Episode 143: Keeping UConn in Tip-Top Shape

Eric Kruger is UConn’s Vice President of Facility Services and University Planning and took time out of his busy schedule to join us on the UConn 360 podcast. Eric oversees a team of skilled and dedicated workers who keep the UConn campuses running and in good condition, in addition to new buildings and construction. Eric was named to his current position in March and oversees the planning and management of all facilities operations and the physical infrastructure of all UConn campuses. He has a long history at UConn and was the vice president for facilities and development and operations at UConn Health before taking his current job. Eric came to UConn in 2014 as executive director of facilities and operations. He previously was as an operations and engineering manager at Eversource and had a 20-year career with the U.S. Naval Submarine Force.

Listen to Episode 143 on Podbeam

Mike: Hello everybody. Welcome to the UConn 360 Podcast. It’s Mike Enright from University Communications, and I have a special co-host today, Jacie Severance from University Communications. Thanks so much for sitting in for Izzy, who’s on assignment, as we say.

Jacie: Thank you, Mike.

Mike: It’s good to have you here again. Jacie’s been here a few times.

Jacie: It’s good to be here and it’s a beautiful day on the Storrs campus today.

Mike: It is a beautiful day on the Storrs campus today and summer is moving along, unfortunately. And our guest today is one of the busier guys on campus. He’s Eric Kruger. He’s the Vice President of Facility Services and University Planning.

Eric’s been in his current position here at UConn since March, and he oversees the planning and management of all of UConn’s facilities and physical infrastructure on all our campuses. Eric’s got a long history here at UConn. He was Vice President for Facilities and Development at UConn Health before taking his current job. He originally came to UConn in 2014 as the Executive Director of Facilities and Operations and made the move to UConn Health in 2022.

But we’re glad he is back here on the Storrs campus. He previously worked as an operations and engineering manager at Eversource and had a 20-year career with the U.S. Navy submarine force. He retired as a senior chief petty officer. So, Eric, welcome to the UConn 360 Podcast.

Eric: Thank you, Mike and Jacie. Thanks for having me and it’s nice to be here on this nice humid summer day.

Mike: So, speaking of humid summer days, some parts of all our campuses are sleepy this time of year, but I’m guessing for you and everybody in Facility Services and University Planning, it’s not a very sleepy time.

Eric: No, it’s probably our busiest time of the year. We have what we term as the “summer slammer” during the summer. So, we take a lot of time between commencement and student move-in to do a lot of projects that we normally can’t get to when the students are on campus. So, it’s very busy for us this time of year and it’s good to be active and making the university and the campuses better.

Mike: So, it seems like you oversee a very important part of the campus that affects every possible area, whether it’s academics, athletics, student life. Just give us an overview of your office and what your area does.

Eric: Certainly. My team oversees space planning for the campus. We also oversee all the design, construction, and planning for capital projects and deferred maintenance projects across the campus, both interior to our buildings and exterior. Then we also have the facilities side of the house that maintains, both from a preventative maintenance standpoint and a repair maintenance standpoint, all of the equipment in our buildings and our facilities, again both outside and inside.

Lastly, we have a logistics department that takes care of things such as our supply needs, our mailroom, transportation, and parking, which sometimes are the favorites to talk about in these kinds of settings.

Mike: Parking is never a problem on any college campus.

Eric: Absolutely not.

Jacie: So, Eric, tell us about your background and how you first came to UConn. And you have a pretty impressive military background too, don’t you?

Eric: Well, thank you. It’s something to be proud of. Yes, I spent a little over 20 years in the United States Naval Submarine Force. I started as an electrician’s mate, which is nuclear trained on submarines. So, I had a chance to work in the engineering department, move the boat through the water, as we used to say. And then as I retired, I was the senior enlisted advisor for the engineering department. Mostly what I did was oversee the training, the drills, and personnel affairs for all of the enlisted engineers on the boat.

After that, I retired and got a job with Northeast Utilities, which is now Eversource, operating the transmission grid in Connecticut and western Massachusetts.

Eric: That was enjoyable for a while. And then I finished my seven-year term or so with Northeast Utilities up at the Talcott area work center, overseeing the operations for the distribution side of the house there. Then I saw this opportunity here at UConn to work in the facilities area, which really takes me back to my submarine days, right?

