Transcript General Faculty Meeting
October 23, 2018
Michael Baginski, Chair: Welcome to the October 23, 2018 General Faculty meeting. There is no sign-up sheet here and a quorum is those who attend this meeting. I now call the meeting to order. Thank you for coming today to the fall General Faculty Meeting. I am Michael Baginski, the University Senate Chair and I also chair this General Faculty Meeting.
Our first task is to approve the minutes from the March 6, 2018 spring General Faculty Meeting. These minutes have been posted on the University Senate Web site. Are there any additions, changes, or corrections to the minutes?
Hearing none, with no objections the minutes are approved by unanimous consent. I would like to remind you of some of the basic procedures of the meeting. If you’d like to speak about an issue or ask a question, please go to the microphone on either side aisle. When it is your turn, state your name, You can ask questions of general interest, but you cannot have a personal conversation with the speaker or anyone else.
The only remarks I have today is that I am very thankful for the cooler weather this fall and it’s finally here.
I would like to introduce the officers of the Senate and our administrative assistant. Dan Svyantek is the immediate past chair, Nedret Billor is the chair-elect, Beverly Marshall is the secretary this year, Adrienne Wilson is the secretary-elect, and last, but not least, Laura Kloberg is our administrative assistant.
Are there any questions? (none)
We have several information items, the first is a presentation on one-year in Mell EASL facility, by Wiebke Kuhn. [2:00]
Wiebke Kuhn, Learning Spaces/Faculty Development Coordinator, Biggio Center: Good afternoon everyone, I am Wiebke Kuhn of the Learning Spaces/Faculty Development Coordinator. I work in the Biggio Center and my primary responsibility is with the active learning spaces across campus, which one of the big ones of course is the opening of the Mell Classroom Building at the RBD Library. I talked with you last April, I want to say, and at that point I was able to show you lots of drawings and sketches and construction pictures. Now we are in full production.
So, as you may know, evidence suggests that academic performance increases when you are in an active learning space. There have been multiple studies about it. [3:14] the most basic one because it is meta-analysis by Freeman and colleagues where they were showing that you can get 6% of a grade increase when you are participating in an active learning classroom space for your class in a STEM field in comparison to traditional lecture and that you are one and a half times less likely to fail your STEM class if you are participating in an active learning classroom.
What we have at Auburn is at this moment in time is 50 EASL spaces. EASL stands for Engaged in Active Student Learning. 28 of those are actually in this new building that we’ve now had opened since August 20, last year (2017) This semester alone we have 43% of our students on campus in that space taking classes, and 13 of those in multiple EASL courses. Which means that they are starting to expect this kind of space when they are walking into classroom spaces and that can also change what they are expecting you to do in these types of spaces. Plus, we have this rollout of EASL spaces, the Biggio Center also made a concerted effort of reaching out to all of you to participate in workshops and other professional development opportunities and over 500 people participating in workshops that were specifically geared towards active learning and rethinking your causes towards active learning. We actually had over 1,000 faculty and graduate students and staff members participate, including in all sorts of Biggio Center activities. [5:06]
What do we have in Mell? If you haven’t been in that space, we have 2 lecture halls, each of them seats 166 students, they also have a couple of active learning principles built into them, so even though you may be using that as a traditional lecture space you can also do active learning in that. We have what we call full EASL spaces. Those are spaces that not only have collaborative furniture that you can freely move about, but you also have sharing technology that is associated with individual monitors so that each student cluster can share their mobile devices to that monitor. So, I can share my material the way that I am doing it right now. But I can also turn it over to the students, so they can collaborate in their groups and then show what the students are doing. That’s the picture that you have at the top there.
Then what we call EASL lite spaces, they have the collaborative furniture they have glass board spaces with eraseable surfaces all around the room, because we’ve noticed that most faculty and most students that is their definite comfort level. There are definitely classes that benefit a great deal from having that additional technology available to them, but if you want to get started in these kinds of spaces with this kind of learning because of what you are teaching then the EASL lite spaces tend to be a really easy way to get going. We also in the Mell Classroom space in the addition to what we built on the Library we have 14 new study spaces that students can reserve online, and you can also reserve them online. We have quite a few faculty members that never actually go back to their offices, they just hang out in Mell and have office hours there and go into the Library and do their research. Of course, since August we have Panera, which has increased foot and crumb traffic considerably. (laughter)
We have just a couple of numbers for you. These are numbers in terms of enrollment, how many sections we have in that space, how many students we’ve had in that space. We do not have any spring 2019 numbers yet because registration had not started when I prepared this presentation. We have everything from first year through graduate courses in the building, we have 10 different colleges that take advantage of these spaces and 36 departments. So, it’s a wide variety and everybody is quite visible when they are teaching so when you walk through the building you can look in and see what a chemistry lecture is doing and then walk a few flight of stairs up and see what a nutrition class is doing and then head over and see what a literature class may be working on. Lots of variety and the students are enjoying that a great deal.
We have the study spaces, we also have lots of informal seating in that space. We have classroom space when there is not a class in it, can also be turned over and be reserved for events and for studying. We have had at this point over 5,000 different events. A lot of that are the supplemental instruction events. They take up a lot of the space in Mell in the late afternoon and evening and the supplemental instruction sessions really flourish in these kinds of active learning spaces. We’ve had many of the Critical Conversations Lectures in this space. We have a number of conferences, like the University Writing Office, they had a conference over the summer that was being held in that space. We had a learning assessment summit, we had a math conference, lots of summer camps, so on the whole the building even in the summer is very busy. For the rooms that you can reserve online we have had over 60,000 reservations.
When the Library is open this building is open which means there is always somebody in there studying. [9:33] So, come and visit if you haven’t done it yet. Do let me say this, if you are planning doing Panera, I would suggest that you go online and use that new app, “tapingo.” Any questions?
