Increasing Apathy From Senior Executives to Talking About “Deferred Maintenance” – The Issue

Welcome back to my Fall 2025 conference trend series. This week we’re tackling a topic that came up repeatedly during conference season: a growing sense of apathy among senior executives towards “Deferred Maintenance”, which if you follow me you will know it is in quotes because we at Roth IAMS are looking to abolish the phrase. We prefer Deferred Capital Renewal and Maintenance (DCRM), but more on that in next week’s post.

For many facilities leaders, this won’t come as a surprise. The backlog has been growing for years. Funding hasn’t kept up. And the message hasn’t changed much.

During one panel discussion I heard two different senior facilities leaders say that they cannot get their executives to pay attention when they bring up DCRM. They just don’t want to hear about it any more.

From the executive seat, everything looks fine. Buildings are open. Classes are running. No chiller failures are making the evening news. When that’s the visible reality, it’s easy for DCRM issues to drift down the priority list.

Why Apathy is Increasing

Based on the conversations I had this fall, a few themes kept surfacing: 

• The backlog numbers feel too big to be real. When someone hears they have a $600M renewal need, it becomes abstract. 
• More urgent issues are dominating attention. Enrollment challenges, labor shortages, operating cost pressures—these are loud and immediate. 
• The message feels repetitive. Many executives feel they’re hearing the same story they heard ten years ago. 
• Past success masks current risk. Facilities teams have prevented failures for so long that leaders assume the risk must be manageable. 

And the timing doesn’t help. One-time COVID funding created a sense that progress had been made—even though, for most institutions, the dollars barely touched the surface.

Facilities teams have been sounding the alarm for nearly three decades, and despite some progress, the best we can say is that things are ‘less worse’ than they would have been. Thankfully, in most cases, we’ve avoided the catastrophic failures that were possible. But that success creates a challenge. In some ways, by avoiding major risk issues, we have furthered the “Chicken Little” scenario where senior executives feel like we have been telling them the sky is falling for so long — even though the sky actually has been growing darker.

Now that we have introduced the challenge, next week we’ll look at why this trend is so dangerous, and what facilities leaders can do to re-engage executives in a more productive, strategic way.