UC Berkeley Associate Vice Chancellor of Business and Administrative Services Ron Coley was appointed vice chancellor of business and administrative services at UC Riverside, campus officials announced Monday.

Coley will begin his term at UC Riverside July 23, leaving UC Berkeley after 16 years on campus in the associate vice chancellor position. Coley said he will move to Riverside in order to further their strategic plan, which he called the “best strategic plan higher education has ever seen.”

“(UC Riverside) is a campus that is really motivated to go to the next level of excellence, and I was quite flattered they saw me as a person that could possibly help them move in that direction,” Coley said.

Coley’s duties have included oversight of UC Berkeley’s offices of environmental health and safety, property management and recreational sports.  Coley’s efforts resulted in the opening of a new Emergency Operations Center in Warren Hall, which was part of a five-year plan to improve campus emergency procedures.

Since he became associate vice chancellor in 1998, Coley said he has striven to put the administration on par with UC Berkeley’s overall level of excellence. He said he set the metric for success for other universities looking to the campus as a reference for administration.

“There’s probably not two weeks that go by that my assistant is not scheduling a conference call, meeting or visit from my counterparts, administrators, saying ‘Ron, I heard what you guys are doing at Berkeley … I’d like to understand how you guys are doing that’,” Coley said.

UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor of Administration and Finance John Wilton praised Coley’s role in a procurement initiative — an action combining the procurement operations of UC Berkeley and UCSF to generate cost-saving.

“He’s just an amazing colleague,” Wilton said. “In every area he’s worked on, he’s made that significant improvement. He is very committed to getting everybody to work as a team.”

At UC Riverside, Coley will receive an annual compensation of $295,000. In the 2012-13 academic year at UC Berkeley, Coley received an annual wage of $200,836.50.

His role at UC Riverside will largely comprise the same duties he was tasked with at UC Berkeley, but it will include management of more departments. According to UC Riverside spokesperson James Grant — who said Coley would bring “great experience and vision” to the campus — Coley will oversee about 600 people in his new position.

“I will miss the unquestioned, unchallenged excellence that Berkeley brings to the table,” Coley said.