If you are interested in teaching in this space, send me an e-mail. I am the only Wiebke on campus so you should be able to find me. Thank you.
Michael Baginski, Chair: Thank you very much.
Next, Annette Kluck will discuss Faculty Exit Interviews. [10:53]
Dan Svyantek, Immediate Past Chair: Mike may like the cold weather, I don’t. my knee is already killing me this winter.
This is an outgrowth of some information we received when Annette and I and another group of faculty were preparing an NSF Grant, an IT Grant, they are for changing culture and things like that in large organizations like universities. One of the things we received was feedback that you want to change but you don’t know why you want change in terms of retaining faculty. We realize that we don’t have an Exit Interview Strategy available on campus and so, Annette and I started working on it and this is just an in-process draft that we want to present to people.
Annette Kluck, Assistant Provost Women’s Initiatives: Thanks Dan. Like Dan said this really came out of feedback that we should be…a lot of institutions do monitor in some kind of systematic way why faculty are leaving. [12:12] I spoke with Kerry Ransel and some colleges do have exit interviews, not all do that. So, formalizing a strategy would be an opportunity to insure that information is getting to the faculty leadership as well as the administration.
As I mentioned, we don’t have a standardized strategy. Essentially what I am hoping the Senate would be interested in is some process to formalize as to what this looks like so any faculty member leaving the university has the opportunity to participate in an exit interview. That would then inform our continuous improvement.
It would be offered to all, currently as it stands, tenure track faculty or not who leave regardless for the reason for leaving, they could always opt out. This would be a process that would involve up to 3 people. There would be a representative from the Provost’s Office. In our current structure that might be someone like Kerry Ransel who has an understanding of HR for faculty. There would be a representative from OID, that might be myself from Women’s Initiatives, the one faculty member within OID, but there would certainly be an opportunity for the faculty member to request someone else. And then a representative that would be appointed by Senate Leadership.
We talked some about this already. Ultimately each faculty member could decide that they only wish to meet with a subset of those individuals and then of course the strategy would be that the committee would prepare a summary of their findings at the end of the year, at least once a year for Senate Leadership as well as for the Provost’s Office, thus providing some strategy for that information to flow back to the institution so we can figure out why faculty leave and where we feel there are areas that need improvement and begin the work on that process.
Questions?
Mitchel Brown, political science: I am wondering why the language of this, and I think this is a great idea, but I am wondering why the language just restricts it to tenure-track faculty? While we still have fewer contingent faculty than most campuses do and permanent instructor positions than most campuses do, we do have those faculty and I wonder why they are not included in this?
Annette Kluck, Assistant Provost Women’s Initiatives: I think that’s a great point and that could certainly be a part of the way this is modified. This is very early on in sort of thinking what this might look like, so I think that is a great point.
Thanks.
Michael Baginski, Chair: Thank you.
Dan King will now give us a construction update. [15:27]
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: Good afternoon, thank you for giving me the opportunity to tell you a little bit about some of the ongoing construction projects on campus and some of the upcoming projects that will happen in the next 6 months to a year. I’d be happy to take questions when we’re done.
Currently, we have about 28 active capital projects ongoing at the university at either the planning, design, or construction phase. A capital project is defined by the Board of Trustees as any new construction or alteration over a million dollars. So, any project that fits into that sort of size cost category would be considered a capital project, so we are tracking those.
From a planning standpoint we have a long list of potential projects in addition to what’s actually underway and you can see those on the left-hand side. If all of those came to happen it would be almost 800 million dollars, 1.7 million additional square feet. Not sure all of those are affordable, not sure that all of those will stand the test of prioritization, but what’s actually approved by the Board of Trustees and these are very solid and most of them are underway, is about 286 million dollars and almost 800 or 900 thousand additional square feet being added to the campus. So, by any measure, and I am sure have seen walking around campus there is an awful lot of construction going on and there are some numbers that would prove that quantitatively to match your probably qualitative experience of seeing it all and having some of the disruption.
I thought I’d start with a couple of maps and kind of walk around campus and show some of the main projects. And then I have a slide on some of the major ones, so my presentation is about 10-11 slides, not too many. Most of it is just pictures.
Starting up in the center of the diagram at the top, graduate education is underway, moving around to the right, Brown Koppel Engineering project, over by the hotel we’ve got the south College parking deck. The projects in White are actually underway. They are in construction, the projects that are listed in orange are programed to start within the next 6-8 months, by next summer anyway. And we'll talk about this as the last project, but a huge project that will have tremendous, we think positive academic impact, constructional impact will be the academic classroom and laboratory complex. It’s the sister project to the Mell Classroom Building and it’s about twice as big. It’s intended to really add a lot of new and modern classrooms to the university inventory. Going where Parker and Allison Halls currently are to replace those older buildings. Goodwin Hall we will talk about in a couple of minutes, the band rehearsal building will be an addition onto Goodwin Hall. The Leach Science Center is on the corner of Duncan and South Donahue, we are building a new facility particularly for physics, kind of wrapping it around the existing Leach Hall and all the research laboratories that physics has there. That’s one set of projects.
A little further out, this map is pulled out a little bit to show the entire campus. We anticipate student housing being built on campus up in the Village parking lot probably starting in about a year or so, maybe sooner. There is a desire to, frankly, replace the Hill residence halls, that’s what that’s about. There is the Rane Culinary Science Center which would go on the corner of Thach and South College, doing a lot of work on that, largely Human Sciences and Hotel related project. In conjunction with the State of Alabama and some money they are providing us, the civil engineering department there is an Advanced Structural Testing Laboratory which will go way out on the west end of west Samford, actually out by the facilities complex where we are, right where west Samford and Shug Jordan hit. Again that will be a laboratory where civil engineering can have all kinds of cool big toys to break all kinds of concrete beams and cylinders and other structural elements to see how that works.
