I looked at the bond information for the Health and Fitness Center recently. I wanted to know how much the Health and Fitness Center will cost the Washtenaw County taxpayers when all is said and done. If you’re having trouble remembering the bond-and-millage issue to pay for the building, it’s because the WCC Board of Trustees never asked the public to fund the building.
Instead, the Board authorized General Obligation bonds, which come with a higher interest rate but don’t require voter approval. The initial price tag on the Health and Fitness Center was about $13M, and the bonds paid an annual interest rate of 4.25%. The WCC Board of Trustees could have sought a bond-and-millage to pay for the building, which would have cost the taxpayers less. They probably had a very good suspicion that the taxpayers would not approve a publicly funded, privately operated health club that no one asked for, that had no academic value to the College, and that the students couldn’t use. Not to mention that Washtenaw County already has a publicly funded recreation center, which the voters did approve. (It’s a lot easier not to ask, and you have a much better chance of getting what you want when you leave the public out of it.)
What could WCC have had instead of the Health and Fitness Center?
The Health and Fitness Center opened in 2007, so the building was built at the onset of the Great Recession. (Recession-era construction is not ideal, but when the Board of Trustees absolutely has to have an expensive and unnecessary building. what else can you do?) Since that time, its maintenance and repair costs have been enormous. (In the millions of dollars.)
A health club requires unrelenting maintenance. Failure to perform it creates liability because it exposes the subscribers to risk of injury. Liability aside, when the facilities are not in good working order, subscribers find the club less attractive. It might even be considered a breach of contract. So not doing maintenance is not an option.
Minimally, the WCC Board of Trustees saddled the taxpayers with millions of dollars in bond and interest payments. According to the bond registrations, the building – with principal and interest – will cost the taxpayers about $22M when all is said and done. The maintenance will cost millions more. And those extraordinary maintenance costs will never stop until WCC closes the building.
So, if the WCC Board of Trustees took the money they spent on the Health and Fitness Center and spent it on instruction instead, what could WCC have been like? What new programs could WCC have had? What did the Trustees forfeit to build a low-quality, operationally expensive facility will likely never support itself and that duplicates another publicly funded facility less than 2.5 miles away?
Photo Credit: Brett Jordan , via Flickr
