Hamline hired Dusty Johnson in the role of Associate Vice President of Facilities Operations and Capital Planning early last month, taking over for Ken Dehkes, who retired at the end of September. Johnson grew up in Albert Lea, Minnesota, and, after getting his Masters at University of Kansas Lawrence, worked as the Director of Facilities Management at UW-Superior for 15 years before coming to work at Hamline.
“I was really drawn to the campus. I wasn’t really looking for a job necessarily, but this came up and my wife said, ‘You know, this looks interesting,’ so I put my hat in,” Johnson said.
On top of managing Facilities Services, which is responsible for all maintenance on Hamline property, Johnson’s role involves a lot of planning and preparing for the future.
“My job is to look ahead and be able to have an idea of what we need to be doing to keep our buildings, our infrastructure, things like that going,” Johnson said.
“Doing revamps on buildings and things of that nature is a lot of money, so we’ve gotta figure it out and plan ahead.”
In the six weeks Johnson’s been at Hamline, he’s already started planning on a number of projects. He described plans to fix the campus’s heating issues, install new bleachers in the gyms and do some much-needed maintenance on Manor Hall.
“Manor is as iconic as old Maine. We’re on, from my understanding, the third generation of families staying in the same room, which is so cool,” Johnson said.
After recent budget cuts, the department has been working with minimal staff, which hasn’t gone unnoticed by students. Junior anthropology and education major Frog Tolstad noticed, and believes having Johnson join Facilities Services will bring some much needed attention to the department as a whole
“I feel like, from what I’ve seen, they’re probably understaffed and underfunded,” Tolstad said. “If you put something in the Akitabox portal (the site used to submit service requests), oftentimes it’ll be delayed.”
Johnson confirmed the understaffing issue, as well. A lack of staff has caused Facilities to have a difficult time keeping up with a large number of work orders, which makes working on preventative maintenance harder. Johnson spoke highly of the group he has and has been working on building them up. He also wants to hire new staff to help support Facilities and Hamline as a whole.
“We’ve got good people here, and I think they just need some help,” Johnson said.
Johnson hopes that fixing the staffing issue, as well as his other projects, will help people on campus to trust Facilities to do their job properly.
“It’s a big thing for me to be able to get us to the point where we have the trust of the campus, and everyone knows that when they call us we’re gonna come in, we’re gonna do it right, we’re gonna get it done in a decent amount of time, and that’s one of the things we’re striving for,” Johnson said.
Facilities Services Project Coordinator Dan Eisenrich has nothing but good things to say about Johnson. Eisenrich has worked at Hamline for two years now and has enjoyed working with Johnson for the last month and a half. Eisenrich appreciates that Johnson advocates for strategic change, instead of pushing the smaller team to do the same work as a fully staffed department.
“Dusty is a breath of fresh air. He’s really knowledgeable, really ambitious and really attentive to different departments and staff needs,” Eisenrich said. “I like working with him.”
