Ground(s) Rules

By Patrick Bohn, September 9, 2026

Take an inside look at the people who power, clean, and maintain the Ithaca College campus.

Whatever the season, the grounds and maintenance teams at Ithaca College ensure that the campus always looks its best.

(Image design by Areya Muraca)

When the lights unexpectedly go out at Ithaca College, Ernie McClatchie ’01, MS ’03, associate vice president of facilities; Bill Kerry, executive director of buildings and grounds; and their staffs are the ones who spring into action. It is the case when it’s something as simple as a blown fuse or lightbulb—but it is also true when it’s a power issue on a grand enough scale to bring multiple teams together to fix an issue. During times like these, it’s all hands, feet, and equipment on deck, working to restore the power of the Ithaca College campus itself.

The classrooms, labs, and offices that sustain IC don’t maintain themselves. It’s the collective work of facilities individuals striving every day to bring the best South Hill has to offer. So it was one winter evening a few years ago when the cables that supplied power to the Dorothy D. and Roy H. Park Center for Business and Sustainable Enterprise—and several other buildings on the Ithaca College campus—faulted out. The site of the problem was easy enough for McClatchie and his team to spot: The area where the cables ran underground could be accessed via manholes, and the top of the manhole where the cables faulted out had, in his words, “melted.”

“We called in every electrician we had, as well as several members of the maintenance and grounds team,” McClatchie recalled. “We had to pull out hundreds of feet of cable that were underground, bring down hundreds of feet of new cable, and reconnect everything. We were our own little NYSEG [electric company] that day.”

Close to 125 employees make up the maintenance, grounds and transportation, and facilities services teams. They work around the clock, year-round, because they, as Kerry said, “want the best for the people who learn, teach, work, and visit here. We’re not a business where it closes at 5 p.m. and people go home,” he continued. “There are more than 3,000 people who live on campus during the school year, and they’re coming and going into spaces at all times, so we need to make sure those spaces are maintained.”

Scope and Scale

Both McClatchie and Kerry compare the challenges of maintaining the college to that of a small city, and with good reason, given that there are approximately 6,000 students, faculty, and staff on campus—in addition to prospective students and families, athletic teams, concertgoers, and others who may be visiting. And that means the sheer scope of the responsibilities for their teams is massive. They include taking care of:

• 7,500 doors with locks

• 15,000 electrical fixtures

• 160 boilers

• 400 residential kitchens

• 36 acres of parking lots

• Seven miles of roadway and more than 10 miles of sidewalks

• 1,200 tons of trash, recycling, and compost collected and processed each year

• 1.2 million square feet of nonresidential space cleaned daily

“Most people don’t think that the person helping them set up at an admissions event one day is the person washing the windows the next. But our staff are involved in nearly every facet of the college.”

Bill Kerry, executive director of buildings and grounds

In the winter, snow removal becomes one of the top priorities. (Photo by Stetson Doggett '19)

That’s just a fraction of their teams’ duties. “Most people don’t think that the person helping them set up at an admissions event one day is the person washing the windows the next,” Kerry said. “But our staff are involved in nearly every facet of the college.”

At any given time, there could be up to 30 facilities attendants cleaning spaces and more than a dozen members of the grounds team plowing snow or applying mulch. While many of those challenges are as unpredictable and fast-arriving as an upstate New York snowstorm, Kerry and McClatchie also have to balance preparation and planning for tasks that follow the cadence of the school year and the ebb and flow of students.

The beginning of the school year, for example, means lots of work orders for carpenters helping with the lofting of beds in residence hall rooms, plumbers fixing sinks that haven’t been turned on in a while, and locksmiths who are on call for key-related issues. The teams are also doing preventative maintenance on the boilers to prepare for the winter switch from air conditioning to heating.

“Then, once the students leave for winter break, we have time to do more aesthetic work such as painting or replacing carpets, as well some minor renovations to rooms on campus,” McClatchie said. “And of course, all throughout winter, our grounds crew is constantly focused on snow and ice removal.”

