I respectfully suggest the following steps to President Glick:

• Refer to a current UNR directory and count the number of people listed under Faciliites Operations, Facilities Services and Facilities Maintenance. Ask why someone broke them into subdepartments—is it because listing them all under one department would make the size of the staff even more noticeable? Compare the total (about 200) with numbers of people in other areas of the university. (Folks, you can play at home by going to www.unr.edu/content/directories.asp and selecting "University Directory." Select a department, leave the other fields blank, hit "search" and a list of all the people in the department will appear.)
  
• Keep an eye out for Facilities employees as you move around campus. With 200 of them on the payroll, wouldn't you expect to see more than two or three each day?
  
• Conduct a surprise attendance check of the entire Facilities staff. (I realize it will take a very large team to do this because you will have to look all over campus at ONE time.) Pay attention to where each person is and what he or she doing.
  
• To get an idea of why some people are missing without a legitimate reason when you take attendance, try telling various people around campus you're looking for someone to do work around your house—painting, for example—and ask if they know anyone who does that kind of work. (Well, they might not tell you. You'd better have someone you trust on campus ask around for you.)
• Consider putting GPS devices on Facilities vehicles. (I hate the spying aspect, but I also hate what these people are doing.)
• Take a look at the browsing histories and e-mail records on Facilities computers. (Ditto.)
  

Once you have done these things, I think you will know how to save quite a bit of money in staff, vehicle, equipment and, maybe, supply costs. (I'm not sure where they get the paint and other supplies for the side projects.)

If that doesn't cut the necessary percentage from the university's budget, here's one more thing you can do: lay off all the people in Facilities who got their jobs because they had relatives working there or somewhere else at UNR.

The campus is beautiful and well maintained in spite of the challenges of aging buildings, so we know some of the people in Facilities work hard and take pride in their work. It's up to you to separate them from the ones who are stealing from the taxpayers and students. Doing this will not have any impact on the maintenance or appearance of the campus. The ones who are left won't even have to drag someone else along when they change light bulbs any more.