Finance Division Fall 2024 Report
Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of Operations Andrea Dooley welcomes new employees and provides an update on capital projects, sustainability, and IT initiatives.
Best,
Andrea Dooley, CPA (she/her)
Facilities
What a summer it’s been for the Facilities team. The Office of Conferences and Events booked out much of the summer with campers, with one week of 900 campers sleeping on campus. It was an excellent outcome for the hard work by events staff and a great challenge for maintenance staff as they navigate scheduled maintenance and annual space refresh. With careful coordination, we logged over 4000 hours of painting in the residence halls alone. Akitabox continues to grow with asset inventorying and condition assessments. We have onboarded a new HVAC maintenance contractor and are beginning our integration with vendors in Akitabox. It is very exciting to continue to bring depth of process, documentation, and data collection to support decisions in facility maintenance and capital renewal.
Employee Comings and Goings
We have two new fantastic groundskeepers: Jeanette Nikola and Skylar Smith. Jeanette and Skylar have hit the ground running, bringing tremendous energy and enthusiasm to our grounds team. Ian Armstrong (of the Kurt Armstrong family) has taken our open events prep position. Ian arrived in late April, just as the busy event season was beginning, and has been indispensable in helping us meet your event needs. The director of facilities operations role was temporarily filled this summer and is again open. This position will be reorganized, more to follow!
Capital Projects
An enormous amount of work was accomplished this summer to renew and improve our buildings through the summer.
Manor House Project(s) included the adjacent yard being torn apart for a water intrusion issue in the Business Office. The waterproofing is complete and new landscaping will be planted when the weather cools.
Elevator Modernizations were completed in Miller and Fields, with all new mechanical elements and cab interior refresh.
Roof Projects at Olin Phase 1, Holmes, and the Lower Estate Garden Poolhouse are all nearing final completion.
Painting was completed on Holmes Hall and several smaller college buildings.
Bike Parking Improvements were installed across the residence halls, and a new bike parking structure will finish soon at the graduate school campus.
Efficiency Projects made great gains as LED lighting projects were launched, and central plant boiler efficiency improvements were installed.
Lower Estate Garden Phase 1 is complete, leaving a ‘blank slate’ for further development following a design process with community input.
Tri-Met’s Bus Stop is now built and operational at the traffic circle by the law school gate. This location greatly improves safety for bus commuters.
Sustainability
Education
The Bates Center Summer Sustainability Internship course was a success again this year, supporting 14 students in various positions here in Portland and beyond. Three students were asked to continue their positions into the academic year. Check out their work here and here!
Other exciting sustainability-related events that happened this summer included the Bates Center Curricular Innovation Camp and the Green Energy Institute’s Youth Climate Summit. Both of these events were focused on bringing high school students to our campus.
Operations
Our focus on energy and climate continues with several lighting projects, a new energy reporting program, and long-term energy planning and program development. More projects will be rolled out over the next several months, including some much-needed lighting upgrades. This year’s Energy Efficiency Intern, Vasty Jean-Francois, has been busy supporting the energy program as a whole with a focus on the Energy Trust of Oregon’s Strategic Energy Management program.
Upcoming Initiatives
The Sustainability Office has been working closely with event planners over the last several months to develop options for community members to host events more sustainably. If you are interested in learning more about these options, please reach out to Amy Dvorak or keep an eye on the Source for program updates.
Business Office and Student Accounts
Employee Comings and Goings
Joseph Rosevear joined the Business Office team in August as our new assistant controller. Joseph has a background focused in governmental, nonprofit, and public accounting and brings a wealth of experience in accounting, financial reporting, grants management, and customer service. These experiences helped shape his philosophy around the importance of blending accounting and service. He is licensed as a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) in Oregon and Washington and is excited to join the team at Lewis & Clark.
The Business Office also began its transition to Chrome River, L&C’s new accounts payable and expense reporting system. The Chrome River platform is being used for managing the college’s payments to vendors, employee reimbursements, and processing Pcard transactions. The platform offers operational efficiency, agility, and convenience for users that our paper-based processes cannot. The Business Office did a soft rollout beginning in June, and hosted a series of training sessions in September to introduce Chrome River to the broader campus. Learn ore on the Business Office’s Accounts Payable webpage.
