EVERETT — They’ve held pep rallies, worn T-shirts and hung banners.
But the selection of a location for a proposed University of Washington branch campus will have little to do with those acts of community pride and rely heavily on a group of “numbers geeks sitting in a windowless room in Olympia,” members of the Everett Area Chamber of Commerce were told Wednesday.
The report due Nov. 15 on the qualities of two Everett sites, a Marysville site and a fourth location in Lake Stevens won’t care too much about geography, said Dr. Lee Huntsman, president emeritus of UW.
Members of each community have promoted their site, most recently at a rally in downtown Everett,
“We’re focused on serving students and serving the state,” Huntsman said. “We’re not particularly focused on physical properties.”
Both Huntsman and Deb Merle, the governor’s education adviser, talked about numbers geeks, although Merle said they “prefer to be called nerds.” She said the nerds are busily running numbers, producing charts and trying to come to agreement on how the various sites stack up, numberwise.
“We are really close to coming up with the numbers,” she said. “And we’re all going to agree to them or I’m going to kill them.”
Merle said she doesn’t want there to be any dispute about the numbers that might derail the project.
A big task, she added, will be to come up with numbers that show the area and the university system have the numbers of new students that require a new institution. “You’ll be happy to know that we can prove it,” she said.
Huntsman and Merle were among four people telling chamber members what needs to be done now to secure a Snohomish County branch campus.
Merle and Dick Thompson, a consultant hired by the city of Everett, said there won’t be a new campus anytime soon unless state revenue forecasts show Washington can afford it.
“A proposal that suggests the funding would be stolen from other parts of the higher education system is a nonstarter,” said Thompson, who referred to what he said were years of the state already “thinning the soup” to cover higher education costs.
Thompson said the Legislature will make the decision and evaluate whether the money is available. Beyond that, he said, backers of a particular site must say the right things to the right people.
“We’re not the center of the universe,” he told the Everett group. “You have to listen to others. You have to explain why. It’s not good enough to yell it into the wind.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
