Finance Division Q1 Quarterly Report

Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of Operations Andrea DooleyDear faculty and staff,

I hope you all had a fantastic summer! Our division has been buzzing with activity throughout these past few months and successes were many. Some achievements are visible to all such as the transformation of Stewart and Odell residence halls while in other areas the mark of success is the quiet passing of key milestones. While the completion of large capital projects is worthy of much celebration, I’m reminded that success in much of our work is defined by the things that go unnoticed. We prevent, we maintain, we support, we improve, we report… Thank you for all of your work, big and small, regular duties and special projects. Below, you’ll find updates from across the division.

Best,

Andrea Dooley

Facilities

Facilities is celebrating an outstanding summer of hard work and the completion of a host of important maintenance and capital projects. Over 2,200 work orders were completed by our trades staff over the summer months, and we logged more than 4,200 hours of painting alone, covering a half million square feet of wall! Important gains in compiling our asset inventory and equipment information details into our maintenance management software were achieved, and it’s exciting to be able to see into our buildings like never before. We expect to be able to respond to building issues faster, and deliver more efficient corrections with this newly gained visibility into building systems and their equipment relationships.

Comings & Goings

We are glad to have two new members on our Grounds team, Greg Dyrek and Dylan Carlson. Both come with a great background in groundskeeping and have quickly begun picking up important work to prepare us for the fall. The Buildings team has two new maintenance staff members, Jason De la Cour and Adam Mortensen. We are excited to have them on board with their depth of experience in the skilled building trades. The Conference and Events team is complete with the addition of Keri Erving, who fills the final assistant director of Conference and Events position. Keri has added tremendous value with her events management skill set and we expect to develop a significant summer 2024 C&E program. With all these important new staff people now on board, Facilities is firing on all cylinders!

Capital Projects

The Stephanie Fowler Student Center electrical system cutover was completed flawlessly, marking the last major milestone, and final completion. While there are always some final details on fit and finish, and tweaking the custom building systems, the project is now considered complete. A big thank you to the L&C community for their patience, support, and understanding, as we completed such a large and important project while the building remained occupied.

Stewart and Odell residence hall renovations were completed on schedule, and students are in the new spaces for the fall semester. This was a huge achievement, accomplished by a great construction team of Contractors, Architects, Facilities staff, and Campus Living staff, who overcame every challenge thrown their way. The Campus Living office in the Odell Annex is also on schedule and will be open on October 16.

The Huston Sports Complex got an early start when permitting was released earlier than estimated. Our contractor was able to jump onto the project and has been moving full steam ahead. As often happens with dirt projects we discovered a few mysteries with soil conditions and buried things from the past, but the project is on schedule for an early February delivery, and we’re excited to make the new fields a reality for the spring sports seasons.

The athletics training room and locker room remodel was completed over the summer. The new training room is larger, with more benches for treatment, and offices to support the staff. Women’s locker rooms were also added, while modifying the swim lockers, for a huge improvement in athletics service delivery.

Grad Commons reached a number of important milestones and is open for all to enjoy. We will make some additional improvements to add additional access and modify some drainage grading over the remainder of the year.

South Chapel envelope repairs are in full swing to repoint and seal the brick exterior. The roofing for the building was completed this spring, and only the window replacement remains to achieve a new weathertight structure. This work will continue into next summer.

Law School Improvements project has delivered the new moot courtroom, a first for the law school and a tremendous addition to their program. Additionally, a remodeled classroom, remodeled library work area including the reference desk, new library offices, and a host of other improvements across three buildings. Some additional work in the Wood Hall Lounge with new carpet and furniture is in the works for this winter to cap off the improvements.

Roofing Projects

Hartzfeld roof has been replaced and is ready to serve for another 30 years.

South Chapel roof trough replacement was completed.

Watzek Roof and downspout work was completed

Evans breezeway rework was completed, and the Bodine and Biopsych exterior beams will be removed with new lighting and cobbles over winter break.

