Time is money, as the design team initially chosen by a collaborative committee to work on the Connective Corridor recently found out.

The team backed out of the plan following a monetary dispute with the city over how much time it needed to spend on the project. The firm estimated it would need to spend three times as many hours on the project than the city expected. This would have led to a substantial cost increase, said Tim Carroll, director of operations for Syracuse.

The delay caused by the firm change is estimated from two to three months.

‘We could not come to terms,’ Carroll said. ‘They thought the project was going to involve a lot of traffic engineering.’ In the end, ‘Field Operations chose to move on.’

Field Operations and Clear were the two firms selected to design the project last year. Field Operations is a large landscape architecture firm based in New York, while Clear is run by Syracuse University architecture professor Julia Czerniak. She did not respond to requests for comment.

The firms and the city parted ways on Sept. 1 after the appropriate number of hours needed to work on the project could not be matched on either side.

The Connective Corridor is being funded by a combination of private donations and federal and state funding. Yet the federal dollars have been secured as transportation money, and Field Operations was not adhering to the guidelines that came with the government financing. Carroll said the firm had no experience with the federal process that guides expenditures.

The corridor – a staple project of the administration of Chancellor Nancy Cantor – is a pedestrian walkway and bus route that will link the SU campus to cultural venues downtown. The path will have bike lanes, street furniture, trees, public art and lighting on fancy, looping orange poles, among other features to attract pedestrians, said Eric Persons, director of engagement initiatives for the university.

The original design team for the project was selected by a committee of city and university officials last November. Yet Persons said the selected design would not be abandoned, though Field Operations and Clear would not longer be the lead developers.

A committee of officials from the mayor’s administration, city councilors and representatives from SU will meet today to discuss the new engineering designer that will take over the project. Both Persons and Carroll said the decision will be made within a month.

Carroll, the city official, said the new firm needs to be an engineering and design firm that can ‘take the scope of work that was developed and bring it to a final design stage.’

The initial firms were primarily urban designers, but the new one will have an engineering focus and is expected to have more familiarity with operating under the restrictions of federal financing.

‘In general we’re looking for an engineering firm who has assembled a team whose composition, experience and talent can best meet the urban design strategy that was presented in this competition,’ Persons, from SU, said.

He made it clear that the committee wants to select a group that can work within the artistic renderings students have been seeing of the Connective Corridor in promotional materials for the past 10 months.

‘We need an engineering firm that really understands these issues and to come in and really be consistent with the strategy we’ve laid out with the competition,’ Persons said.

The project is currently planned to stretch from University Avenue to State Street along Genesee Street. Persons said the eventual plan is to extend the corridor to Armory Square and southward toward the new convention center and hotel being built near the OnCenter.

SU and city officials are currently lobbying for an additional $10 million from New York state to finance the extension to Armory Square and the OnCenter (which has been dubbed the Convention Center District).

So far, the corridor has been funded by $11.3 million in federal funding – which came with spending restrictions that led to the ousting of the original design group – and private donations.

The university is not funding the project in any way, though a considerable amount of time and effort is spent by well-compensated administrators on its progress.

National Grid donated $1 million to the project. And a vice president from there, Marilyn Higgins, was hired by the university during the summer to take on the newly created position of vice president for community engagement and economic impact. She will be deeply involved in the university’s academic and artistic contributions to the corridor.

SU’s role in the connective corridor can be summarized with three broad topics, Persons said. It helps with the fundraising, provides the academic component of the project and participates in the ‘spirit of collaboration.’

‘It’s about realizing as an institution that we’re only as good as the community,’ he said.

Currently, the most noticeable presence of the corridor on campus is the bus stop signs notifying the community where Connective Corridor bust stops are located. This was the idea of Student Association President Ryan Kelly who serves on the corridor’s ‘working group,’ an advisory board.

The signs were something that Kelly ‘had brought up as sort of a need to help not only the students, but the community understand where the bus goes and what kinds of cultural and entertainment values exist along its route,’ Persons said.

Carroll said progress will be seen the public piece by piece.

‘Every year, they are going to see something that defines the Connective Corridor,’ he said. ‘You’re going to hear about the Connective Corridor for years to come.’

Published on October 18, 2007 at 12:00 pm