At the University of Delaware, most deferred maintenance problems will be corrected by shortly after the millennium, according to Executive Vice President David E. Hollowell and Richard L. Walter, director of facilities management. Walter puts it this way: "We're winning this battle, at a time when so many other universities, corporations and government agencies are losing." In fact, UD's success in overcoming aging infrastructures -- while also building 11 new facilities during the 1990s and increasing University-sponsored support for student scholarships by 227 percent -- was commended by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education Review Board, in a 1996 reaccreditation report. Today, Hollowell reports, UD annually allocates 2 percent of the estimated $1 billion replacement value of property assets to cover renovations. It also redirects year-end surpluses, capitalizes upon the private gifts from friends of the University and implements new technologies to boost efficiency. As recently as the late 1980s, however, the University allocated only a "few hundred-thousand dollars per year" for renovations. Asbestos dropped from ceiling tiles, paint was stained and peeling off classroom walls and air-conditioning systems often consisted of many inefficient window units. Then, in 1990, Hollowell and the late Tom Vacha, who was president-elect of the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers when he died last year, alerted newly hired President Roselle and the UD Board of Trustees to the alarming campus-wide problem of deferred maintenance. Roselle sought and received Board approval to make renovations and repairs a high University priority. Roselle lost no time in correcting $41 million worth of UD's most pressing structural problems -- from gaping holes in classroom ceilings to cracking support columns and leaking water pipes. He also supported sweeping improvements to UD's computing network, a program that had been launched earlier by and supported by his then-associate Vice President Susan J. Foster, now vice president for information technologies.