We’ve got a huge project that’s going to go sort of where the Fraternities are on Lem Morrison and where some of the Beef teaching cow herd would graze to build new recreation fields for the students. A number of new recreation fields. We just signed that contract, I think, today.
Most of you have seen and are well aware of the Gogue Performing Arts Center along South College. There’s a Childcare Center in the Research Park, we are not particularly managing that project but it’s being done via the university and a third party, the Research Park and a third party. A long-awaited addition to the university from a capability and support the parents on campus.
And last but certainly not least, we have been working to relocate the Poultry Farm from the south end of campus, probably for the last 3-4 years, and we got approval from the Board to finally relocate all of the rest of the facilities out there, so in about 2 years from now, maybe summer of 2021 we would like to see all those barns you see when you drive up South College gone and that will become available for Research Park expansion and new facilities in the Research Park. [22:00] So, that’s an overview, high level, looking at the overall campus.
Some specific buildings; I took these on Friday it was a cloudy day, sorry the picture is not prettier than it is, but this is the Graduate Business Education Building on the corner of Magnolia and S. Donahue. It is going right next to Lower Hall. A pretty big building 105,000 square feet. We anticipate it being done this spring and gear up for a couple of months and have it up and ready for fall semester.
A huge project and a very important project for the College of Engineering is the Brown Koppel Engineering Achievement Center, across the walkway when you leave this building you will see that. It’s 142,000 square feet, you can see the main building, blue and green there which is thermal insulation for the building. Sometimes we get asked if we are going to leave it those crazy colors, but no we will not, it is just the insulation, it will get covered with brick.
A really interesting thing about this facility is…you can sort of see in the bottom left a flat area. That is a raised area with a bunch of spaces of structural concrete, on top of that will go a courtyard, but underneath it there’s 40 or 45 thousand square feet of laboratory space that is just going to be shelled out for future engineering laboratory growth. So, engineering, we think, was very strategic in how they considered that building and planned for the future to allow for future growth of their laboratories. Our fear is that if will get filled up pretty quick, and I suspect it will. But a great project there for the College of Engineering.
Leach Science Center, we threw out the front end of the existing Leach building, and this 3-story wrap-around of that will go in place. It will hold some classrooms, a bunch of office spaces for the physics faculty that have to get out of particularly Allison Hall, as part of the Academic Classroom and lab complex construction. That project is running behind schedule and won’t be completed until about February. We are trying to work all that out with COSAM and the Physics department. I appreciate their patience on that one.
Most of you are aware of the Gogue Performing Arts Center. Hard to miss it on S. College, huge project. One of our more expensive projects, a very complex building. Should be open summer 2019 and I think they are planning some kind of opening and then have their first set of performances probably in the fall of 2019. The university is looking forward to having the capability to bring the arts in a bigger and better way to campus than what we’ve had before.
[25:24]
The South College Parking Deck on the south side of the Hotel and Conference Center. The intent is to provide almost 600 spaces there to increase parking in that section of campus. It would support additional faculty and staff in that area because the northeast quadrant of campus is where the real deficit is. That will come online late spring 2019, early summer. Those are all projects that are underway.
A couple of projects that are about to start. One is the Goodwin Hall, Band Rehearsal Hall addition. We’ve been working with Liberal Arts on this facility for a number of years. Finally got a configuration that seemed to work within the budget available to build an addition onto Goodwin Hall so the marching band has a place where they can practice that is acoustically acceptable. I particularly mention this, it will cause some disruption in the Miller-Gorrie/Goodwin Hall area of campus. The pedestrian walkway that goes between them will stay open but there will be construction in the parking lot next to Goodwin, right off W. Samford.
This is the Recreation Field Expansion that I mentioned earlier. The road looping around there is Lem Morrision and the fraternity houses are on Lem Morrison so the fields will be on the back side of the fraternity houses. This represents a pretty major expansion to campus recreation and will allow both intramural sports and club sports to expand and have more capability than they currently have. Campus Rec is paying for that.
Finally, the major project for the next 2 or 3 years will be the Academic Classroom and Laboratory Complex with Student Dining. It is going on the site of Parker and Allison Halls. Allison will come down first, probably beginning in the summer time, one of the reasons we had to move the physics faculty. Parker will stay in place for most of the construction. The Building to the left that you see is the academic building, the building to the right is a dining hall that will be built to serve the core of campus. Some statistics on what’s going to go in the academic building [27:58]; a 300-seat lecture hall, a 200-seat lecture hall, a 100-seat lecture hall, two 120-seat lecture halls, two-99 seat EASL classrooms, four 80-seat EASL classrooms, and 24- or 32-seat regular classrooms. A pretty major academic building, it has a lot of collaboration space, a lot of space for informal breakouts, tends to be an important way that people learn these days. We look forward to getting that underway. The view you see there is probably what you’d see if you were in a helicopter over one of the Quad dorms, looking toward the southwest. The stadium would be over here, pointing to the upper right off the page and the Student Center off to the right of the page. This is the campus green, so it will have a major impact on the edge of the campus green as well when that gets built. This is the hill that goes down to where Allison is and behind the building is Bibb Graves Amphitheatre. It will be a great facility, but construction will be disruptive because it is right in the core of campus. Not looking forward to that.
That is my presentation and I am happy to take questions. [29:32]
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: Excuse my voice, I am getting over a cold. We were at one point negotiating a building to be used to house both geological sciences as well as ourselves and that fell through. And I don’t personally know any details about it and wondered if you could fill me in on what might have happened and what might be happening with future time lines. I see you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you so I don’t think that is going to happen so quickly.
