(Archive | Logan | COM Department)
Recently, the plan for URI's biotechnology building was the subject of two sequential articles in the Providence Journal. Spending on URI building questioned, July 25, raised concerns by members of the RI House Finance Committee (HFC), over cost overruns and the presence of administrative space in the plan. URI officials explain biotech center plans, July 26, presented the University's response. What did these exchanges mean, and what do they say about the College of the Environment and Life Sciences (CELS), administrative home to the building, and URI?
What are the issues, and why are they of concern to URI, legislators, and taxpayers? The public discussions covered by the Journal took place at the Rhode Island House Finance Committee. The HFC decides bond requests for statewide referenda, the RI mechanism whereby voters authorize major capital expenditures. HFC also serves as watchdog on architectural plans, project costs, and compliance with what voters approved. HFC bond approvals are based on statements of the need for and nature and scope of each project. A floor plan indicating uses of the biotechnology building was part of the University's presentation to the HFC.
In 2004, voters approved Question 13, to
"...allow the State of Rhode Island to issue general obligation bonds, refunding bonds, and temporary notes in an amount not to exceed $50,000,000 for the construction of the University of Rhode Island Center for Biotechnology and Life Sciences."
The original biotechnology building plans and descriptions, according to the HFC, did not indicate that any of the building was to be used for administration, nor was this use presented to voters. The Voter Handbook, which provided the official explanation of the purpose of the bond money, had only this:
"Explanation: How will the money be spent? $50,000,000 will be used for the construction of the University of Rhode Island Center for Biotechnology and Life Sciences. This teaching and research facility will include modern classrooms, teaching laboratories, high-tech specialty laboratories, centers for state-of-the-art instrumentation, incubator space for technology commercialization, and a 400-seat public auditorium."
After a bond for a $50 million building was approved, detailed architectural drawings were produced. Rumors of two concerns became red flags for the committee: deviation from approved space use and cost overrun, including the appearance of ~10,000 square feet for a top floor administrative suite and a $10 million overrun. In May, 2006, HFC requests for obtain copies of floor plans were stonewalled by CELS and the University until the Committee balked on approving bond referenda for the University. (Eventually, one of three requests by the University, a bond for a pharmacy building, was approved by the HFC for the 2006 referendum. Approvals for bonds for a chemistry building and a nursing building were denied.) The paper reported that the cost of the building was estimated to be $60 million even despite a reduction of ~20,000 square feet; the University indicated it would raise the additional $10 million privately (it was not reported who authorized this or how it would be done).
This issue before the Committee was thus to guarantee that what was presented to the HFC and voters was congruent with what eventually will be built. This in turn is based on the principle that public trust is rooted in government accountability. In a system of checks and balances, oversight would not be given to the parties most directly benefiting from the project (here, the University or its Board of Governors). The Committee was addressing an obvious failure of the oversight system. The Committee also expressed doubts by some members that it might be going too far, meddling in University business ("micro managing"), according to the newspaper, but without external review of this project, the system would have failed the test of proper checks and balances and the public may well have felt betrayed, justifiably, by the "bait and switch" nature of substantive revisions in the floor plans. The newspaper provided insight into a discussion in which all concerns were based on principles that are in the public interest and in point of fact define that interest.
Even after the reported exchanges, unanswered questions remain.
- If the bond issue were based on a presentation that did not include clear indications of administrative space, then why was it added, by whom, and within what established channels for monitoring and approval (i.e., who in the University, Board, or Finance Committee, if anyone, was involved)? Certainly, how was the addition of 10,000 square feet rationalized at the same time that mission-critical space was being reduced by 20,000 square feet, in effect, a reduction of 30,000 sq. ft. from what was presented to the voters as feasible at the time of the referendum. How could the initial architectural work on floor plans and approximate costs err so much?
- Why was administrative space given priority over space more immediate to the mission of the building (research, teaching, technology development for commercialization), as specified in the public rationale for the bond?
- Did the College need new administrative space? The College had 2852 sq. ft. of administrative space in Woodward Hall in 2000, half of one wing. Today, an entire wing of Woodward is taken by administration, and much of this has been redecorated twice since 2000; additional offices in the basement and second floor are occupied by College administration. Since 2000, faculty members and inflation-adjusted grant dollars have changed little, and by most accounts, College administrative services to the departments have not improved. Why has administration doubled and why does it now need to double its space again?
- If the Dean wants offices for administering biotechnology programs, why does he insist on a second suite of multiple offices? Are the more accessible first floor offices of Woodward (where presumably the non-biotechnology business of CELS will continue to be conducted) less adequate than the isolated penthouse suite that appears in the plan? Why would grant writing, usually carried out in faculty offices, require new space?
Further Reflections. Aside from the appearance that the College is placing its own administrative wants above public purposes in the new biotechnology building, there are two additional aspects of this project that are troubling. The first relates to the building itself. The second has to do with the trend of buildings symbolized by this one and its predecessor, the Kingston campus Coastal Institute building (there is also a bay campus CI building).
The architect has reportedly designed other biotechnology laboratories, but is there anything in this design to indicate anything extraordinary? The style, externally that of a traditional New England brick box mill building, offers little to inspire future faculty or students. If it is meant to inspire or to invoke an intellectually spiritual sense of pride to the campus, does it do so? I submit that it does not, but I cannot say why this is so. Perhaps it is a matter of economics. What does $50 or $60 million get compared to Brown's $92 million life science building, which opens this fall? Is there such a lack of public spirit and funding that mediocre and uninspiring is the best Rhode Island can do with its public buildings, even on its only research university campus? Or if the money should have been sufficient for a style the state could take pride in, why does this building appear to be so dull?