Financial Planning and Analysis
Employee Comings and Goings
Mary Bresnahan was hired to fill the vacant financial analyst position in late August. Mary will focus on internal reporting, budgeting, variance analysis, support of Colleague self service budget information, and partnering with departments across campus to answer their budget-related questions.
Despite enrollment challenges in the 2023-2024 year, the College exceeded the budgeted operating margin by focusing on good expense controls and taking advantage of high interest rates through short-term investments of operating cash. The 2024-2025 year presents similar enrollment challenges in the College of Arts & Sciences (CAS), in part due to the Department of Education’s debacle with the rollout of the revised FAFSA. Both law school and graduate school enrollment is in line with budget expectations. CAS and Common Services will continue to focus on good expense controls, particularly in areas with no student impact. If you are a budget manager, departmental budgets are available for viewing using Colleague self-service. Please reach out if you need assistance.
Information Technology
Infrastructures and Operations
The Infrastructure team assisted in the implementation of our Security Operations Center (EDR, SIEM, Managed Services).
In our service desk, 1904 tickets were received, and 1621 of those were resolved in Q1. 60.15 percent of these tickets were resolved during the first contact with the clients. The average resolution time was one day, 23 hours, and 20 minutes. 86 percent of the tickets received were generated via email, and 13 percent by phone. The highest ticket counts were related to account access (28 percent), software (24 percent), hardware (21 percent), security (14 percent), and services (3 percent).
Academic Operations spent the summer editing the Crestron components in each classroom to resolve AV rack communication issues over IP, incorrect sound levels, and image projection complications. New HDMI ports have also been installed into classrooms where natural wear and tear was affecting laptop usage. The same care is now being extended to some larger classrooms and event spaces on campus.
EdTech
Over the summer, the EdTech team focused on projects aimed at enhancing classroom technology, streamlining operations, and programming to help students and faculty get ready for the start of the fall semester. In GSEC classrooms, we implemented tethering solutions, improved cable management, and began planning for the replacement of end-of-life classroom computers to ensure more efficient technology use.
Based on feedback from students and faculty, we successfully launched an online Student Moodle Crash Course tutorial to help new students become familiar with the platform before classes began. We also presented at several in-person orientation sessions to introduce students to the IT services available on campus, ensuring they were aware of resources such as tech support, specialized labs, and LC account information. For faculty, we organized a series of start-of-term development workshops covering Moodle, Google Classroom, Generative AI, and Appointment Schedules. These opportunities provided a mix of demonstration, practical tips, hands-on practice and Q&A, helping both student and faculty successfully access and leverage learning management systems and related educational technology in preparation for a smooth academic start.
Enterprise Applications
Over the summer, the Enterprise Application team enacted stricter email authentication standards and anti-spoofing settings in Google. We continue to work with the Office of Communications and other teams across campus to abide by Google’s new standards for “mass senders” (domains that send more than 5,000 emails a day).
In addition, we led a multi-team effort to move Zoom to Single Sign-On. SSO streamlines authentication and gives LC community members secure and immediate access to Zoom with their college-provided accounts.
Finally, we are working alongside Campus Safety and Facilities Services to audit and improve our deployment of Lenel, normalizing naming conventions and working towards a better system of access level authorization.
Information Security (ISO)
A very busy period for all of the L&C community as we collaboratively work to strengthen the cybersecurity posture at L&C. Many of the projects that have been in development went live during this quarter.
We expanded the number of L&C enterprise-wide applications under the Single-SignOn and Multi Factor Authentication program improving our defenses and better protecting our resources. This included Google, Workday, remote network access, Zoom, Amazon Business, and others.
The Institutional Data Standards Council (IDSC) is working at developing procedures ensuring compliance with current and new L&C, State and Federal data retention, data custodian, and privacy policies.
Behind the scenes, all of us are also working to deploy new standards from the build of desktop and laptops, authentication, data retention and recovery, and creation of an identity and access management program governing accounts, access privileges, lifecycle, and auditing.
Information Systems (IS)
The Information Systems team, in cooperation with Information Security and Infrastructure, completed extensive work to identify and reconcile accounts held by active and former students. This work is part of a broader initiative to better define our identity and access management, audit existing accounts and mitigate risk associated with inactive or unmonitored accounts.
