Here’s the info from an email Susan Martin sent around this afternoon:
I am pleased to report that the State legislature has passed Senate Bill 511 which includes a $31.5 million capital outlay appropriation for the renovation of Pray-Harrold. The bill now will move to the Governor’s desk for signature and we hope that will occur soon to enact this into law. We are thankful for all of the support from our State legislators and friends who have moved the bill to this stage.
Again, not that this means that folks who teach and work in Pray-Harrold will have to soon pick out new carpet patterns. For one thing, EMU still needs to raise the rest of the money to get the project truly off the ground. But it’s still good news.
Eastern will sell bonds to fund the rest of the PH project. EMU has a good bond rating. It won’t start for 9 to 12 months then the first stuff will be IT items etc. Mark Jefferson will actually begin in December with a ceremonially ground breaking in November.
It would be nice if EMU could get at least some money from some donors. I’m certainly not wed to the name “Pray-Harrold;” I am sure if someone wanted to write a big enough check, that person could get their name on the biggest building on campus.
I also wonder about how much bond money EMU is going to be able to raise in this quite crappy market….
I don’t think there will be any huge difficulty in EMU coming up with $20 million or so for an important project, now that the state has approved (save for the Governor’s expected signature) on the capital outlays bill that includes PrayHarrold’s $31 million. But also keep in mind that there are no firm decisions or commitments on what will be done to PH with this money. EMU has to have an appropriate match of some size to the state funds, but I think most details of this project are yet to be determined. They are, I think, not specified in the actual legislation except in the broadest terms: improvements to the PH classroom building.
The real issue for EMU now, assuming the Governor signs as expected, is to devise a good plan for how to improve PrayHarrold. The current so called plan, a “program statement” devised by a contractor a few years ago in consultation with a small number of administrators and very few faculty or students, is barely worth the paper it’s written on. The good points in it are obvious – fix heating/cooling/ventilation, wiring, etc. But some of the Academic departments that use PH classrooms were denied input into the lightening quick consultations done by the contractor, and the then badly out of touch CAS deans’ office was relied on too much (creating errors) as the consultations were done. Substantively, the Provost’s office was absent without leave during this process. As a result, the plan is not based on a realistic projection of enrollment or accurate assessment of teaching and classroom needs, and it puts too much stress on the merely cosmetic. It’s a wish-list, not a plan. EMU overpaid that contractor for this “program statement”. Its many obvious shortcomings may be why the Fallon administration refused requests to make it available to the public for several years after it was first produced. It was finally released from that embargo about a year ago, in the first months after the Fall of the Fallon Adminsitration, by associate Provost Bob Neely. (Previously, the former Interim Dean of the college affirmed publicly that the document was available in his office, yet everyone who sought it from him was ignored.)
In light of this good news from Lansing, and in light of my view that knowing the past is relevant to shaping the future, I can’t help but mention a wager I made with former President John Fallon in the first year of his two years at EMU: He told me that the state was going to approve funds for PH that year, and that ground breaking would be certainly before the calendar year 2008 ended. I said I’d be hearing such confident predictions for a decade, and that they all were proven false. He proudly affirmed the certainity of his expectation being met. I said I thought I knew Lansing better than he did. So we made a bet, with a handshake: me saying that there’d be no PH groundbreaking or other work started before Jan. 1, 2009, him saying there would be. We agreed that the loser was to treat the winner to dinner at an Ypsilanti restaurant of the winner’s choice. So, John, if you’re still reading this blog, contact me to pay up, OK?
Now, fortunately, EMU is entering an era of accountability and transparency, and that gives encouragement to the hope that EMU decisions will be made more intelligently than has been characteristic for the last decade. And making a priority of improving academic buildings is vital!
PrayHarrold needs improvement. All praise to President Martin and Freman Hendrix for getting the deal done in Lansing! Now we need to seriously plan for what PH really needs…..undertaking such planning while the Mark Jeff expansion project is underway will be a managerial task unprecedented in EMU’s history, but it’s a challenge well worth the effort.
Hats off to the Martin Administration for this achievement, and to all the legislators who supported EMU’s very reasonable capital request! It’s so very good to have top leaders at EMU who are credible in Lansing, and on campus too.
Page 3 of Saturday’s AA NEWS has a story about the inclusion of the PH money in the capital outlays bill.
Mark: According to Wade Tornquist the program statement for the building done in 2004 or 2005 will have to have the dust blown off of it since its a few years old. Now is the time to try to get a change in input from the faculty and departments.
Yes, Alum, that is Wade’s position. But my position is that the current program statement needs more than having “the dust blown off” — it’s a fatally flawed document. Too bad that a small fortune was spent on producing a program statement that’s as flawed as this one, and too bad that administrators who pushed that thru at the time without real input have not been held accountable for that mispent time and money; but I fully agree with Wade that the planning that must begin now needs faculty input and needs input from all departments that use PH. In fact, i’ve been making that point for sometime. (The current program statement was produced without any substantive or official faculty input, and several departments were excluded altogether, with results that invalidate nearly the whole assessment of what the building’s current uses are: leaving out biology lecture classes from assessing PH’s uses is like leaving out electrial wiring and bedrooms while designing a house.) So, I strongly advocate input into the PH renovation process and last fall my efforts and those of others spurred Welch Hall offcials, for the first time, to admit that the current statement was not an adequate document to start with, and they promised a meaningful input process. Since the time, however, Wade has put the brakes on that input, so the faculty PH input committee that was promised in the winter and that members were elected to has not meet……Why go fast if you can standstill? was my interpretation of the backing away from starting that committee to work; Wade said it was because of the uncertainity over whether EMU would get any state funds. Others said it was because he was overworked and i am sure he is. Previoiusly, Wade had said to me it was urgent that the committee meet over this past summer, and a willingness to do so was a stipulated as departments selected reps to the committee. That the committee hasn’t meet regardless has been cited by some PH faculty members as proof that nothing ever changes at EMU; I am more hopeful than my cynical colleagues.
(For those who don’t know, Wade Tornquist is from the chemistry dept. and he presently has administrative appointments in the an Associate Dean of the CAS deans office and in the Provost’s office, where he runs budgets and facilities among other duties. A very hard working capable guy.)