Work continued Friday morning on the Wood Innovation and Design Centre (WIDC) downtown, while up the hill at UNBC, we finally found what will go into this six-storey $25-million building when it's finished next fall.
Because up until yesterday, the provincial government had started construction on a building but hadn't told anybody exactly what it was for.
While "build it and they will come" may work in Kevin Costner movies, it's an irresponsible use of tax dollars.
The fancy title of Wood Innovation and Design Centre was applied when it was going to be an 11-storey, $160-million monstrosity that would have covered the entire block across the street from the Ramada Hotel. Remember the hype? It was going to be a global showcase for the potential for wood construction, one of the tallest, no wait, hold on, THE TALLEST wood building IN THE WORLD!
What would happen inside of it?
Well, research into doing other cool things that could be done with wood and some engineering stuff and it'll be a downtown campus for UNBC and... don't worry, we'll figure it out.
Let's not get bogged down by details.
But let's build it!
It'll be great for downtown revitalization!
It'll put Prince George on the map!
The unrealistic ambitions are long gone, evaporated in the hot air of Throne Speeches, but the ridiculousness of the entire project lives on.
It was announced Friday that WIDC will house two new master degree programs in engineering. Along with a technical one-year, course-based master of engineering in integrated wood design, the facility will also teach the students of a more formal, thesis-based master of science degree program in wood-related engineering research.
On top of the $100,000 the province kicked in back in March in seed money for UNBC to develop the degrees, another $466,000 was added to great fanfare Friday by the Ministry of Advanced Education to pay for the start-up costs of the two programs.
Sounds great for 36 full-time equivalent student spaces doing important research and the importance of that research was stressed to no end as part of the announcement.
Unfortunately, no one mentioned how ludicrous it is to house 36 students, along with the accompanying staff and faculty, in such a large and expensive building.
UNBC tells us on its website that it had more than 4,200 students in academic programs from September 2010 through August 2011. If a massive forest fire from hell were to burn the entire university to the ground and the provincial government were to decide to rebuild UNBC to its current glory, using the same ratio of building cost to number of students being used for WIDC ($694,444.44 per student), it would cost $2.9 billion.
To put that number in context, the four-storey Teaching and Learning Centre building at UNBC cost $31.3 million ($29 million budget with a $2.3 million cost overrun) to build. It opened in 2008. The Northern Sport Centre cost about $30 million, as well.
In other words, the napkin-math replacement cost for the entire campus would be somewhere in the $250-million to $300-million range.
So why do 36 students need a Taj Mahal satellite campus downtown?
Great question, particularly since around half of those students will be doing strictly course work, which could easily be accommodated in already existing classroom space at UNBC. Furthermore, the whole point of a university campus is to have students and faculty working together at the same location, with plenty of options for inter-disciplinary collaboration. Isolating the students and professors for these two new graduate programs downtown, no matter how expensive and wonderful the building, will be to their detriment and the detriment of the remainder of the school body at the main campus.
WIDC is the wrong building in the wrong place at definitely the wrong price. That money would have been better used to not only fund those two new programs but also an entire undergraduate engineering program up at the main campus.
Instead, we'll have a beautiful engineering marvel downtown that only a handful of people will use.
Now that's wood waste.
