It took an extra week to move forward with plans providing more stringent oversight on where the university chooses to put new buildings, but the University Senate finally voted yesterday to create an independent body to oversee the process.
Last semester saw intense controversy surrounding the university’s decision to bulldoze the Wooded Hillock to make way for facilities displaced by the planned East Campus development — an episode many hoped the creation of a new committee would help avoid in the future. With the bill’s passage, the Site Selection Committee would replace the Site Selection Processes Committee to oversee and provide feedback on the environmental impact of facilities decisions.
The senate voted 63-14 in favor of creating the new committee.
The proposal was supposed to come to a vote last week, but after an amendment passed that some said fundamentally changed the bill’s content, undergraduate senator Jonathan Sachs made a motion that dismissed the meeting because fewer senators were present than the amount needed to vote. Sachs had said adding the additional committee would further bog down an already convoluted process and hoped to challenge that decision yesterday.
But engineering professor Elisabeth Smela made a motion yesterday to directly vote on the recommendations immediately after the floor was opened for discussion, beating out an undergraduate senator who was en route to the microphone.
The original recommendations proposed by the committee — which was charged with reviewing the university’s site selection processes after East Campus development threatened the Wooded Hillock last semester — called for the transformation of the long-standing Architectural Design Standards Review Board into the Site Selection Committee.
However, Vice President for Administrative Affairs Ann Wylie said that altering a successful committee that deals primarily with the specifics of buildings’ designs into one that analyzes site selection and environmental concerns wouldn’t make sense.
She instead proposed an amendment last week that called for a separate, independent committee that wouldn’t interfere with the function of the existing design board. The amendment passed 39-24 last week.
Because of Sachs’ maneuver, the meeting ended before senators had the chance to vote on the issue, though they debated extensively for over an hour.
Sachs said that he had planned on bringing Wylie’s amendment back to the senate floor for reconsideration in yesterday’s meeting, before Smela moved to vote on the plan without continued debate.
“I wanted to bring it up, but I didn’t have the chance,” Sachs said. “That was really unfortunate.”
Site Selection Processes Committee Chairman Gerald Miller, a chemistry professor, said the design board was recommended to take on the site selection review because it meets regularly but doesn’t have many projects because of the budgetary climate.
“It’s unlikely the committee will have any capital projects with the budget right now,” Miller said, noting the board is only working on two projects. “We chose to use a committee that meets regularly. It’s a committee of experts that is used to making analyses and recommendations.”
Though Miller didn’t support Wylie’s amendment, he said the need for such a review process is imperative.
“I really wanted the senate to act, and they did,” he said. “There are lots of reasons why we need something like this in place, with the possibility of constructing the Purple Line through campus and closing Campus Drive. They’re important issues the committee needs to address. We needed a significant step-up in how we determine site selection.”
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