Come springtime, the switch back to air conditioning is a lengthy process. The college has 13 different cooling towers, which pull heat from water and return cold water to cool down air conditioning equipment. All of this needs to be prepped, cleaned, and sanitized before being filled with water, in order to meet the standards of the health department and the Department of Environmental Conservation. “We can’t just fill the towers up with water on the first warm day of the year because if the temperature drops again, that water’s going to freeze,” McClatchie said. “So, we’re keeping an eye on the weather until we know it’s going to stay warm.”

As winter turns into spring and Commencement nears, the campus begins to bloom -- with the help of the grounds crew, who spread mulch and plant bulbs across campus. (Photo by Giovanni Santacroce)

It’s often said timing is everything, and the work McClatchie and his teams do is no exception. The maintenance and grounds teams often start work enough in advance to ensure they meet the needs of their campus partners. One example would be the annual process of turning on the campus fountains at Dillingham Center. “We aim for them to be on for the college’s second open house of the spring so that prospective students and their families can see them,” McClatchie said. “To ensure that they’re ready, we have to clean out piping, power wash the floor, hook up the wiring for the LED lights—it’s several weeks of work.”

And there’s another day in spring that his teams have circled on the calendar. “Commencement is our biggest day of the year,” McClatchie said. “Our preparations for that start in March, when we start mulching and planting all the flowers that we want to be in full bloom two months later. We’re also focusing a lot more effort on cleaning and maintaining spaces like the Athletics and Events Center.”

McClatchie is an Ithaca College lifer, having worked at IC since getting his master’s degree. And the pride he and his staff have for the college is evident in the quality of the work they do.

If you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen the campus at full bloom during Commencement week. While McClatchie’s team can’t make the sky blue, they ensure that the grass is a vibrant green, and the flowers blast out bright reds, yellows, and purples. It’s a fitting—and often breathtaking—background for the culmination of the academic year. And it’s possible due to the teams’ collective efforts. “We have talented people who truly believe that the work we do is important,” he said. “That’s how they’re able to rise to the occasion and do great things every day.”

Power in Partnerships

With responsibilities across campus, it’s no surprise that the facilities and grounds teams partner with academics, administration, and student affairs and campus life extensively. “Partnerships are the backbone of the work that we do,” said Kerry. “We want to make sure that we’re working with others to deliver the best campus experience.”

Their partners include dining services and athletics, where garbage and recycling needs arise daily and continuously. But the duties also extend to specific requests. One example of that would be last summer, when the grounds crew got a request from an astronomy professor to trim some trees by the Clinton B. Ford Observatory in the IC Natural Lands to improve the sight lines for students and faculty observing the night sky. “The goal there, of course, was meeting their needs without disturbing too much of the natural beauty out there,” Kerry said. “Once we figured out the logistics, we were able to take care of it in a day.”

“Partnerships are the backbone of the work that we do. We want to make sure that we’re working with others to deliver the best campus experience.”

Bill Kerry

Working with academics takes place indoors as well. In science classrooms and labs, proper air flow through hood systems is required to comply with Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards and is critical for student and faculty safety. The facilities team monitors the system that tracks that airflow, and, should an issue arise, they work with IC’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety to fix the problem quickly.

The human anatomy lab within the School of Health Sciences and Human Performance is another area where monitoring is critical, due to the cadavers used by students during labs. “The coolers in the lab have to maintain a certain temperature, and our ability to monitor that and respond to an issue if needed impacts so many things, from the educational experience our students get to the college’s reputation as a place that will take care of its donors,” Kerry said.

A more recent partnership has been with the Office of Residential Life. Occasionally, college-provided residential room furniture needs minor repairs, and rather than sending all of that furniture to another company for refurbishment, the carpentry team makes some of those repairs—such as putting new tops on wood dressers—in house. “It’s something our team can do at the end of their day, and it saves the college money and time,” Kerry said.

While most of the work focuses more immediate needs, McClatchie is responsible for working with the IC Board of Trustees to plan budgeting for the long-term, major projects that maintain the college, such as deferred maintenance. “I work with the department supervisors to come up with the list of priority projects, trouble spots, or things that have outlived their time frame,” he said. “That becomes the capital list we submit to the Board of Trustees in the summer. We’re trying to determine the most critical things we can do that feed the needs of the campus. And because we have campus leadership and a board that trusts our judgement and the work that we do, it makes that whole process much easier.”

