, but we also want to respect one another and expect them to respect one another as well.
So in the classroom is maybe a little more straightforward. In hallways, I think, you know, again, it may depend on who that individual is to some extent. And I think, again, approaching it from an attitude of encouragement and offering what the positive behavior is as opposed to threatening arrest due to a PPE violation, you know, we want to try to incentivize proper and positive behavior. And so I think if it seems to be an employee, I would visit with the supervisor about that as opposed to confronting someone.
We can do that through our supervisory channels, I think, more effectively. And I think the other thing that we are doing as a campus and university is approaching this through a really intensive social media campaign to encourage everyone to wear a mask to engage in all these behaviors that we've talked about, washing hands, keeping socially distant, but in particular wearing a mask. So I think hopefully we'll have enough motivation and peer pressure out there that those who aren't doing those behaviors are going to be the ones that stand out. And I know I was across campus for a meeting today.
As I went over and back, I noticed every person I encountered had a mask on. Now, we're not back to all 29,000 students yet. We don't have everyone back on campus. But it struck me that everyone I saw was wearing a mask that's been communicated frequently already to students.
And that's going to be the expectation. So I think we've all got to communicate that. We've all got to stick together. And of course, we all have to model that behavior ourselves.
I hope that provides a little bit of guidance and gives an approach as we encounter individuals that maybe aren't doing what we believe would be in all of our best interests. Great. So, Dave, there's a question on the hand sanitizer's stations. And the question is, why are they not touchless?
Right. For a very simple reason, we couldn't get touchless ones. So, and we will continue look, but we could get the ones that are out there now and we had to get in a large quantity. So we thought it made more sense to get them out there rather than wait and say, well, they're coming and they'll be here in December.
So it was simply a supply chain question. I understood. And speaking of which, the question is, how do we get replacement PPE supplies from your department? I believe there's a form for doing that.
I'm trying to remember what website it's on, but to make it easy, you can always just call our helpline, our normal 24-7 helpline. They'll take the message and make sure that it gets to the right people. So, if you can't find it on the website in terms of the actual form, that's probably the easiest way to do it. Okay.
Let me offer plans B&C for that as well. Thanks for sharing the direct line, Dave. And I think another option would be let your department head or business manager know because they have that information in terms of acquiring additional supplies. And plan C is let Joe Kegel know because he's got a good network in can interface with our facilities folks and help to address any problems as well.
So, all kinds of options to make sure we keep things stocked and cleaned and safe for everyone. So, Dave, everybody here at the Institute of Ag loves our 11 maples dining facility. And there's a question and you may have to answer this, but perhaps if you know if a win is win, well, maples reopen. And then the bigger picture, Dave, is how do you keep these dining facilities clean?
Because there is a lot of traffic, obviously, that would come through many of the facilities on campus. No, it's Dr. Cross wants to answer the opening question first. I'll be glad to hear and unfortunately that answer is I don't know, but let me check on that one.
That's one I haven't thought about since mid-March, so I need to determine. I know, of course, with students coming back that the dining services has to ramp up and be available, but also know the focus is going to be on packaged or boxed meals as opposed to in service dining. So, I'll find out what the plan is for maples and sorry, I don't already have that. If there's anyone on who knows the answer to that, I welcome a lifeline here on this.
Otherwise, I'll follow up. I do think Billy Williams said he heard next week. That would make sense because our students, of course, start classes next week. So, that would be my supposition, but I think we need to check with Jeff Maples to make sure.
Yep, I'll do that. All right, so I'll let you take the other part of that. So in terms of cleaning a couple of things, first, dining is all the dining facilities are some of the places where we have done quite a bit of Plexiglas to separate the servers and the cash shares from the clients. We also will have a number of hand sanitizer stations in dining.
We will, right now we're planning on cleaning all the dining facilities twice a day. I don't know if we'll be able to do it more often than that, but that should be sufficient with all the other tools that we're using, but it's obviously something that we're concerned about. We'll continue on there. And someone's also asking, will outboard dining be encouraged or set up?
It will. The tents obviously will be available for that, but yes, I mean, we certainly would encourage folks to dine outside. We all know it's safer outside. And we, all the dining facilities have also been set up with social distancing like most restaurants.
So they'll accommodate much fewer folks. I should note that there is an app now so that you can make a reservation for dining. And I don't have that with me. We can certainly get you that link or Jeff Maples or Aramark and get you that link.
So they're trying to accommodate folks and spread out that usage a little bit so we don't have those same kind of issues. But as Dr. Cross indicated, they're going to do a lot of grab and go kinds of things in hopes that folks will take them outside or take them to the hammock or somewhere so that they can deal with the amount of folks that need dining because we obviously are going to have to do it in a much different way. And this is probably getting a little more into food services, but do you know that guidelines will be provided to, for instance, caters who might be going into off campus locations?