Because in the submarines, with the engineering department, I oversaw more than just the electrical system. I also oversaw HVAC and plumbing and hydraulic systems and those kinds of things. So, by coming back to facilities, I felt like I was more in the role that I had been trained to do for many years in the Navy. And of course, I lived locally here in Mansfield Center, so it was a great opportunity for me, and I jumped at the chance.

Mike: So, tell us, anytime anyone comes back to campus that hasn’t been on campus for three years, five years, ten years, twenty years, their expression is always the same. I can’t believe how much campus has changed. What’s going on right now? What are the projects you’re working on right now that are going to change the campus even more?

Eric: Well, we’re building a new School of Nursing over by the Fine Arts area. That’s underway with a delivery sometime in mid-winter of 2026 or 2027. So that will be a new look to our campus.

We’re also renovating the Field House and turning it into the Bailey Student Athlete Success Center, where we’ll have a chance to do some research, academic support. Athletes will be coming in there to use this area. And also, there’s a sports medicine portion of that as well. We’re hoping to open that in December of 2026.

We have a Gant renovation project that’s starting soon, and we hope to be finished with that one in December of 2027. Those are the big projects.

We’re also, as probably everyone has seen if you’ve been on Route I-95, doing a Mirror Lake improvement project. We’re working on the spillway and the dam for the lake there, and we hope to be done in the second quarter of 2026. So those are probably the biggest things that people see when they’re on campus.

At the regional campuses, we’re doing some work at the Hartford Times Building, putting a Hartford Café in there for our students for the fall this year. So that will be exciting. We’re a little bit all over the place with some of our projects this time of year.

Mike: Some of us are old enough to remember reading The Hartford Times. You mentioned one project, the Mirror Lake project, and I was talking to Sean Vasington about that the other day. There’s a lot more to that project than meets the eye, and there’s a lot more to Mirror Lake than meets the eye. He was talking about the various tributaries. Can you talk a little bit more about that project? Because it is a campus landmark, but it seems like there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye, as I said.

Eric: Well, there certainly is. And of course, Sean is our expert in that area, being the landscape architect that he is. But I can tell you a little bit about it. It’s our responsibility to maintain the dams on our campus, and that is one of the main dams that we have. Obviously, if we don’t maintain that or keep it up to code, then you could have problems with flooding across Route 195, which is our major thoroughfare on campus.

So, we have a project to replace the spillway and the dam itself to get another, hopefully, 50 years or more out of that lake. It does serve as a tributary for storm drain runoff. As you all know, it’s kind of uphill to the core of campus from Mirror Lake. So, most of our storm runoff finds its way in there eventually, and then it crosses under Route I-95 and gets dispersed out through Valentine Meadow, which is over on Horsebarn Hill. So, it’s a very important piece of our campus, not just for looks, but also to maintain our storm runoff.

Jacie: It’s so interesting. I did an exercise with FEMA a couple years ago where we talked about what would happen, and we did some exercises about if there were dam breaks. And I’ll admit, I didn’t even know that the campus had dams before that exercise.

Eric: We do. We have a lot that you don’t even think about, and then you find out where they are and look into them a little bit more. But yeah, there’s quite a few of them on campus.

Jacie: It’s so interesting. Can you tell us, summer’s a busy time for these new projects, but it’s also a busy time for maintenance of our current facilities, right?

Eric: Right, yes. So, our maintenance technicians are doing preventative maintenance and repair maintenance that they normally can’t do when our students and staff and faculty are on campus.

Right now, we have about $12 million worth of deferred maintenance projects going on in the residence halls. Most of them are getting some sort or another of fluff and buff, and also some more detailed work done on them to make them presentable for the students that come back.

Obviously, we do room turns and kind of freshen up the rooms after a full year of having students in them, make them ready for the new students that come in in the fall. And then lastly, we do have some bigger projects going on the University Planning, Design and Construction side, where we are putting air conditioning into several of the Northwest residence hall facilities. And we are also making some repairs to the HVAC system and some additions to the HVAC system in the Werth Residence Hall.