Sustainable Success

One of the unusual things about the structure of IC’s Office of Facilities is that the Office of Energy Management and Sustainability falls under its purview. Ithaca College has made sustainability a major campus priority, and that extends to the Office of Facilities in big and small ways. “That’s not the case on most college campuses,” said Scott Doyle ’98, director of energy management and sustainability at Ithaca. “But I take a lot of pride in that fact that we’re housed and working together so closely.”

“Whether that’s a shift to environmentally sensitive cleaning products, a reduction in our chemical spraying on campus grounds, or the addition of electric vehicles to our vehicle fleet, we’ve made significant changes over the years, and we’re always looking for other opportunities to increase our sustainability,” McClatchie said.

The college's focus on sustainability has enabled the maintenance and ground crews to use more environmentally friendly products. (Photo by Andrew Franz)

One of the things Doyle values the most is the level of institutional knowledge possessed by the facilities and maintenance teams. “They know a lot more about some of these things than I do,” he said. “For example, we’ve been looking for ways to increase our solar output, and I suggested putting some panels behind the Park School of Communications. The electrical team told me that wasn’t a great idea given all the other infrastructure we had in that area. I’ve got a lot of respect for how they use their expertise to know what’s going to work and going to be safe for the campus.”

While they do sometimes have to use that expertise to say no to an idea, most of the time, that knowledge is used in moving the college’s sustainability efforts forward. In December 2025, the college completed its “Recharge at IC” initiative, which resulted in a major expansion of its public electric vehicle charging network, including 26 level 2 charging stations on Farm Pond Road. “The electrical team knew that we had an appropriate power source there and that they were going to be upgrading the electrical capabilities of that area anyway, so that location was the perfect spot for the chargers,” Doyle said.

Other areas of collaboration include working together on scaffolding affordable upgrades to buildings in a way that ensures further upgrades can be made down the line. “If we’re looking to use geothermal energy to heat and cool a dorm, for example, we might not have the resources to do that right away,” Doyle said. “But through conversations, we realize that in order to use geothermal energy there in the future, that dorm is going to need better insulation in the building and upgraded boilers. And if that is a project we’re capable of doing right now, we can make that a priority.”

“A lot of times, I’ll ask the facilities and maintenance teams, ‘What am I not thinking of here? Why are we doing things the way we do?’” he continued, “because their explanation is going to be a valuable learning experience for me.”

Lights, Towers, Action

One of Ithaca College’s most iconic traditions is the changing of the Towers lights on New Year’s Eve, when the windows of the East and West Tower residence halls are lit to display the final two numbers of the current year before changing at midnight to ring in the start of the new year.

That operation isn’t as simple as flicking a single switch, however. And the responsibility to make sure it goes off without a hitch falls to Matthew Walters, IC’s facilities services manager. After starting at the college as a cleaner in 2003, Walters began supervising the residential team within the Office of Facilities in 2015 and has overseen the light change for the past two years.

“Handling the lights is a big undertaking. But when we see the lit towers, we feel a ton of pride.”

Matthew Walters, facilities services manager

Armed with a binder that’s been in use since the tradition began in 1965, Walters and his team map out which rooms in each Tower will need a light, setting up power strips to handle all the lights on each floor. “Depending on the numbers that are being displayed, we might need upwards of 30 people flipping switches at midnight,” Walters said. “Changing from a 7 to an 8, for example, requires 67 lights to be turned on or off.”

All told, it takes a handful of people about 12 hours to set up the lights. The team then does a brief, eight-second dry run, ideally, Walters said, under cloud cover, so as not to give away the big reveal. The lights are turned on a few days before Christmas, with the new numbers remaining on until the Monday after New Year’s Day. And this tradition comes with a modern, sustainable, twist. A few years ago, the college switched from 300-watt bulbs to 15-watt LED lights that shine a bit brighter. “Handling the lights is a big undertaking. But when we see the lit towers, we feel a ton of pride,” Walters said.

That pride is evident in McClatchie’s voice as he recalls the night of that infamous power outage. “We had the power back on by 8 p.m. that night,” he said. “It was one of my proudest moments during my time here,” he continued, “to know that we were prepared for a challenge and had the people to fix it.”