In a time where the college struggles with a budget deficit, state funding makes maintenance and replacement of broken instructional equipment possible.

City College will allocate $830,000 from the state on “deferred maintenance” and equipment updates, such as repairing 13 roofs and setting aside $25,000 to replace the only harp in the music department.

“Any kind of funding we get is very helpful,” said Lyndsay Maas, vice president of business services. “If we wouldn’t have received this, we wouldn’t have been able to do these projects at all.”

Ginger Brucker is a harpist, student and music department lab assistant. Brucker pointed out that the department has two harpists but only one, broken, harp.

“There is a string on the bottom and every time I play it, it buzzes, so I can’t really play,’’ Brucker said. “It is really frustrating.’’

The harp is used in classes like “Symphony Orchestra” and “Concert Band”. Brucker said that being able to play the harp at City College has nourished her passion for music.

“I’ve been playing a long time and I always loved it and I always just really enjoyed it,’’ said Brucker, “but when I came here, I totally grew as a musician.’’

The state decides how much funding each district gets, and that determines what equipment the departments can have replaced. The college’s current budget deficit has made the ability to do any maintenance or replace equipment dependent on receiving these funds.

The money must be spent on either deferred maintenance or instructional equipment and the district decides where the money will go within those two categories.

The decision of what maintenance should be done is based on demand and what could save the school money in the future. For instance, Maas pointed out that repairing the roofs for $185,000 is a precaution to avoid future disaster that could be much more expensive.

“Repairing roofs is always an important one because if you don’t repair them the buildings leak and you have more damage,” Maas said.

The total maintenance will approximately cost $590,800.

The rest of the funds will be spent on instructional equipment. This includes, but isn’t limited to: storage racks, a broken harp, four new laptops and five replacement student video cameras. More details about the allocation can be found in this document.

A year-long ranking process decides what instructional equipment will be replaced. The different departments requests items to be replaced and several committees work to put the items in order. Priority is given to replacing items and not ordering new items the school has not had earlier.

“This was a huge relief to me to see that we were getting this money and we’d be able to do these specific projects,” said Maas.

Clarification Oct. 7, 2017:

This article has been updated to correct grammatical mistakes.