Table 13.

Maintenance Staff Understanding: Subthemes and Illustrative Quotes

Maintenance staff who don’t understand the ARD intent and system will neglect it at best and thwart it at worst	[It’s essential to have] the facilities folks, the ones responsible for managing the site, at the table during the design process and making sure that they all understand what the design goal is here and how the operations really [work].
	So, none of that is working right now, mostly because people don’t understand the system. . . . But they keep on piling up rock so it doesn’t overflow, not understanding that it’s overflowing because it’s clogged up.
Traditional grounds maintenance crews are unfamiliar with—and often reluctant to address—native plants typical of ARDs	You know, it’s just that our grounds crews are not trained horticulturists, so the complexity of the planting in this kind of naturalistic setting is just hard for them to identify. . . . They’re scared when they see all these plants together, they’re scared to remove something for fear it’s an intentional, desired plant. And so they are leaving things that become out of control and invasive.
Lack of knowledge transfer about an ARD facility can lead to major problems	We worked with the then‐Director of design for the Parks Department; and I’m not absolutely certain he communicated to anyone in Facilities what all was being designed and built.
	And because of the turnover in the maintenance world, we can train the crew that’s working there today, and tomorrow it can switch out, and suddenly things go to wreck and ruin because the trained people have moved on to other jobs and there’s a new crew that didn’t get the training.
Maintenance manuals are essential to help staff understand ARDs; but they must be user‐friendly	The maintenance manual that we got from [the designer] is 1000 pages long, and nobody’s actually read all of it. I have flipped through relevant parts of it, but some of it isn’t really relevant—just documents they have to give you.