Sustainability

Phew! What an exciting and jam-packed summer! The Sustainability Office staff and students were busy with grants, operational initiatives, and several curricular and co-curricular activities.

Education and Community Engagement

It was a summer of firsts in the Sustainability Office with a new Climate Leadership Workshop held on campus, funded by the NW5 Consortium Community Engagement Grant. The workshop brought together college and high school students from communities throughout Oregon and Washington to train, plan, and engage in community-based climate justice work. The program was delivered in partnership with the University of Puget Sound, Portland Public Schools educators, local environmental justice facilitators, and Lewis & Clark faculty and staff. Our hope is to offer this event again in the future, possibly rotating the campus host across our NW5 partners.

The NW5 Consortium Community Engagement grant is open to faculty and staff with project ideas that engage the community and the humanities. Please see the request for proposals for more information.

In addition to the Climate Workshop, Sustainability Director Amy Dvorak taught the Bates Center Sustainability Internship summer course. The course includes hands-on training for students prior to beginning sustainability-oriented internships with organizations in Portland and beyond. Check out a few of our student experiences here! This course also featured guest lectures by a number of L&C employees, graciously sharing their expertise with our interns. A big thank you to Helen Howell, Jaime Cale, Read McFaddin, Devan Freeman, Meredith Goddard, Aimee Milne, Elizabeth Young, and Jordan Latt!

New Student Activities

This year Amy, with the help of four awesome student leaders, led a sustainability-focused new student trip to the Gorge. In addition to enjoying the beautiful outdoor venues that the Gorge has to offer, we were also able to visit several alumni-owned businesses.

Climate Action Plan Progress

We continue to work on our climate action plan which includes advancing our energy efficiency programs and tracking a number of legislative initiatives and public funding opportunities. We applied to various funding sources this summer, including successfully obtaining an in-kind grant from the Oregon Alliance for Independent Colleges and Universities Coalition as part of their Energy Sustainability Launch program. Beginning in September, the Sustainability Office will be hosting an Americorps member through the Confluence Environmental Center who will focus on Energy and Climate programming. 

Recognition

The Sustainability Council is thrilled to announce that Professor of Law Amy Bushaw is the newest recipient of the Evan T. Williams Sustainability Prize, honoring individuals for outstanding contributions to sustainability within the Lewis & Clark community. The award will be formally presented to Amy in October.

Fall Events

Join us for the Sustainability in Portland networking annual event in October. Stay tuned for details! 

Business Office and Student Accounts

Comings & Goings

In July, Student and Departmental Account Services welcomed Amanda Aldridge and Katie McMeen to the department as Student Account Specialists.

Business Office

The Business Office completed the final audit fieldwork during the month of July and has closed the GL for FY23. Annual financial statements are being finalized for acceptance by the College’s Audit Committee in October. The past few months have also been spent assessing software options for improving our Accounts Payable, Employee Expense, and Purchasing Card Management processes. Multiple products have been evaluated, and we hope to be moving forward with the implementation process in the coming months.

Financial Planning and Analysis

Summer is a busy time for the office of Financial Planning and Analysis. May 31 marked the end of the fiscal year (FY23) and time to analyze how we performed relative to expectations. The institution will report strong operating results for the 2022-2023 year with solid enrollment, increased revenue, and good expense control. We anticipate 2023-2024 to be more challenging at all three schools with enrollment and revenue coming in below budget. We have been working with Deans and VPs throughout the summer to identify targeted budget adjustments that will offset the revenue shortfall. As we review FY23 results and preliminary FY24 data, we are beginning to build assumptions for the FY25 operating budget.

Information Technology

Educational Technologies

The Educational Technology team made progress on several projects aimed at improving and refreshing educational technology in teaching spaces and common areas at the Graduate School and the Community Counseling Center. This included critical maintenance to ensure existing AV racks, equipment, and projectors stay in good working order and streamlining bring-your-own-device (BYOD) connectivity for both faculty and students by equipping classrooms with tethered HDMI cables featuring USB-C adapters. At the Community Counseling Center, EdTech collaborated with Institutional Operations to update, rebuild, refresh, and train CCC staff on technology critical to ensuring appropriate supervision for in-person counseling appointments after a nearly two-year hiatus.

