Brown tight-lipped on district plans

COURTESY KARL DOMINEY
GAINING KNOWLEDGE: Brown Executive MBA professor Carl Kock leads a class in competitive strategy at the new Providence offices of Brown University Continuing 
Education.
COURTESY KARL DOMINEY GAINING KNOWLEDGE: Brown Executive MBA professor Carl Kock leads a class in competitive strategy at the new Providence offices of Brown University Continuing Education.

(Updated June 4, 3:30p.m.)

When Richard Spies, executive vice president for planning at Brown University, came to College Hill a decade ago for the position that President Ruth Simmons, then one semester into her tenure, created for him, he didn’t know the role the two would end up playing in the creation of Providence’s so-called Knowledge District.
It was January 2002 and the revitalization of the city’s once-thriving Jewelry District into an educational-medical hub designed to create skilled workers and jobs wouldn’t officially begin for another five years. But by that time, Brown already had established a presence there and has continued adding to it despite struggles with city officials and the public.
The recent opening of the university’s continuing-education building in what is now called the Knowledge District and a new financial agreement with the city would seem to cement the college’s prominence in an area where it now employs about 1,000.
But if the university has future plans for the district, it isn’t letting on publicly following its long and sometimes contentious talks with the city over a new payment-in-lieu-of-taxes deal.
“The question is, is there a plan? There is no specific plan,” Spies said. ‘That’s really something the new administration at Brown is going to [handle] at the city level, the state level, and in due course.”
Simmons announced her retirement, effective at the end of the academic year, last spring. Spies followed shortly after and will work with Brown through December but will only be on-site through June.
Christina Hull Paxson, a dean at Princeton University, will arrive July 1 into a renewed sense of municipal cooperation, after the university agreed in early May to pay the city an additional $31.5 million over the next 11 years.
Spies acknowledged the agreement removes a “block.”
“[Debate on payment] certainly made it harder to have high-level discussions about what could or couldn’t be done,” he said. “Things got done, but at the same time there were other things that couldn’t get done.”
But Paxson also arrives with a sharper focus on what the new financial arrangement and the recently released zoning changes for redevelopment of the Interstate 195 land – a major piece of the Knowledge District puzzle – will mean for the university and, increasingly, what the university means to the city. “Destination education is a way to drive economic development,” said Lou Mazzucchelli, director, National Science Foundation EPSCoR/Slater Fellows Program at Slater Technology Fund, and a former venture capitalist. “[But] we can’t believe it’s going to succeed solely on the back of rocket scientists, or in this case, chemists, or in a risky prospect along the lines of crafting, shall we say, video games.”
Brown University opened its Laboratories for Molecular Medicine within the district in 2003, a milestone of its then-newly created Plan for Academic Enrichment, and its first development off College Hill.
Spies said that move was born out of necessity in seeking space.
“It was simultaneous with … a lot of planning work being done on how to accommodate what would be significant growth at Brown over time, like a lot of universities, [in] science and research facilities,” he said. “It really wasn’t until later that there was a more comprehensive decision that we would seek to move in this direction.”
The availability of space, along with the presence of Brown activities and the possible presence of other businesses – for-profit and nonprofit – made the Knowledge District attractive.
The university bought property on South Main Street that houses Hemenway’s as well as university medical programs, in 2005, and land on Richmond Street in 2007 where the $45 million Warren Alpert Medical School eventually was moved in August 2011.
Ship Street Square, a public space across from the medical school, opened in May 2012, as did the continuing-education building on Dyer Street. That building underwent a $5 million renovation and the university said another $3 million is planned.
The University of Rhode Island runs it biotech-manufacturing program from its Providence campus on Washington Street that has sought to align graduates with Knowledge District biotech companies including EpiVax on Clifford Street. The campus also houses the Institute for Immunology and Informatics, or I’Cubed.
“My view is the Knowledge District is a concept rather than a space,” Spies said. “It’s much better that we don’t put a boundary around it. It ought to incorporate [all campuses], hospitals, and commercial areas where there are a lot of the same activities are going on.” URI and Rhode Island College want to build a new nursing-school building that would house their separate programs but would share resources, including teachers and funding.
The idea is to be closer to hospitals and to accommodate, like Brown, a student population that has outgrown campus space.
“Moving nursing education closer to hospitals [is] a very interesting approach,” Mazzucchelli said. “We have a fairly rich hospital structure that needs people. It attracts people into the state and they spend money here even if they end up being nurses elsewhere.”
But part of the bigger picture for the Knowledge District is to create permanent jobs for Rhode Island residents. The state struggles with an unemployment rate of 11.2 percent, the second-worst in the country.
“I think it’s time to really leverage and build [the district] out further,” said Laurie White, president of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce. “Companies might want to be around the kind of research that’s happening with Brown and other universities whose role it is to get the research and discovery out of the labs and into for-profit businesses.”
The problem seems to be space and money. EpiVax, for instance, a nonventure backed firm, has said it would gladly hire more URI graduates if it had increased capacity and financing.
The I-195 Redevelopment District Commission is charged with overseeing development of 22 acres of land within the district into businesses that would be linked with open space.
New regulations, according to Providence Mayor Angel Taveras’ office, allow for expansion of colleges and hospitals there.
The mayor’s office declined to comment further on Brown’s role in future development in the district.
In an interview with Providence Business News last month, however, Taveras acknowledged that Brown was interested “in several parcels” in the district but that was left out of the new payment agreement.
“I look forward to working with them on it, but that would require an additional agreement,” he told PBN. “We said: ‘Let’s just work on what we can agree on now and then work together on that part later.’ I think you can expect to see a lot more cooperation between the city and Brown.”

Please note that in our June 4, 2012 edition, in the article “Brown tight-lipped on district plans,” we misspelled the name of Brown University’s incoming president as Christina Hull Paxon. Her last name is spelled Paxson.

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