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: Probably the absolute solution has not been figured out as to what we are going to do there. What is sort of under consideration at the moment is, so this is probably the major project on campus for the next couple of years. Probably the next major project on the core of campus, after that what we hope and the university leadership is fairly supportive is a replacement of Funchess Hall. Funchess Hall really has two major groups in it, a big Ag group and a COSAM group. So, one of the options that are being considered is, so it might be an Ag building and a COSAM building to replace the one Funchess building. Probably in the parking lot at Comer Hall. In the COSAM building would it be possible to put Geosciences and Mathematics in addition to what’s in Funchess. That’s kind of what’s being planned, it makes it a pretty big building. Is there a better solution by moving it somewhere else? Could be, but that’s probably where most of the discussion over the last 6 months or so has been.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: so, about 40% of biological sciences is located in Funchess along with the Ag group as well, so would those people be moving into this new building that might be located in the parking lot area?
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: Yes. The new building would essentially take the tenants and COSAM and Ag would like to move more into their building from different other facilities to co-locate. But certainly, the primary function of the building would be to provide new space and replacement space for Funchess and to relocate the current tenants within Funchess. Then it’s a matter of what other currently exterior groups to Funchess would go in the new building as well.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: Any concept of the size? When we were first negotiating on this building it was listed out at about 85,000 square feet, but that was close to one-half of the size that was calculated to be needed.
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: The University Architect, Simon, is up there. He may be a little more familiar on the size. It’s a pretty expensive building. Simon, do you recall what the size of the COSAM or the Ag building are?
Simon: (off microphone) 185,000 square feet.
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: For each? They are big buildings.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: Wow, they are almost as big as the one you just mentioned.
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: What Simon said was 185,000 for each of the 2 building, one for COSAM and one for AG. Those are very expensive buildings, the budget is a lot higher than anyone thought, so someone has got to agree to fund all that, but we have to find space eventually for geoscience and mathematics. Whether it is going to be in that building or a separate facility that’s a solution that we have to come up with.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: Each of those buildings are almost as big as the one you are talking about to house physics and that large teaching building over there.
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: They’re big.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: They’re enormous. Thank you.
Rick Hansen, school of Pharmacy: You showed a new student housing facility next to the Village, and my question is What is the plan for replacing the parking that will be displaced when that housing facility goes in?
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: Let’s be real…this right here is S. Donahue so the parking area that is immediately to the west of S. Donahue all the way to the Public Safety Building, originally we thought that might be a good place for student housing. On further thought and input from the housing folks they thought, no. We need to save that space for future business school growth, engineering growth and faculty and staff parking. So the new housing will go on the far west end of the village parking lot where it curves around and Magnolia turns into Wire RD.
It will displace quite a few spaces, roughly about 500 spaces. We are looking at expansion the surface parking here and a number of different places, possibly a parking structure out here. This parking is important and is currently used by commuter students and used during special events, like basketball games and all that, so there’s going to be a high interest level in making sure we don’t lose that capacity for both of those uses. We don’t have the plan exactly figured out but we’ve got some ideas that we’ve been floating up to the administration.
Rick Hansen, school of Pharmacy: I would urge you to consider that with the new business building, I don’t know if that’s temporary displaced parking, but it has had a heavy impact in how far out people are having to go in that area.
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: Correct.
Stacey Hunt, Political Sciences: This is a related question, and maybe you don’t know because I doubt I’m referring about capital improvement that is 1 million dollars or more, I see you are building a lot of new parking lots, but since traffic has gotten congested it has gotten so bad around and on campus. I was wondering if you guys had any projects maybe less than capital projects because they are inexpensive relatively, but projects, instead of parking structures, that could alleviate some of our car reliance that cause traffic jams?
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: Let me answer that in a couple of ways. There are a couple (of projects) that are contemplated, none that are actually locked in with a plan and funded yet. One place that there is a real problem with parking after working hours about 4:00 or 4:30 p.m. is where Lem Morrison meets West Samford Avenue, by the President’s house. That intersection backs up all the way from Lem Morrison all the way back into here (not sure where he was pointing). Our thought, again, not planned, programed or budgeted, is to do away with the 4-way stop and put a traffic circle there. That may eat up some of the corners, but the idea is to how to keep traffic flowing a little better. Another idea that which may not reduce congestion, but the Dean of the School of Nursing is adamant about slowing down the traffic on S. Donahue as it approaches from the south to the Nursing school. The speeds are so fast that it may jeopardize students crossing from the parking lot that we have at the hay field to cross S. Donahue to get to the Nursing School.
So we’ve talked about it. We don’t have a project programed or funded to put in medians or traffic calming, change the lane system a little bit for that.
In general, though to your question, the real thought is we have to use the transit system to move the bulk of people on campus. There is no way we can build ourselves out of the parking problem, particularly for students. General thought is to put parking more on the perimeter and then you bus in. [38:53] Certainly we can encourage cycling and all that, but that would have limited impact.
In conjunction with parking we are always studying that to figure out, what could you add, what could you do different and all that. I don’t know if that’s a great answer to your question, but there’s no lack of thought on how to try to make it better.
Stacey Hunt, Political Sciences: Yea, just because the capital project are very big and most transportation projects are relatively inexpensive, roundabouts and bike lanes don’t cost very much. Do you work with urban planners or are there urban planners on your committee that could help with those kind of less, they are not very expensive projects.
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: Correct, we have in the office of the University Architect we have a department of planning and space management and we have planners and a civil engineer who kind of runs most of our transportation study issue. It’s a problem, a challenge and I am not trying to make any excuses, we only have 2 or 3 north-south or east-west roads on campus. Now we have probably exacerbated that problem by making some pedestrian walkways, but the general thought is that it has enhanced the campus and the livability of campus, but it has some traffic impact. There are just so many places you can move S. Donahue, W. Samford, Lem Morrision, Wire Rd, that you can really move traffic north and south on the campus
Stacey Hunt, Political Sciences: I know a department that has community planners on it, if you wanted any. (laughter)
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: Come on down. We’d be happy to enlist your assistance.
