Here are a few things you may not know about Vice Chancellor-Business Affairs Steve Relyea. He is a Southern California native (originally from Santa Monica), he has an undergraduate degree in psychology and a graduate degree in business administration (from UC Irvine), he enjoys playing the guitar (especially with his eldest son) and his favorite food fare is Japanese. What you probably do know about Steve Relyea is that he’s been the university’s chief financial officer for more than 20 years, managing many of the central campus services. Relyea has also been a leader in our efforts to become a more sustainable, green campus and was recently honored for “Outstanding Individual Achievement” by the California Center for Sustainable Energy. In this interview, he talks about the university’s sustainability projects, the current economic challenges we face and what still excites him about his work.

Relyea: When I began at UC San Diego in the mid-1980s, it was a much smaller campus, but even at that young age, the campus had attracted outstanding people and had a solid reputation in many academic disciplines. We were dealing with constrained budgets, but not near the challenges we face today. Over time, my role has expanded to become more directly involved in the application of technology to solve problems, working with students and faculty on a variety of projects, and developing campus solutions to issues related to climate change.

Relyea: My job changes every few years, which means I always feel challenged, which is a good thing. It is a wonderful mixture of fright, intense learning and fun. The most fulfilling part of working at UC San Diego is being able to work with such amazing people. The staff and faculty are brilliant and creative, and the students are so smart and energetic. Where else can you work in such an exciting environment? It is rare that a day goes by where I don’t learn something new, or am impressed by a team member’s accomplishment. So many people I work with want to make a positive difference in our community, our country and our planet. You can’t ask for more than that.

Relyea: We are soliciting ideas from our campus community on how to streamline operations, how to rethink the way we do things and how to increase revenue from sources outside of UC San Diego.  We have formed “tiger teams,” made up of people from academic and service organizations, which have focused on how to redesign our processes and use technology to reduce costs.  We are also soliciting ideas from around campus through our “suggestion box” on Blink.  My managers have held brainstorming sessions with their staff and we continue to look at all of the ideas that surfaced.  We are working to leverage UC San Diego’s strengths in order to be more competitive for state, federal and private resources.

It is important that we stay focused on those services and infrastructure that are essential to UC San Diego’s teaching, research, patient care, safety, compliance and critical student services. 

Relyea: These days we are dependent on external resources and financing for many mission-critical programs, so the liquidity crisis has been a major challenge in financing important activities and projects.  The reduction in state funding has been significant, and in many cases the self-supporting operations are even under more financial pressure.  And, if we are successful at bringing stimulus funding and other resources to UC San Diego, our lean staffing and support systems will be strained to keep up with the associated workload. 

One of the biggest challenges is to continue to innovate, be competitive and serve a growing campus while, at the same time, reduce our costs.  Fortunately, we have brilliant and hard-working people at UC San Diego who pull together to come up with solutions to these issues.

Relyea: Many campuses throughout the country are greening themselves, but UC San Diego is taking a different approach.  It is different because we started with the legacy of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which was a pioneer in identifying the problem of climate change, and our culture is to now identify solutions.  UC San Diego’s Sustainability 2.0 initiative is not about just greening the campus by today’s standards, but rather looking at technologies and practices that people will turn to five years from now.  It is about not trusting that a “silver bullet” will solve the climate change problem, but investing in an integrated strategy that brings multiple approaches together, including changes in human behavior.  The UC San Diego approach is having faculty, staff and students as partners with the community in designing and implementing solutions.

This integrated strategy will move beyond solar panels to multi-megawatt, high-efficiency arrays.  We will move beyond recycling to targeting a zero-waste campus.  We will move from energy conservation to energy independence, investing in advanced energy storage and using waste methane gas to create renewable energy.  We will move from just reducing water use, to using icy-cold water from an adjacent ocean canyon for cooling.  We will move from corn-based ethanol to developing advanced algae biofuels.  And rather than just measure our emissions, we are one of the first universities to trade our emissions on the international market.

What am I most proud of?  I am most proud of the staff, faculty and students that are developing these ideas, and moving them from ideas to reality. 

Relyea: Being a Vice Chancellor was not my ambition as a child. I thought about being a musician or an FBI agent—in grade school. I am still trying to figure out what I will be when I grow up. In the meantime, I’ll have fun doing with what I’m doing.

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