Are the internal floor plans designed with the best contemporary thinking for biotechnology research? Were they exposed to external review by qualified scientists and other designers? Were faculty beyond the Dean's office part of the design team, and had any of the design team ever designed or worked in leading-edge biotechnology facilities? Just what was the expertise of the design team beyond the architect and the Dean's minions; i.e., what particular expertise was sought explicitly for the purpose of building leading edge biotechnology facilities? Qualified external experts who have seen these plans have allegedly reported that "it isn't done this way now;" are such criticisms valid?
URI's commitment to the environment should be displayed in design elements that are as state-of-the-art as modern technology permits. This commitment should be shared by all Rhode Islanders, who want their public buildings to measure up to the extreme design demands of a post-peak-oil world. In its approach to this issue, the University has committed itself to meeting LEED certification. LEED is a program of the U.S. Green Building Council, which says this, "The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™ is the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high performance green buildings." LEED provides four levels of certification—certified, silver, gold, and platinum—based on a point system (69 points possible) for details of building siting (14 points possible), water efficiency (5), energy and atmosphere (17), materials and resources (13), indoor environmental quality (air, light, lack of toxins)(15) and design innovations (4 points) (plus one point for a LEED accredited professional). Certainly, it is commendable to attempt the conformity to the LEED ratings. The stated goal for this building is to reach the "silver" level, with 33 points required. Commendable, especially for a lab with extreme air handling demands in filtered-air laboratories, but is this the best URI can do, the hallmark of our environmental standard? The energy-bleeding glassed penthouse is at the very least environmentally insensitive, at worst blatantly energy wasteful. Would eliminating this (or converting it into space more in line with the buildings mission) improve the building's LEED rating? Or has the University's commitment been lost in the lust for the glassed shrine proposed for CELS administration? One must wonder whether a building can accumulate enough LEED points while still boasting such an energy-leaking sump on its roof.
Is this building a sign that CELS and URI are on the right track or is it a sign that still something significant is missing? Certainly, CELS has become the environmental college in name only. This was the College that voted (under heavy pressure from its administration) to do away with its Department of Community Planning, killing (rather than rebuilding) a department that may well be more important to the State's looming planning crisis (in a world with more problems from post-peak oil and global warming than most of us can imagine) than any other unit of the institution! This College administration produced organizational models for the life sciences that do away with BOTH plant and animal sciences (dissolved in some murky biotechie super organizational soup), blurring the future of two departments that are highly critical to maintenance and evolution of the State's aquatic and agricultural resources, currently, and for the foreseeable future, the principle mechanisms for maintaining open spaces and a quality of life that is important to most Rhode Islanders. Certainly, if citizens want to know how to grow a garden or to run a small farm or aquacultural enterprise, their quest for knowledge will not begin in a biotechnology laboratory.
But just what is it that this building stands for? The building was once the brainchild of 50 faculty biologists seeking core facilities for access to biotechnical tools, with applications in the marine and environmental sciences (more). The building now symbolizes the State's legacy of last-place support for State University research (more), as URI becomes one of the last state universities to develop such capacities. Yet, in the design process the needs and talents of all but a very few of the faculty have been forgotten, lost in vague political jive promising great prosperity through entrance into the lucrative business of biopharmaceutical and biomedical research. Is the University seriously claiming that it can enter this arena, one that was already crowded a decade ago when the building was first conceived? Does anyone really believe that URI will ever compete with Brown and Brown's new buildings and existing extensive medical facilities, faculty, and staff (and even here, Brown is a late-comer and relative light-weight in biotechnology research)? How will URI do this without a major infusion of millions of dollars of new and permanent state funds, or without converting virtually all faculty retirements in CELS into biotechies? Will the attempt be futile, and can it be done without losing the soul and academic strengths of CELS departments that have been of traditionally greatest value to the State?
The great difficulty in all of this is that no one knows, and no one is saying, what lies in the future for CELS (see a suggestion). And if CELS is leading URI down a garden path, no one has yet articulated where that path leads the institution or why we are on it (if we to take the usual platitudes about economic development as a sufficient reason for URI to lurch off into this direction, what other promises of yet-to-be-realized new sources of wealth will steer the flagship institution next)? This is the College that has yet to make good on its administration's talk of basing everything on a vision and mission-driven strategic planning process (a promise made in 2001); indeed, this is a college which operates without a plan and virtually without a system of shared faculty governance (more), and its faculty must be asking themselves, as the URI community must also ask, where is CELS going and what does CELS stand for? If the institution's lack of academic expertise in planning and architecture is being revealed as a significant weakness by the way this public building is being planned, and if this design signifies the ability of administrators to put their own well-being above the common good, then the public must be wondering what else is being revealed? Did the CELS and URI handling of HFC concerns cost URI bond positions for chemistry and nursing buildings in 2006? All of this should leave the URI community feeling tremendously uneasy.
A footnote (December 2006): Just before the November 2006 bond referrendum, the Providence Journal suggested that voters reject the URI bond issue for the new pharmacy building, saying it was cost-ineffective for the returns claimed by the University. The University had not made an effective case at all. Still, the public approved by an adequate margin and the University can add some more interest payments to its bottom line. Dean Seemann, it is said, has been promised $10,000,000 out of a new URI Capital Campaign (10%) to pay for his penthouse suite. He has also made several hundred copies of an expensive ($10,000) self-promoting DVD touting the biotech building as a new welspring of industry for Rhode Island, the second coming of the Slater linen mill. Given the hopelessness of RI's dismally late entry into this already over-crowded field, and gloomy long-term prospects for post-peak-oil international commerce, perhaps a new linen mill would be a better investment.
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