A $35 million brain center was closed for four months. We may never know why.
If you care, call FAU Vice President of Public Affairs Peter Hull at 561-297-1352 and let him know that the public would appreciate a public university that promptly replies to public record requests.
Florida Atlantic University doesn’t want you to know how it spent $35 million of taxpayers money on a building that doesn’t work.
After the university opened the Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute in Jupiter with great fanfare in January it shut it down with no fanfare on July 30.
Little is known about the reasons behind the shutdown, the cost to reopen the building, the loss of experiments caused by the shutdown and who is going to pay for it all.
On Monday, the university said the building reopened — sort of. Research and lab animals cannot return until other thresholds are met and that could take up to eight and a half months, an internal email provided by the university said.
The state put up the money to construct the three-story, 58,000-square-foot building. A foundation headed by David J.S. Nicholson gave FAU $10 million to help run innovative programs within it.
In a state often credited with the best public records laws in the nation, FAU has gone to great lengths to keep you in the dark on why the building closed and who's paying to fix it.
Stet Palm Beach made numerous attempts to get more information but the university as the sole keeper of records that could have answered basic public questions stonewalled.
Here’s how:
The university’s public statements on the building closure started with a brief press release sent to the University Press, the FAU student newspaper, which posted a three-paragraph item on Aug. 4.
The item announced that out of “an abundance of caution” the $35 million building had been closed to undergo “an evaluation of its building services systems due to some apparent malfunctions.”
It was not sent to major local media outlets, which did not begin reporting on the closure until Stet Palm Beach and OnGardens.org reporter Joel Engelhardt teamed with University Press Editor-in-Chief Jessica Abramsky to publish a fuller story on Aug. 28.
There’s no city or county building permit review of buildings on state-owned land. FAU is the only body that signs off. So FAU controlled all of the information, which was public due to the university’s reliance on taxpayer dollars.
Three weeks after the UP story, when pressed for more information, university spokesman Joshua Glanzer did not return phone calls and simply forwarded the same vague statement.
At that point, Abramsky lucked out: She got a response to a public records request that included an email describing the closure. The university did not charge her for this service.
“Our current state is to relocate occupants (by 7/30/23) and then animals (ASAP) because the building pressurization is unstable and any condition which knocks the HVAC off line (fire alarm, power fluctuation, or otherwise) causes the potential for entrapment,” Wendy Ash Graves, the director of the FAU Office of Environmental Health and Safety, wrote to colleagues on July 29, a Saturday.
The ducking begins
The brief internal email formed the linchpin of the news story produced by Abramsky with Stet Palm Beach and OnGardens.org.
What did Ash Graves mean by entrapment? Ash Graves and university employees copied on the email did not return phone calls.
Other students and faculty referred questions to the north campus spokesperson Cara Perry. She did not return calls.
University officials on the Boca Raton campus charged with handling queries from the media also did not reply.
When other local media began covering the closure, more details emerged.
Perry, an associate vice president of research communications, spoke to The Palm Beach Post, saying engineers and architects had been hired to figure out what went wrong and how it would be fixed.
“It has something to do with the control systems in the building. This kind of building is not your typical building. It is a very complex and sophisticated building with a lot of careful engineering. That is why it is taking a little time to pinpoint," Perry told The Post in a story published Aug. 31.
The 14 questions FAU won't answer
After that, Perry responded to Engelhardt’s calls, answered some questions and agreed to answer a more detailed set of written questions. He sent her 14 questions on Aug. 31.
She provided short answers to three of the questions in a Sept. 14 text message but the remainder never have been answered.
On Sept. 15, she indicated the rest of the answers would be forthcoming.
“I need to connect with one more person and she is out sick today,” Perry texted.
Six days went by. When contacted again, Perry’s tone had changed.
“I was told by my supervisor, Peter Hull, that we do not have any additional information to provide right now. It’s an ongoing project. You can reach out to him if you like,” she texted.
At least 10 calls since Sept. 22 to Hull went to voicemail and never were returned.
That same day, Engelhardt made a public records request for the answers Perry had prepared.
Typically, the university considers the amount of work that would be needed to fulfill the request and provides a cost estimate, which must be paid before the university will provide the records. That can take a week or in some cases as long as a month.
In this instance, it’s been more than two months and the university has not responded.
Stonewalling common at FAU
FAU, which drew statewide attention over its aborted presidential search and still does not have a permanent president, appears to want no such public dialogue over its shuttered $35 million building.
But under state law that doesn’t matter.
The records must be provided within a reasonable time frame, state law says, although it does not define reasonable.
It’s not uncommon for FAU to fail to promptly respond to public records requests.
The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which supports free speech rights on college campuses, has been in talks with FAU’s General Counsel’s Office for four years to improve its transparency.
In some cases, they’ve made strides, said Lindsie Rank, FIRE’s student press counsel. But advances often are followed by periods of unresponsiveness, she said.
The university’s refusal to respond to questions about Stiles-Nicholson appears to be working.
With the building partially reopening Monday, the questions of what happened and how much it cost taxpayers are likely to blur.
If taxpayers object to FAU’s refusal to turn over public records, they can let the university know by calling the office of FAU Vice President of Public Affairs Peter Hull at 561-297-1352. His email address is hullp@fau.edu.
More FAU transparency failures
FAU stonewalls University Press investigation into removal of criminology professor, here.
FAU claims no documentation behind the partial closure for repairs of a major Boca Raton campus parking garage, here.
Read the 14 questions FAU won’t answer here.
This story appeared with permission in OnGardens.org.