So, it’s a great time for us to get out there and hit some of those residence halls and classroom areas we can’t access during the normal school year.

Jacie: I think I’m going to take that term “fluff and buff” and use that in my regular life now too.

Mike: Air conditioning, we never had air conditioning in the dorm rooms when I went to school here. We didn’t even have television.

Jacie: Wow.

Mike: So, Eric, obviously everybody knows the UConn Storrs campus and everything that goes on here. But our regional campuses are so important to what we do here at UConn, and we have great regional campuses all over the state. Talk about the work you people do there. Is it challenging to be doing work at campuses that are a little farther away from Storrs? Do you have people on site there? And the same for UConn Health and UConn Law?

Eric: Right. Well, just to be clear, my responsibilities now really only include the Storrs campus and the regional campuses. So, I no longer oversee any work at UConn Health.

For the regional campuses that we have, we do have a small facilities contingent at each of the campuses. And we have an operations manager, Glen Mathieu, who coordinates the effort across the campuses to really standardize things and make sure that we’re providing the same level of service for all of our campuses.

Is it harder to maintain because we’re not there? Not as much, because we do have someone who reports to Stan Nolan, who’s our VP for Facilities, and keeps him up to date with things that are going on at the regional campuses. And of course, now that COVID has made remote work and remote communications much easier, it’s really quite easy now to communicate with our folks at the regional campuses and keep up with what’s going on there.

We also do some projects at regional campuses. Those are typically led by our project managers here in Storrs, but our local operations managers at the regional campuses are kind of the boots on the ground to keep an eye on how things are going with the contractor and making sure that we’re staying on schedule and there’s no utility conflicts that we have to worry about, and keeping the project manager abreast of what’s going on.

So, it is a challenge, but we manage to stay up with it based on a lot of the hard work that people do out there.

Jacie: You know, because it’s like a city, you’re managing a lot all the time. So, what do you do in your spare time to unwind from all of this?

Eric: Well, you know, I like to read, and I like to ride my bike. I don’t get to do it very often, but I do when the weather’s right. The older I get, the more I realize that the weather needs to be between 60 degrees and 75 degrees for me to do anything outside. So as far as working out or riding my bike or running, that’s what I enjoy doing.

I also have two grandchildren, a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, so I just really enjoy watching them learn and grow up. Beyond that, I spend a lot of time watching sports. I’m a big sports fan, not only of UConn but also of the New England professional sports teams. So, I find myself watching a lot of sports and following how we’re doing.

Mike: So, here’s a final question. I am fairly confident saying, of the three people doing this podcast, I am the least handy person in the room. Jackie has a farm at home, and Eric, you’re obviously very well versed. When you get home and see a problem at your house, are you like, enough, this is the last thing I want to deal with? Or are you able to handle it when something goes wrong at your house?

Eric: Well, you know, if my wife’s going to listen to this, I probably should couch my answer here. I have a little bit of skill still. Like I said, I used to be a hands-on electrician, so I can fix some electrical things around the house. I kind of know how mechanical things work, but I don’t really have the hands to fix plumbing problems that are significant or HVAC problems. I usually just call a contractor for those kinds of things if I need to.

Mike: Sounds like a good plan. Sounds like a good plan. Well, Eric, thank you very much for joining us today on the podcast. We’re all so proud of how the university looks and the great facilities we have, and it’s not an easy job. So, thank you very much and thank you to your team.

Eric: Alright, I’ll pass that along to them. They’re a bunch of great workers and I appreciate the fact that I get to work with them every day. And thanks for your time today and giving me this opportunity.

Mike: Thank you. Well, it’s a pleasure having you. And Jackie, always great to have you stepping in here on the podcast.

Jacie: Thanks, Mike. And hey, guess what? Do you know what the tallest building on campus is?

Mike: Oh, I feel a pun coming. So, I will just… the tallest building on campus. Well, I would say the top of the Wilbur Cross Building.

Jacie: Well, you’d be wrong. It’s the library, because it has lots of stories.

Mike: Aha. We can always count on Jackie for a good pun, and we will wrap it up with that. Thanks everybody for listening. Enjoy the summer and enjoy your time, and we’ll catch you next time on the UConn 360 Podcast.