UF Still Building Despite Economy (Op-Ed in The Gainesville Sun) - July 16, 2009
Harvard University recently slowed a major campus expansion because of the economic slump. It is hardly alone: Stung by falling endowments, declining public funding or both, universities nationwide are downgrading or abandoning planned growth.
The University of Florida has not escaped today's economic pressures. But, we believe a strong partnership with the Gainesville community makes us a stronger university, and vice versa. We think that in these tough times, it is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do to invest in the place we call home.
That is why we moved ahead with the Eastside Campus office building we plan to break ground on Monday. It is also why we continue an aggressive building program that amounts to an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars and job creation engine in the Gainesville community and the North Central Florida region.
About the Eastside Campus office building:
From an internal perspective, we need a central location to bring together offices now spread around at several different places. We will have 82,000 square feet in this three-story space housing at least 300 employees. This will centralize UF's services and people power, improving both efficiency and public access.
For East Gainesville, the building represents another in a series of steps forward. For years, UF's presence in this part of town was confined to UF Shands Eastside Community Practice. But in 2004, we opened the Eastside Campus, locating more than 200 staff members there. At the time, we said we planned further expansion. The new building delivers on that promise. In coming months, we will also launch a $12 million data center.
When all is said and done, we will have spent nearly $35 million at the Eastside Campus, with more than 550 full-time employees based there.
Our presence has a couple of benefits. One, it signifies to the world that this too-long-neglected area of Gainesville is a solid, promising place for redevelopment, new development and new businesses. Two, the addition of 550 people who go out for lunch, run errands and shop inevitably bolsters nearby restaurants and businesses.
Wal-Mart last year opened its Supercenter off Waldo Road, adding as many as 400 new jobs. Satchel's Pizza on Northeast 23rd Avenue nearby is already a Gainesville icon.
On a more philosophical level, it should be obvious that no community can reach its full potential with an entire side of town and its population left out of the picture. To become the creative, singular and enticing city we want to become, we have to open the door to the strengths and contributions of all our residents in all our neighborhoods. It might seem that now is not the time to spend precious dollars on new facilities—wherever they are located.
The opposite is true. The scarcity of other opportunities in the construction industry means that we are paying lot less for a lot more. We had nearly two dozen bids for the Eastside office building, far more than the six or seven that had been customary. As a result, the construction budget is already significantly less than we anticipated.
East Gainesville is not the only area to benefit from this climate. Think of the new UF construction along Archer Road - the Biomedical Sciences Building, the Emerging Pathogens Facility, the Shands at UF Cancer Hospital, and so on.
When combined with the VA Medical Center's expansion, these and other projects add up to $1 billion—that's billion, with a "B"—in new construction and a big source of otherwise scarce jobs and services related to the construction industry.
To be sure, putting up new buildings is not all we do for the community or Florida. We continue to pursue technology commercialization, work that has resulted in dozens of spinoffs and over 1,000 jobs. But, the history of the Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubator in Alachua proves that having the right facilities is key. We are working to augment the BDI with a second technology center at the Shands at AGH site as part of our emerging Innovation Hub.
Author and thinker Richard Florida has said famously that technology, talent and tolerance are the 21st century building blocks for economic development. Universities have them all, but that by itself is not a recipe for success. We need the unique strengths, talents and knowledge of Gainesville and its residents as our partners.
As Florida has written, "The key to the future lies in building stronger bridges between universities and their surrounding communities. The old town-gown boundaries must dissolve until it becomes impossible to see where the university ends and the community begins."