Yes, absolutely. Yes. They've been presented with the same guidelines in terms of protocols, wearing masks, how they prepare food, how they serve, all those things that they've been presented with. And they're required to be the same kind of protocols as we went with our on campus Aramark folks.
They've all indicated that they will do that. We also, and we hope that that collaborative cooperation will continue, but there's also the hammer. If they do not do that, then they will not be serving on campus anymore. So they understand that.
And so far they've all been very, very cooperative. That's great. Well, here's one that is a non-COVID question for you, Dave. And that is, have you all had a chance to finish the fire door installation in Morgan Hall?
I know, I think we have. I know we're very close on Morgan. I haven't had a chance the last two weeks ago over there. I knew we were very close.
We were trying to have that finish before classes started. So I think so. I always hesitate if I haven't laid my eyes on it, but I know that our intent was to have that all finished before classes started next week. Great.
I'm fairly certain it's finished on the first floor. I haven't walked upstairs the last couple of weeks. So I'm not certain. Okay, Gold, you know, if the project's complete here in Morgan?
You know, so working on that, they get an opportunity. Were they working where they've been social distancing and all the other projects, they stood them off for this for a while, but they're still continuing to work on that and they've still helped materials order. Great. Thanks.
I think the majority of the larger portions of that project are done. I think the doors are supposed to be getting the finishing. They're going to be doing some finishing stuff like that to go and continue to get that done where they plan to put the new dollars in and repair the floors and stuff like that. And the fire marshall has signed off on the on the actual fire door.
So we have that final approval. So as Joe said, it's finishing all the finishing works that's associated with the project. And Dave, we've actually had several people hoping to get the information on the week home COVID production products. So maybe if you can share that with us, that would be we will audition that specific thing.
I might mention too that and we'll add it to the document. If you go to our website, we have a COVID link and there are two two memos, one deals with what we're doing in terms of building services and custodial, the other deals with what we're doing with HPC and zone maintenance and building systems. And that will give you quite a bit of additional information. Then next week, there'll be a larger document, not a technical, but it will give you some of the chapter and verse of numbers that I know how many shields and how many signs and all those kinds of things.
So if you want that or want to refer to that or forward on to people, that document will be there next week. Again, on our website, they'll give a lot more information. But in terms of the product, we will get that product. What I'll do is make sure that we add that to the memo that's on our site.
And then I'll send you all the link. Great. That'd be wonderful. So that's the end of questions.
We do have a couple shout outs to you. Thanks for the hot water and plant biotec. And then just generally, a number of people just saying thank you so much for what all your group is going to help keep these facilities clean during the pandemic. Well, and as I started with, we greatly appreciate your all help.
We've had a great relationship with UTIA and with each of you. And we really want that to continue. Please don't hesitate. If you see something that's not right or there's something that we didn't do, we want to know there's a lot more eyes and ears for you than there are us.
Hopefully we're catching them. But please let us know where we can serve, not just in COVID, but anything in facilities. We're anxious to make sure we're supporting your mission and supporting faculty and staff fully. So please let us know how we can do better.
Great. Tim, do you have any final thoughts? Oh, of course, I always got a few last words. But most importantly, let me thank Associate Vice Chancellor Urban for joining us this afternoon, giving up almost an hour his time again this week.
And he already gave up time last week for us. We appreciate partnership and really appreciate your willingness to visit with us today. I hope that the information is helpful to everyone. To me, it's quite amazing what has been done and what is being done in the interest of health and safety.
So really, really appreciate it. And I neglected to say it was stark, but really there's two groups I'm aware of on campus that have really never left, maybe scaled back for a period of time, but really never closed down, if you will. One of those groups is facility services. They've been here throughout the pandemic, taking care of our facilities, taking care of the buildings, the grounds, our inside facilities as well, making all these changes.
So really appreciate that. And it reminds me also, of course, of our College of Veterinary Medicine that's continued to work and serve clients and meet emergency and critical care needs and now really scaling back up to conduct student education as well. So those two groups, I think really provide a great example to the rest of us that if we do things wisely, if we do things properly, we can achieve our mission, achieve our jobs and do so while remaining healthy at the same time. And thanks to Dave and his crew, they're making it safe for the rest of us as well.
So I'm going to wrap up right there. I encourage all of you to join us again Friday for another fireside chat. So we'll have a completely different topic. I'll have an update on the week now that we're scaling back up again, let you know where we stand and we'll look forward to visiting with you on Friday afternoon.
That's it for me, Lisa. Great. And thank you both and see everyone on Friday. That was good.