Yes sir?
Tony Moss, Biological Sciences: Sorry to double dip. Regarding the two new buildings that are going to in somewhere on Comer hill where the parking is, are faculty that are going to be associated with those buildings, will they then be relocating their parking to the south parking deck that is currently being built? Or will they be built and faculty move out of Funchess and then Funchess raised and that becomes parking at least for a while?
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: No definitive answer, but a couple possible solutions there. Certainly, the South College parking garage that’s currently under construction was built to help with that future situation because we know we are eventually going to do that. So we are adding 500 spaces or 600 spaces even though we know the hotel will eat up 2 or 3 hundred, but we gain 300 there roughly, one way or another, for the general campus will help with whatever we do with the Funchess replacement. Some options could be. Because of the slope as you go from where Comer is, there is a big hill down in that parking lot to Roosevelt and if you build those buildings that are awfully big, so you got to have a lot of mass and a lot of height, so could the first floor or ground floor be parking? So you get some parking there. Then the Library Parking Garage is woefully undersized for its vital location on campus. It is in a great location on campus. During the day tremendously valuable for faculty and staff parking, at night tremendously valuable for student parking, who are all going to the Library and other academic buildings. So, I think probably part of the solution is going to have to do with the Library parking deck eventually. It is just undersized for that space. [43:05] You could add 3 more stories to that thing, you could make it wider and add a whole other bay, there’s all kinds of stuff you could do. I think the solution is going to have to be some kind of combination of that.
Tony Moss, Biological Sciences: Thank you very much.
Beth Schwartz, Biological Sciences: Hi, I am sorry I came in late I just had a quick question I did look through the presentation beforehand. I noticed the schedule of fees for student’s infractions or whatever, could you pull that up?
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: That’s his presentation, I’m the Facilities guy, I’m not the parking guy.
Beth Schwartz, Biological Sciences: Oh, I am so sorry, I am in the wrong place. Never mind, I’ll wait.
Mike Stern, Economics: I just wanted to ask you about an older presentation you gave and what the status is of one of the projects from then. I was looking at your presentation from 6 years ago at the fall faculty meeting and you had a slide that says the campus objectives from 2012-2020, it was talking about the master plan at that point. That slide said we were to replace old or deteriorating academic buildings in the core of campus to provide a better learning environment for students and working environment for the faculty and staff. And the first item on there was the central classroom facility which we have done and the second item on there was Haley Center. So, we are at 2018 now, and I am wondering where we are at or what the plans are for Haley?
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: Okay, a great question and a goal not yet achieved. That sort of strategy was what we had when Dr. Mazey was here. When Dr. Boosinger took over it was really the emphasis was shifted more toward student success and enhancing academic capability. So we sort of got off to replace the older buildings in the core of campus as sort of the major theme, and some of the buildings that you’ve seen since then, the central classroom facility which morphed into the Mell Classroom Building and Academic Classroom and Lab Complex fortunately stayed as a key thing. So the key to replacing Haley is what do we do with the College of Education and what do we do with the Liberal Arts staff that are in Haley? You got to get them out of there to tear the building down. We are all for tearing it down. Or do a major renovation, know the tower down, although that would be fairly problematic, and even take a quad down or two and then do a massive renovation. Whether that’s cost effective or not or just tear it down and build a new will remain to be seen, but currently the real thought is what has to be done to get Education and Liberal Arts out of Haley Center.
We had a project several years ago to construct a new College of Education Building out on PO Davis Drive on the south end of the Hill residence hall complex and that got put on hold. I believe it has a renewed interest now, so if we can build that and take about half of the current loading out of Haley Center. Then it’s a matter of finding where would we put the Liberal Arts folks that are in Haley Center and we don’t exactly have a solution for that. There may be potential options for the future, but other things would have to happen first. So, that remains in this decade of 2020 we get the ACLC built, early 2020 we get Funchess replaced and personally I’d love to see that Haley would be gone by 2030 in my lifetime, but it’s going to take some major moves to do it.
Mike Stern, Economics: So, there really isn’t a specific plan on Haley. I think the 3rd and 4th were Parker and Allison and we’ve moved forward on getting rid of those so we are doing number 1 and number 3 and 4 and I’ve had colleagues told me when they came here in the ‘90s that they were talking about getting rid of Haley then too. Just wondering when it becomes a reality rather than a push forward?
Dan King, Associate Vice President, Facilities: Still hanging out there, it’s a huge goal, but it’s a tough one. If it was easy to do we’d have done it. Sort of like the Coliseum if you will. The question was, what would it cost? We looked at that 5 or 6 years ago and it was north of 100 million dollars. [47:52]
I’ll just give you another analogy and this is not…well it might be some criticism on us, but when I first got here 10 years ago when we built the Arena and the Coliseum was always 3 years we are going to tear it down. And it’s still 3 years out before we’re going to tear it down. So the Coliseum is another one of these older facilities, outlived its life, still occupied though by folks that need that space, but it needs to come down.
Okay, thank you.
Michael Baginski, Chair: I want to take a moment to welcome Kelvin King. He is the new Executive Director of Campus Safety and Security. I asked him to give a short presentation. Are you going to give one today or not? I think you are at least you are down on the agenda.
Kelvin King, Executive Director, Campus Safety and Security: Let me just do this for the sake of time. I yielded some of my time to my cousin Dan. I didn’t intentionally do that, but it’s been done and enjoy being respective of people’s time. So, I will tell you a little bit about me. I will tell you what the mission is and I will tell you about one initiative that is going on right now where I think with all the new construction, it’s going to be relevant, then I will be here at the end. I have a couple of business cards, you know how to find me and if nothing else, my commitment to Auburn University and to Campus Safety and Security and to you guys, is to be responsive.
