Interview: UMass Dartmouth chancellor sees slim chance of returning to Star Store
When UMass Dartmouth Chancellor Mark Fuller took office two years ago, the university’s art school was at a crossroads. The College of Visual and Performing Arts had been operating out of a former department store in downtown New Bedford for 20 years. A lease-to-own agreement for the property was about to expire. So Fuller faced the choice of buying the Star Store for a dollar, or continuing to rent it from its private owner.
The Star Store — an elaborate, Beaux-Arts building whose renovation helped spark a revitalization of downtown New Bedford as an arts and culture district — had widely reported maintenance problems, including a leaking roof and a busted air conditioning system. But, in his first public interview since the Star Store closed abruptly in August, Fuller claims there are other costs to taking ownership that few people seem to understand. To comply with new green building codes for state-owned property, Fuller said most of the Star Store would have to be rebuilt.
“It was air handlers, it was chillers, it was new windows meeting codes,” he said. “It was new wall infrastructures for sustainability. It was new doors.”
Fuller said the price tag for turning a 100-year-old department store into a green building fell somewhere in the range of $50 million to $75 million. That cost estimate sounded absurd to many people in New Bedford. And as journalists and politicians dug for details, they found Fuller’s cost estimates weren’t based on recent inspections or property assessments. Instead, Fuller said he got his numbers from conversations he had with DCAMM, the state’s Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance. I asked Fuller how he could make such an important decision without clear documentation and precise cost estimates.
“Well, it seems perhaps less nebulous to me than to others because we were experiencing exactly these costs on a campus project for a building that we owned. So there was nothing nebulous about that,” Fuller said. “We know exactly what the renovation is costing at the Arts and Sciences Building. And it was $900 a square foot. The square footage costs of renovation that DCAMM provided were exactly what I was experiencing on campus. And so to me, it was a very, very credible number and I had multiple conversations with them about that number.”
“We know that, you know, the mayor, and many of the citizens are disappointed. We’re disappointed,” Fuller said. “But that doesn’t change the reality of what it would cost us to own that building. One of our major revenue streams at a university is student tuition. So basically, we would have had to raise tuition to pay for that building. I couldn’t do that.”
Instead, Fuller advocated to keep renting the Star Store from its private owner. He said this was a much cheaper way of keeping UMass Dartmouth’s art school in downtown New Bedford.
“Think of this as an apartment. Our obligation was never to renovate a building,” Fuller said. “You would never fix the roof on an apartment that you’re renting. That’s the responsibility of the landlord.”
Then, this past August, just two weeks before the fall semester started, the Massachusetts Senate removed a line in the state budget that had funded the Star Store’s rent for the past 22 years. It was an unexpected change that Fuller said was spearheaded by Mark Montigny, New Bedford’s own state senator. Montigny later said that continuing to rent the Star Store would amount to squandering more than $50 million the state paid under the lease-to-own agreement.
“We would be in the Star Store today if the appropriation had continued. There was no plan on my watch to withdraw from the Star Store,” Fuller said. “We were operating under the best assumption that the appropriation would continue. The governor had put it in the budget, the House had put it in the budget, and Senator Montigny removed it from the budget and stopped our ability to even maintain the building.”
“I know that Senator Montigny had a, you know, particular agenda that he wanted the university to own it,” Fuller said, “despite the consequences, the financial consequences that that would mean to us. And so that’s why it didn’t make it through the Senate. And that surprised us.”
The art school closed over two frantic weeks at the end of August. The transition interfered with students’ education and triggered outrage in New Bedford. Many students now split their time between private studios and a makeshift facility the university set up in a former Bed Bath & Beyond in Dartmouth. I visited the building this month. One graduate student, Immer Cook, said he’s been biking around with fragile ceramics and 50-pound bags of clay. To wet that clay, Cook uses a trash can filled with water instead of a sink. Then, since there are no functioning kilns onsite, he transports his sculptures back out of the facility to fire and glaze them in other studios.
I mentioned to Fuller that, based on my visit to the space, the new facilities didn’t seem up to snuff.
“Oh, absolutely not. And we are, we are well, well aware of that,” Fuller said.
Still, Fuller said the university can only refund tuition if the students formally withdraw from their classes, which means they wouldn’t get any course credit for the three months of work they’ve already done.
“And I know that’s not satisfactory. I get it,” Fuller said. “We’re working around the clock to get everything stood up as quickly as we can. So we’re looking at options in terms of, you know, perhaps new facilities on campus that we can control, and not be, you know, subjected to exit, if you will, based on political whims. So we do have to control our destiny in the future, because this has been a trauma.”
Fuller said the university is renovating the Bed Bath & Beyond campus this winter so the art students can actually finish their work onsite. He said the university is considering extending the lease there for a second year. But Fuller said the long-term solution could look like a new one-story building on the main campus. I asked him if a return to the Star Store is still on the table.
“I never like to say nothing’s possible but, you know, it was expensive to move out,” Fuller said. “I’d be, you know, very open to looking at showcasing, you know, our artists’ work in New Bedford through a gallery or an event space. What is difficult for me to envision is standing up academic programs in, you know, in the Star Store or other facilities that we don’t control … because it puts us at so much risk doing that, as we have experienced here. Politicians change. Budgets change. All of that changes.”
Many people in New Bedford are still hoping there’s a way to save the Star Store. Local politicians have called on Governor Maura Healey to broker a solution. New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell has offered to buy the Star Store and lease it back to UMass Dartmouth. I pressed Fuller to find out who he’s actually talked with and where those conversations went.
“I can tell you that I’ve spoken with Mayor Mitchell. I think his desire is to return everything into the Star Store. I don’t see that pathway. I don’t see how that happens,” Fuller said. “Because even if it were to be put, somehow, that the city would buy this, they’re going to have to deal with the renovations. And you’ve read Mayor Mitchell’s press release from, I don’t know, a couple months ago. He said we could acquire it at the time, but we can’t fix it.”
“So I don’t know who is, I don’t know who’s fixing it. And even without the green building codes that I’m subject to, I think it’s much more expensive than people are anticipating,” Fuller said. “And that would fall on either some, I guess, appropriation that would come or some increase in taxes. I just don’t — I’m not seeing it. I don’t see how we get from where we are to there.”
Back at the Bed Bath & Beyond campus, some students have adapted to a new, slower artistic process. Others are paying out of pocket for private studios. And the Star Store, towering over the main intersection in downtown New Bedford, sits totally empty.
South Coast Bureau Reporter Ben Berke can be reached at bberke@thepublicsradio.org.
The post Interview: UMass Dartmouth chancellor sees slim chance of returning to Star Store appeared first on TPR: The Public's Radio.
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