We took advantage of a quiet CAS campus to install frames on the first floor of Watzek Library to display the R Lab Photo contest winner photos. We worked closely with Watzek Library and Facilities on this effort. Other projects accomplished during the summer break included collaborating with the Art Department’s Digital Media program to expand access to computers capable of supporting academic use of cutting edge image generating AI tools such as Stable Diffusion, upgrading our Learning Management System to Moodle 4.2, and collaborating with the Office of Student Accessibility to deploy a new accessible document conversion application, SensusAccess.

We wrapped up the quarter with outreach and onboarding events for new faculty and students. We held a Moodle Crash Course Workshop for new faculty, held drop-in hours, and helped facilitate ChatGPT Experiential Workshops at the CAS Faculty Retreat. We presented during NSO information sessions and hosted tables at the Academic Fair and department-based NSO events at the Graduate School. Finally, we offered substantial support for the Graduate School’s Hybrid Convocation.

Enterprise Applications

The Enterprise Applications (EA) team has been working closely with Ricoh to coordinate the IT component of the Qtrak implementation. This will support the Mail Room and allow them to provide better mail service for L&C community members. They have also been working with staff to help them meet Google storage quotas, and have created and facilitated training for a number of departmental Shared Drives. They continue to support and improve institutional use of Salesforce, particularly focusing on process improvement for the Graduate School’s Partnership and Placement work for their students’ internships and field placements.

The EA team started 1:1 meetings with departments across campus that use third-party email platforms as part of an institutional email security and authenticity initiative. In addition, the EA team has begun its 1:1 annual software/system health check meetings with application administrators.

Led by the EA team, the Application Administrators group has begun to meet monthly in order to facilitate defining the duties and responsibilities of the variety of application administrators throughout the institution and to help provide best practices, documentation templates (in association with the Institutional Data Standards Council) and a community of support.

Operations

Advanced features were implemented in our data center backup solution to assist in boldening our posture in regard to cyber security. In July, the team engaged with a vendor to assist with the implementation of Freshservice, our new IT service management solution, preparing it for rollout to the IT staff in early Q3.

The team supported the implementation of new digital signs in Fowler installed general announcement boards and worked with Athletics to get Griswold up and running after construction for the first athletic practices of the school year.

Information Security

The ISO’s office has been busy adding tools and practices to strengthen our security posture. Efforts launched this summer include: 

Multi-factor authentication for remote access: This is an additional layer of security for VPN/remote access for those needing access to applications or services only available inside our network. Many of these applications and services house sensitive or important data. The IT Services Desk will manage requests for VPN/remote access.

Email filtering and web security: We have adopted Google’s built-in capability to scan attachments in a “sandbox” before delivering them to your inbox.

Endpoint detection and response and Security Operations Center: We deployed endpoint detection on every L&C-owned computer and server. It monitors activity in our computing environments in real-time and prevents known malicious behavior from occurring. It also sends a log of threatening activity to a Security Operations Center (SOC).

New account creation process: We have added a layer of security to our account creation process that involves multiple checks on the authenticity of new users.

For a more extensive summary, please refer to this report provided by the IT Governance Council.

Google Plus licenses have been deployed to all staff and faculty. This implementation offers advanced security features that work to prevent, detect, and remediate security incidents.

Information Systems DMARC: As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance email security, we have implemented a new standard for email authentication. DMARC is the industry standard for email authentication and email domain identity protection. This email security standard prevents spammers from using our domain to send emails without our permission, also known as spoofing, and helps ensure you can trust emails you receive from the College by rejecting emails that do not meet higher standards for authenticity. While DMARC works silently in your inbox, some users that utilize third-party messaging services will need to inform IT of their use by September 30th, 2023 in order to ensure the sending of emails is not delayed or blocked.

You can visit the Email Authenticity Initiative page to review additional information and find the form to engage IT in reviewing third-party services that need authentication.