Our mission: The safety of all students, faculty, employees, and visitors is the mission of Campus Safety and Security. It’s not complex. We sometimes can make it a little complex, but certainly our commitment is to build, maintain the safest campus in the world. The folks that work in Campus Safety and Security, Is see a commitment from them, I see their energy every day, I know they believe in the mission and we just need you guys to help us keep the campus safe. If you see something, say something.
If you know of something that needs to be done from a Campus Safety and Security perspective, Call us. If you have questions and concerns about something that’s going on in your building or on campus – it doesn’t do you any good to keep it to yourself, call us.
One shameless plug I am going to make, we have a 24/7 operations center. There are 1,200 cameras or so that we are monitoring continuously. With new construction there’s a cost for the cameras. If you are in an existing space and you notice that you don’t have camera coverage and you would like to have some, by all means, give us a call. We will send someone out to do a survey and make a recommendation. It would be up to your respective college to pay. Again, I will be here at the end if someone has a question, if someone has a concern that I can address, I will do so.
How many of you guys know where I came from? Some do. Before coming…for 27 years 10 months I was an FBI Agent. My last station was in Montgomery where I supervised the Mobile division counter intelligence efforts as well as the cyber program for the Mobile FBI as well as our computer analysis response team. I spent 27 years 10 months in the Bureau, I have done everything there is to do in the Bureau, I think. If I didn’t do it, it wasn’t significant.
I am very pleased to be here, I spent 15 years of that career in the Auburn/Opelika area. So this is an opportunity for me that I don’t take lightly, but it’s also an opportunity for me to come home. I am not an Auburn grad, but I spent a lot of time in Auburn or Lee County Alabama. For me this is a close to home as I can get. My wife loves the community. The one thing I’ve said before, I came here because people here, they treat you well when they speak to you. I hope you guys will continue to speak to me and if you need something, call us.
I’ll take the questions at the end.
Michael Baginski, Chair: Thank you very much, and welcome.
Finally, Don Andrae will speak about parking and traffic. [53:52]
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: I do want to say that Parking does work very well with Facilities, the campus architects and planners, we do know about some changes we were talking about with some of the parking going away and try to figure the best way to work it out. We also realize too that the infrastructure of our campus and the city roads does make it sometimes not really conducive to putting a parking lot somewhere because of the traffic going there.
I will get started. I am Don Andrae, the director of transportation services. We just formed transportation services, it used to be parking and transit, but we put them back together now, because they are so integral with what they do, so we have them back together.
Dan talked about all the projects on campus that are going on so what I wanted to do is quickly touch on the ones that will impact parking. You can see the first one up there is the graduate business school. That building will be completed here shortly, and it will add 136 parking spaces back to the inventory. So, that is going to be good for that area. The Brown Koppel will be completed, not that is will make a whole lot of difference, but it will add 3 parking spaces for somebody to park. The South College Deck, when it completes, we will have 239 faculty/staff parking spaces in there. It is a strange situation however [55:21] This is going to be for the Hotel, the ramp going to the second and the second level and the third level will be for faculty/staff. Then the fourth and fifth level will be for the Hotel. There will be a gate at that level so the Hotel spaces are basically protected, there will be certainly nothing for us from our standpoint. It is going to be zoned A, so we will gain all those spaces in the A zone in that area.
The academic classroom that we were talking about, Allison, when it comes down we are going to lose all of Graves Drive, so we are going to lose all the 94 spaces there. We anticipated that. We weren’t sure when they were going to start so we went ahead this year and took the fourth level of the stadium deck and it has been made all B zone parking, so that has added about 100 spaces back to that inventory.
The other one that has an impact is on the corner of Thach and South College, there is a paved lot that is A and B as well as that little gravel lot, we are going to lose all those spaces while they are doing that construction. That’s the impact from parking from there. The other one that he did mention that I don’t have up here that is going to help us, there will be 300 parking spaces out at the Gogue Performing Arts Center that we will be able to utilize in conjunction with transportation, we will have to run a transit bus from there to get to campus. It may end up being a commuter lot. That’s the impacts from parking from that.
The other thing I want to talk about today is there has been a lot of questions about how we do enforcement. What I want to show you is we use license plate recognition. A lot of schools have gone to license plate recognition and we were the first one in the state. We also have permit lists which means we don’t have hang tags anymore. What I want to show you is back in 2013 before we went to license plate recognition (LPR), you can see we wrote 3800 tickets. We have been on license plate recognition since 2014 and using that for enforcement since that time. You can see how it increased the number of tickets we wrote each year after that until we peeked in 2015 with 8300. It dropped the year after that, but only because the fact that we changed parking management systems and we had to redo our LPR so we lost a few there. We lost a lot this semester this year. These figures are only for August and September, it is not for a full year for each one of the years listed. This August and September it dropped drastically again because our new parking management system (which by the way we have put out an request to replace) It had a problem with the way it issued student tickets, so we could not enforce any of the student lots. We did enforce all the faculty/staff lots and maintain the number of tickets with that, which was about 1200 tickets for students parking the those lots.
What you can see is the number of tows we did, because we also decided this year since we could not enforce the student lots the way we wanted to when we went in the faculty/staff lots it doesn’t do me any good to put a ticket on a student’s car if they are parked In a faculty/staff space, you still can’t park. So that is why the number of tows went up. The same thing with wheel locks. You can see the wheel locks went up in 2017 but went down this year because of the same thing. If you wheel lock somebody then they are still in the lot, so it doesn’t do any good. The number of tows went up.
I also want to show you the number of appeals. You can see the number of appeals went down this year and you can also see that the number of appeals that were denied stays about the same yet the number approved went way down. Our students are learning from the fact that we take pictures with every ticket we do. Now we don’t even write tickets anymore, so you won’t be able to see a ticket on a car. If the vehicle is registered, we send an e-mail saying you got a ticket and they can go online and appeal if they want to, but when they go online to appeal it has the pictures showing what they did for violation and they say “oops they got me.” So, they don’t appeal as much.
