2 October 2004
Bruce Fisher
Consolidating ECC
For over a year now, Erie County Executive Joel Giambra has been advocating consolidation of the three campuses of Erie Community College, saying a single campus makes better educational and economic sense. The idea has been greeted with stiff opposition from the College's board and president. We asked Giambra's chief of staff, Bruce Fisher (who is also Deputy County Executive) to explain their continued pursuit of consolidation. This is his response.
A generation ago, two creative and relentless County Legislators named Joan Bozer and Minnie Gillette led preservationists and educators on a successful mission – to save the downtown Post Office building from the wrecking ball, and to turn it into the City Campus of the county’s community college.Joel Giambra and a lot of other folks want to build on Bozer’s and Gillette’s work. Giambra proposed in 2003 to invest County funds in a new community college consolidated onto one downtown campus.He shopped the idea and got buy-in from Democrats and Republicans, both city and suburban – and from community activists, chambers of commerce and professional planners.
The new campus could be networked with every library, community center and high school via teleconferencing and the same internet-based distance learning network that on-line universities use.
The numbers actually favor of a consolidated campus. This should be no surprise, because keeping three separate physical plants and three separate program mixes costs more in maintenance and administration than would one consolidated campus. The consultant (jointly hired by the County and the College) calculated the extra costs of keeping three separate campuses at $5.7 million per year, not including the cost of any new buildings on the three campuses whose buildings today are crumbling.
Were we to keep three campuses and erect new buildings to replace the Amherst and Orchard Park facilities that are falling apart, the cost would be $130 million – but remember, that capital cost is not all. Keeping three campuses would also commit the community to bearing the extra (and avoidable) costs of $5.7 million a year.
By contrast, the total cost of building a new campus downtown – with new buildings, new technology, secure parking and transit access to the entire region – would be just $160 million. That’s $160 million plus normal operating costs, versus $130 million for new buildings on three campuses, plus $5.7 million a year in avoidable costs, on top of normal operating costs.
It would seem an easy choice. Less money, better product, unification and co-location versus more money, same product, continued fracturing and sprawl. City kids get access, suburban kids get a unified campus with secure parking, everybody gets a regional hub with a college at its core, and money stops being squandered in triplicate.
But there’s resistance.ECC’s current leadership has so far rejected consolidation. The President of ECC would put more public money in a 3-campus system that isolates poor kids in Buffalo, sends suburban kids into traffic Hell at Youngs and Wehrle, and could strand them in proposed dormitories in Orchard Park.
Here’s why the issue has once again heated up.
ECC’s President wants to thwart the planning process that would inevitably recommend a consolidated downtown campus
In late September of 2004, the ECC Board of Trustees was hoodwinked into voting up a proposition. They thought that their only choice was between telling Giambra to come up with $190 million cash on the barrelhead ($160 million for a new campus plus $30 million for a parking structure), or else sticking with the College president’s plan to keep investing a few million here and a few million there in the current three campuses – and avoiding a master-planning process.
The current president of ECC wants the 3-campus status quo. The faculty union wants status quo. Administrators (of whom there are more today than there would be in a unified campus) want status quo. Each academic department that has a presence on each campus has separate leadership, which wants status quo.
The current ECC president wants incremental capital spending on each of the two suburban campuses. He wants to build hockey rinks and dormitories on the South campus in Orchard Park. (If hockey rinks and dorms go anywhere, they should go downtown, of course. A pad of practice rinks next to HSBC arena means that Buffalo could host more amateur skating events.)
The current ECC president wants to build a new academic building at the Amherst campus; new academic building next to the City campus, adjacent to the library and to the new Public Safety Campus – now that would make sense.
But the game is obvious. This incremental spending plan has confused the Board of Trustees into believing that such short-term spending on existing sites should be contrasted with the long-term cost of building one consolidated campus.$160 million for new and better, $130 million for status quo
The dishonesty lies in comparing the capital costs for a new consolidated campus with the capital costs for fixing old campuses – and meanwhile ignoring the altogether avoidable costs of keeping three campuses.
