Board of Trustees meet Thursday, Friday

The first IU Board of Trustees meeting of the year will discuss library renovations and privatized parking for the next fiscal year.

It will begin Thursday and continue through Friday at IUPUI.

Philip N. Eskew Jr., the chair of the facilities and auxiliaries committee for the board of trustees, will deliver a report on proposed renovations to the Herman B Wells Library, according to the trustees’ agenda.

“The media room is being renovated simply because it needs upgrading,” Eskew said.

The report, which Eskew said will be approved by the trustees at the meeting Friday, calls for a renovation of approximately 10,000 square feet of existing film and media archive space.

“But it’s really to protect all of our media records and our archives, and put them into a format where people could go in and view the media materials in a better atmosphere,” Eskew said.

The project would cost an estimated $1.1 million. The cost would be covered by campus renovation funds, as well as gifts through the IU Foundation and campus repair and rehabilitation funds, according to the meeting’s agenda.

Eskew said the project will be finished by December.

“It’s really just upgrading a place in the Wells Library that has needed it for quite some time,” he said.

During the previous trustees meeting, members discussed the issue of privatizing parking.

“Last meeting that was the discussion, and we recommended not to privatize, and that we would come back to the board with a strategic business plan for implementing best practices in parking,” said MaryFrances McCourt, treasurer for the board. 

The board agreed to keep university parking funded, but posed alternate questions to the committee that will be answered during this meeting.

“How is it going to achieve the same amount, economically, that we would have gotten over time through privatization?” asked Thomas Reilly, chair of the board.

McCourt said their key objectives are to improve the efficiency of their operations and to maintain a fair and equitable rate structure.

“We’ve done a lot of work across our campuses looking internally and externally at best practices,” she said.

The plan would be implemented across IU’s eight campuses, possibly spanning the next full fiscal year, McCourt said.

However, Reilly said the neuroscience report is the most interesting item on the agenda.

“Neuroscience is going to be the big thing in the future,” he said.

Follow reporter Kathrine Schulze on Twitter @KathrineSchulze.