The appeals Board works the same way, when they get the appeals in and see the pictures, they say, “denied.” Don’t be concerned about the fact that you can’t see a hang tag, you can’t see a ticket, because we are trying to make it as automated as possible which allows us to enforce more.
Back in 2013 when we went to LPR we had 6 people walking the entire campus enforcing and writing tickets. It was hard to see the hang tag if the car was parked straight in and they would have to walk up between cars to see it and it made it challenging in the parking deck to get up near the railing edge to see it. Cars that back in now, that’s like putting a red flag on your car. We get out we check it we write down the license plate and enter it in the system and after about the 3rd day most of the officers recognize the cars and can get the offenders again. That’s how we do enforcement. [1:00:36]
The pricing, you had a question on that; back in 2014-17 we changed it to $10, 20, 40, and $50. Now because of the fact if it was $50 for your first ticket and it went to $100 if you were not registered. We thought that was a little bit steep and we went back to $10 and found out that was not working, Now we’ve gone to $20, 40, 60 and it stays at $60 for 4 or more, so it’s back up higher.
And we also raised the cost of our tows and wheel locks from $85 to $100. We will try to build that back up a little more each year, it’s hard when you go down to go back up as high as you were.
Another thing I want to talk about quickly too is the employee express shuttle. How many of you have used the employee express shuttle or know about it? We run the shuttle on a regular basis from Facilities where there is parking. The shuttle will go on various routes down Thach and College, will go to Ramsey and Lowder, these are regular operation hours for a fixed route, but it also runs on an on call basis, so if you have a meeting over at Nursing and you are here at Broun Hall then you can call in, they will come pick you up and take you out there, when you are done with your meeting call them again to pick you up and bring you back. The last we checked, the maximum wait time was 6 minutes.
I did want to say too that before we close and ask for questions is the fact that we are in the middle of a transportation demand management study that is wrapping up now. We are going to be doing an overview November 9 which the Senate has been invited to come to see for initial recommendations. This will be a complete transportation management study that not only looks at parking but looks at transit, looks at bicycles, looks at walking, and all modes of transportation and parking on campus. There will be numerous recommendations we hope some will be adopted.
Other than that, I am going to open this up for questions, I know you have more questions that I can talk about. [1:03:13]
Tommy Brown, Library: Obviously, the Library deck is near and dear to my heart. Is there a reason why every A, B parking lot on campus can’t be designated as tow away zones?
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: Yes, because there are a lot of people that are in a non-exempt category, if you are non-exempt you cannot get a A zone, so all the people who are non-exempt who are staff and faculty less than 10 years cannot get a A zone, so we don’t make them all A zone, but yes, we are looking at that. We are looking at what we might call Zone parking, so you may see some zone parking in the future, so instead of A it may be called zone 1, zone 2, zone 3, zone 4.
Tommy Brown, Library: In this case, the deck is what I’m concerned about. That’s A and B parking
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: Correct.
Tommy Brown, Library: And you have to be designated one or the other. I am not sure why you can’t make that a tow away zone.
Mike Baginski, Senate Chair: You mean for all A and no B?
Tommy Brown, Library: The reason I am saying this is if you go back and forth in the deck it is swarming with students
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: Students are neither A or B.
Tommy Brown, Library: That is exactly my point.
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: We have looked at several options for the Library deck. One of course is putting a gate there, but then you’d have to have access to get through the gate. The problem with a gate of any kind you have to worry about your egress, and pulling up what if the gate doesn’t open, what if you are not entitled to be there and you still want to get in and now you have 10 cars backed up behind you to South College, so we are looking at other options. One of the good options like the license plate recognition we have talked about, you can have a fixed camera on every vehicle that goes in. If a vehicle doesn’t belong it would automatically alert us and we could come over and tow them out.
Mike Baginski, Senate Chair: That’s what he wants.
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: That’s what we are going to look at doing but we will wait until we get our new parking management system because it has that type of capability in it.
Tommy Brown, Library: Thank you.
Beth Schwartz, Biological Sciences: can you go back to the schedule for what they are charged? [Bkup 1:05:31]
Most of the students at this university are from pretty affluent homes and these prices are not a disincentive. I couldn’t park anywhere earlier this week and ended up going to the pay lot across the street from Rouse and it cost me $12. My A zone spot looks pretty good to students who are going to pay, I mean it ought to be $100 the second time. There ought to be a disincentive and this is not that/
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: It’s not that I don’t disagree with you, what I would say is it’s probably a fact that we get numerous calls, there are a lot of students that do have the ability to not even worry about paying (their mon and dad pays it), but we also have numerous students who are working while they are going to school and yes it’s hard to figure out how do you penalize those that really don’t care and charge them $100…
Beth Schwartz, Biological Sciences: No, I’d apply it across the board, if they are parking where they shouldn’t be parking. If I am late to class because I can’t find parking there’s 265 people without a class. If they’re late because they can’t find parking it’s a very different consequence. I want to have a parking space when I come to work.
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: And if we go to zone parking it will probably resolve some of that, but here’s the other thing too because some students the same way, if they’re late you deduct points from their grade, a lot of professors do.
Beth Schwartz, Biological Sciences: No, not at the size of class that I have. I just want us to have first dibs, I want us to have priority and these policies are not dissuading them enough to say, ‘oh, that’s a faculty spot.”
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: You go back to the Traffic and Parking Committee because I can’t just raise the price. You go back to the Traffic and Parking Committee and discuss with them and see if we can back up to where it was.
Beth Schwartz, Biological Sciences: And the idea of towing is fantastic. So, great.