The math is very straightforward.
The “social” math is very straightforward, too.
The current ECC president refers to the City campus as the “inner city” campus.
Has anybody reading this ever encountered the phenomenon of racist code-words?
We are unapologetically, and with some energy, advocating that this community invest a total of $160 million in state and local money in order to get a new, state-of-the-art adult education facility next to the Central Library, the Flickinger Athletic Center, Dunn Tire Park and the new Public Safety Campus (which Giambra built so that we could train all the Buffalo Police, Erie County Sheriff deputies and town, NFTA, UB and other police forces all in one place). The new campus would sit astride the public transport and telecommunication lines that make downtown the administrative, financial and legal hub of the region.
We think that the current structure keeps urban kids isolated, wastes money on maintenance and administration, forces students to drive from campus to campus, sends more than 1,000 students a year to Niagara County’s one-campus community college, and fractures what should be unified.
But division serves a political agenda.The recent board resolution was a smart political move for those who insist on keeping three separate campuses – because now the Board of Trustees, who are all volunteers, seem to have come down squarely against consolidation.
But this fight is not over. The main reason it’s not over is because the College, while independent of the County, can’t come up with money by itself. The College does not have taxing power.
Why did we ever have to deal with this issue?
Three years ago, the board of Trustees of Erie Community College came to Erie County government with a request for $17 million in new capital funding for repairs to decrepit College buildings on the North Campus.
Giambra asked if the College Trustees would engage with the County in doing a formal planning process. The Trustees agreed in 2002, a consultant was hired and a document was produced.The document is called the Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement. (It’s available on-line at the Erie County website, http://www.erie.gov.)
Meanwhile, having enjoyed a good reception for the idea, Giambra decided to build the new Public Safety Campus at the eastern end of downtown, across the street from the Flickinger Athletic Center. (Every grade-school and club swim meet in this part of the world is now held at the Flick; the energy there is fabulous.)
The way we put it, we wanted “a unified state-of-the-art community college campus with a state-of-the-art program that renews our region, energizes our economy and stimulates our future.”
The core of the Public Safety Campus is a building that is now under construction at the corner of Division Street and Elm Street. After this structure is completed, there will be a second structure - which will house the facilities for training public safety personnel from all around this region.
That's what's in the ground and on the way.
But the question has been, are these two buildings alone? What comes next? And the answer lies within the draft generic Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).
This document is a critical step in the development of a Long Range Campus Master Plan.
This document analyzed the alternatives:
a. keeping the current three campus arrangement and rehabilitating and rebuilding; or
b. building a consolidated central campus in downtown Buffalo.
Although this document does not choose between the two alternatives, Giambra in February 2004 endorsed the new consolidated downtown ECC campus. The facts in this report strongly favor that choice – especially the extra operating costs.
Just to make sure that we weren’t trying to make the case with facts alone, we asked Cannon Design to contribute some pictures. They’re in a powerpoint available at http://www.erie.gov.
In sum: a community college is a place for people in transition. Its students are a mix of displaced workers seeking retraining, kids on their way to a four-year school, adults seeking various vocational training courses and even people looking for skills-upgrades related to specific companies in the area. A community college should be accessible (e.g., a 17-minute drive from anywhere in Erie County), up-gradeable, networked (e.g., to every library), cheap, convenient (e.g., with free parking) and flexible in schedule. A community college is not a university. A community college should not be an academic environment sequestered in splendid isolation.
The old Erie County Vocational and Technical College got turned into a three-campus oddity during an era when sprawl was relentless and money for suburban education, apparently, was limitless. Now we have to invest in the College because its physical plant is coming apart and its programs need help. The rest of the community needs to help the Trustees see that everybody is better served by shedding the sprawl mentality, and putting our money where it will do the most for everybody – downtown, in one place, at the region’s core, where our university should have gone in the first place.
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.