By ETHAN SCOTT
ethan@du2.byu.edu
A BYU grounds crew is laying all of the brick pavers in the plaza behind the Wilkinson Center -- a job that would have been done 10 years ago by contractors.
The grounds crew started taking over the job about 10 years ago when foreman Richard Fifita decided that BYU could do a better job for less money.
'The contractors in the past have done the paver work, and we ended up coming over and redoing all of them because they settled quite a bit,' Fifita said.
'I think taking pride in our work makes a difference, so that the student will walk over and say, `I laid all those pavers. It's been five years and they never settled.''
Fifita starts workers off on smaller projects and moves them to bigger jobs as their skills progress.
'Everybody who comes brand-new, they have to start from shoveling or raking or cutting. They're all graduating from one state to another,' Fifita said.
Members of the crew are often construction management majors who are interested in similar lines of work, but all kinds of students -- some who have never wielded a rake or a shovel -- have worked on the crew, Fifita said.
Even after the project behind the Wilkinson Center is completed, the brick crew will still have plenty of work, said Roy Peterman, director of grounds at BYU. Many walkways around campus need to be widened to handle student traffic.
'Originally the campus was designed for 15,000 students. Now we have 30,000 plus. The walkway systems that are being developed and the plaza areas are built so that they can accommodate the additional student load that is now upon us,' he said.
Large activities that have sprung up around campus have prompted the inclusion of brick plazas in campus plans, Peterman said.
'The brick plazas that are being developed here on campus are ones that have been in need for a long time. There have been student activities that have developed a need for large open spaces,' he said.
BYU has turned to brick because Provo weather tends to make grass unsuitable as a surface for these activities, Peterman said.
'These activities generally happen mostly in the spring and in the fall -- right when we typically have bad weather,' he said.
Working with friends keeps the job from being tedious, said Michael Marx, 27, a BYU graduate from Thousand Oaks, Calif., who is working on the crew while his wife finishes up school.
'We're all BYU students or were BYU students, so it's a good atmosphere. It's hard work, but it's a lot of fun,' Marx said.
Even if workers don't make a living with the skills they learn laying brick, it will come in handy eventually, Marx said.
'Having this skill here is good for anything, whether you use it for life -- you know, for a job -- or you just use it to better your own home or your friend's or just to help people out. It's always good to know,' he said.