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: It’s good. I hate to say this, but I would rather wheel lock because I get the money (meaning the university), towing goes to the tow company. I have to trust them that they will do a good job.
Beth Schwartz, Biological Sciences: How much does that cost them to get their car back? Either way?
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: $100.
Beth Schwartz, Biological Sciences: That’s it?
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: It’s $100 for the wheel lock and you have the $20 ticket or $60 ticket on top of it. There are some students who just don’t care. They will come in the office and say, “hey, I got to go to class, tow me.” You call their moms and they say, “my son has to go to class.”
Tony Moss, Biological Sciences: I have been on campuses where the faculty designated parking is entirely gated and it seems to work very well. I saw this at Florida State University and I saw it at Georgia too, I think when I visited there. I worked very smoothly. Any way to consider those kind of options?
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: I think once again we would have to work with Facilities because a lot of the lots, like I said, the infrastructure is not there for the electrical for the gates and again you’d have to make sure you have an area when somebody that comes up that doesn’t belong in there. What you find at these other schools too (which I have been to quite a few myself) is you find out that you have to have a lot of spare gates because students just run through them.
Tony Moss, Biological Sciences: I suppose that is true. Good point.
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: That’s why I say we are looking more at the fixed LPR camera because that will alert us right away that somebody’s gone in that does not belong and we will send a vehicle in right away and just tow them out. Which is much better than trying to stop them from getting in and causing other issues.
Tony Moss, Biological Sciences: I suppose maybe driving over grass and over curbs which they do.
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: Yes they do. I’ve seen at one school where they actually tore down the bushes because the bushes were next to where the gate was, so they just drove through the bushes.
Yes? [1:09:16]
Brian Anderson, Civil Engineering: A couple of things. I have been on campuses in most other states parking for faculty is about $400 or $500. A lot of that goes to building parking structures and they don’t use state money to build parking structures, it is all self-paid for by the parking fee. Would it be a good change if we charge more for permits and invest it in the infrastructure that way?
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: A study is looking at that as a possibility in making the zone parking and raising the price for the different zones that would guarantee that you have a space to park. But to guarantee we would need a gate or a way to make sure of that. It has been discussed a lot. Certainly, right now for $80 a year is a bargain. And it barely covers the cost of the things I am doing so there is really nothing left for me to help Facilities in fixing potholes or signs or things like that and certainly not enough money to put toward a fund that we could save for building a deck. Parking is very expensive, the deck over on South College was 15 million, is that what it was?
Dan King: There’s been a lot of discussion about raising the rates to help raise funds for a parking structure. I think the reluctance is the university leadership today has maybe been concerned about what would be the faculty pushback.
Brian Anderson, Civil Engineering: (for some reason the microphone quit working. comments are difficult to hear) That woefully understates it. $400 for the gate and card to get in special…
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: What we have to do in order to do that is you have to provide an option.
If somebody does not want to pay $400 but still wants to go to work, we have to have an option for them to park whether it is a remote lot with transportation to get you to campus, we have to work all that out. That is what this study is looking at. We will look forward to see what the study comes out with. [1:11:45]
Brian Anderson, Civil Engineering: (for some reason the microphone quit working)
A second question. On the north side of campus I know that you are building the deck on South College but we still have a crisis around Chick Fil-A and all. What’s going to happen when the…is the Gendlda lot going to stay? I saw some drillers out there, what’s going to happen? I’m kind of worried that it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: It’s hard to say what’s going happen. We do know that the arrangement on the Genelda Lot was because it’s not paved. It was a special arrangement that the City gave us permission to do and that’s about run out so something will have to be done probably by 2018 or 2019. I think next year is the last year we can have it as a gravel lot. So I am sure some things are going to change and that’s why there is core drilling. There’s all sorts of developers. Developers are everywhere. We are not sure what’s going to happen there, but we hope that whatever happens is going to help us. There’s been lots of discussion, we could gain space or we could not. [1:12:51]
Dan King: On the north side where all the development is, there are a number of developers who are (cannot understand) they are pretty proximate to campus, just on the other side of Magnolia. I can tell you that (? Real Estate is talking) we are trying to get ourselves inserted into some of those deals to buy 200 or 300 or so spaces. We are trying to pursue participation in anything close to campus.
(more comments off microphone)
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: You talk about what we pay because Wright Street we released those 100 spaces and were paying $125 a month per space. And people were parking there for $80 a year.
Tony Moss Biological Sciences: One last question. I think having shuttle busses on campus is a great idea. Do any go out to the Veterinary School?
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: Yes, there are several routes that go out Wire Road.
Tony Moss Biological Sciences: So, that’s not included in the shuttle bus system that you described.
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: No sir. The regular transit system.
Tony Moss Biological Sciences: These buses are very loud and are always running with the engines while sitting in place. When I visited Bar Harbor and ? they have a million people in Arcadia visiting every year up there and they have very small buses to get around that are very quiet.
Don Andrae, Director Transportation Services: The contract actually calls for hybrid busses, some of them are hybrid, so if you idle at the Student Center, we are looking at ways of stopping that. The new transit bus system will be going out at the end of next year and part of that contract will include electric buses. We are going to make sure we get some electric buses. If fact I will tell you now, Alabama Power has made arrangements with us, we are going to have 2 electric buses on campus in the Spring. They will lone them to us, each one for one week each from two different manufacturers so we can check them out. So, we will be running some electric buses in the spring.
Tony Moss Biological Sciences: That is even better, thank you.
Michael Baginski, Senate Chair:: Thank you very much.
One thing I would like to say before we conclude is that Herb Rotfeld is our parliamentarian. [Aside: Someone put green all over my page.]
This concludes our formal agenda for today.
Is there any unfinished business? (none) Hearing none, is there any new business? (none) Hearing none, I now adjourn the meeting.