With the news coming out that President Obama will infuse another $100 billion to try and save the country’s educational system and that Connecticut’s Governor Malloy is pushing to have the Connecticut State University System scaled down and streamlined to help shrink the budget, it hardly seems to make any sense that CCSU’s police department will be provided with a new $5 million building.
The CCSU police are currently housed in a small building on campus adjoined by several mobile trailers. While no one will argue that these are luxurious accommodations, it’s spending like this that will prevent the university from doing other projects which will further the quality of education. With proposed dorm buildings, classroom updates and enhancements and other new facilities on the long-term plan, they should seemingly take precedent over a new police building.
Their current location hasn’t prevented any of the officers from doing their jobs. They are a fully capable staff and are actually very strong for a campus police department. Some schools only have a campus security squads and public safety teams, but the CCSUPD is a fully functional branch of the state’s police department. However, it seems untimely for the university to be asking the state bond commission for such a nice building when we have dorms and academic buildings which dreadfully need renovations or to be replaced entirely.
Take, for example, the ongoing library project. Part of the 10 year plan for this university was to expand the library to nearly double the size and provide the student body with a state of the art reading and research facility. Before the funding for that was approved, the university decided to request the money for this station.
At a university, the learning experience and quality should priority over most other things. While campus safety is a paramount issue at an college, ours is a generally safe one. Our staff isn’t criticizing the police department, but instead those who are lobbying to the state bond commission from this campus. Those in charge at Southern Connecticut State University put in their request to build a new academic building, parking garage and to renovate the student center, all for less than the bid CCSU made for a new public safety building.
We certainly are happy that not all of the funding being pursued by Central is for the police station. They did put in a request to renovate Davidson Hall to be up to date in regards to the state fire code. However, the majority of those allocations were previously approved at past meetings.
Eastern Connecticut State University asked for funds to move an entire softball field and build new surrounding facilities for nearly $3 million less than our requested building will cost. The question remains, are we putting our funds to good use? The specifics of the request are baffling. $42,648 is intended to be spent on the vague item line of art. $250,170 of the funds will be given to the construction administrator.
There is a lot of pressure coming from the leaders of this state to get our budgets in check, but simultaneously increase the graduation rate and the quality of education. With the small and uncommon opportunities that we receive to update, build and strengthen our university in this economy, building a facility for a group that already functions very well may not be the wisest choice. That amount of money should have been used to renovate one or even several academic buildings, which is more important to student success than a new police station will ever be.