Binghamton University administrators said yesterday they would publicize plans and accept feedback about a multimillion-dollar renovation for the aging East Gym the week classes end.

Hundreds of pages of internal documents show that planners have for years been anticipating ‘negativism’ from some members of the campus community ‘ which doomed an almost identical project two years ago ‘ and are strategizing how to massage away the sort of dissent they fear could doom the project.

The town-hall-style forum, to be held May 8, in the Old University Union, room 133 at 4 p.m. and repeated at 7 p.m., will be the first time the East Gym renovation committee accepts public comment on three proposals dated earlier this month to replace the aging, cramped complex.

BU President Lois DeFleur says a modern, fully-equipped recreation center is necessary to help lure the best students to Vestal.

Students, faculty and staff will be able to give planners feedback about the three concepts. The cheapest plan costs $7.8 million and the most expensive costs $17.5, but all three would dramatically increase the number of workout stations in FitSpace, the workout center located in the East Gym.

But while this meeting is the first time students will be able to see the latest East Gym plans, it’s not the first time administrators have opened up such plans to the public.

REJECTED AND BACK AGAIN

Administrators tried but failed in 2005 to persuade student voters to devote money to funding similar renovations. The plan they pushed, pitched as turning the East Gym into a state-of-the-art ‘rec center,’ would have cost $20 million. They would have had to add $169 per semester to the activity fee for future Binghamton undergraduates.

Before raising student fees, administrators are required by law to consult the student body ‘ consultation that took the form of a March 2005 referendum. The campaign to sell the plans, which came to be known in marketing materials as the ‘East Gym Extreme Makeover,’ came with a Web site, giveaways and an advertising blitz, all of which then-Vice President Anthony Ferrara said cost the University around $5,000.

A complement to the marketing blitz was a set of Town Hall meetings advertised as venues to gather feedback from the campus community. But hundreds of documents provided by the University under state open-records laws show that the meetings were actually intended to sell ‘buzz.’

‘Goal: generate ‘buzz,’ a BU official wrote in an unsigned note made during one of the private planning sessions before the forum. The writer added on the same page: ‘Not so much an issue of detail info vs. establishing support for the rec. center itself.’

To foster ‘buzz’ and not ‘detail info,’ some administrators rehearsed the public forums as late as several hours before the first November 2004 presentation.

The documents reveal that rec center supporters feared the meetings ‘might attract negativism’ and ‘turn into a political forum.’ During one evening public forum in November, several students harshly questioned administrators who spoke, including then-Vice President Ferrara and Rodger Summers, the vice president for student affairs, about the $20 million price tag.

Still, during the meetings, architects, BU administrators and Campus Recreation Services officials stuck to the script, stressing amenities instead of cost.

During public statements and interviews with reporters, BU officials avoided the topic of cost, even though the documents detail three building price options ‘ $10 million, $15 million and $20 million ‘ that had been discussed internally for months.

But President DeFleur overruled the objections of several of her top deputies who suggested providing students the ability to vote on the different prices, insisting instead on merely presenting the highest of the three dollar amounts.

‘Their idea was, if we’re going to do this, let’s do this right,’ Matt Schneider, then president of the Student Association, told Pipe Dream last March.

To DeFleur and her supporters, Schneider said, ‘right’ meant the most lavish rec center.

But in the end, nothing would be done at all: the students voted 55 percent to 45 percent in March 2005 against any fee increase.

Now, more than two years later, rec center planners will publicly discuss three less costly price options.

REGROUPING

Still smarting from the backlash against the first rec center campaign, the new committee task to redesign the East Gym wasted no time in evaluating, as one April 4-dated document provided to Pipe Dream by Student Association Executive Vice President David Belsky, ‘lessons learned.’

Among the committee’s concerns was how to avoid the politicization of campus that the rec center project seemed to induce, illustrated by feedback left on a forum set up by the University of the now-defunct reccenter.binghamton.edu show.

While many of the comments are carbon copied and pasted taking points from the Binghamton Outdoors Club, which led a concerted effort to flood the forum with demands for amenities like a rock climbing wall, nearly as many of the comments were a proxy battle about decreased funding for Harpur College and the arts at BU ‘ some more eloquent than others.

‘Stop wasting money on all this crap,’ one student, among almost 150 comments, wrote in a misspelled missive. ‘[W]e need proffesors [sic] and paper.’

So at a September meeting, committee members deliberated ways to defang the renovation plans and make them easier to swallow at another referendum, which the committee seemed intent on holding in fall 2006. As the project’s expected completion time pushed further into the future, the minutes say, it would become more expensive.

‘Historically a [f]all referendum tends to be more successful,’ the minutes say. Even the name of the project was subject to the ebb and flow of opinion shaping. ‘Student Recreation Center’ won out over ‘Campus’ and ‘University Recreation Center’ because, among other reasons, it would ‘help isolate the project from attack by the faculty. The dollars going toward it are not shared with Campus Academics.’

The committee toyed with how many options to include on a referendum ‘ two? three? ‘ and even considered avoiding a referendum altogether in favor of an opinion poll, which would eliminate the rush for fall 2006 but which wouldn’t ‘offer the definitive final answer that a referendum offers.’

But the hustle for the vote seems to have calmed and the fall referendum date was dropped. Seven months passed between the final committee meeting and the release of the plans.

‘ With staff reports