Chair Joseph on $50M community college repair allocation

The fiscal 2026 to 2023 capital commitment plan include $50 million in fiscal 2027, only to bring community college to the state of good repair.

The $50 million would be matched by the state for a total of $100 million.

We spoke at the preliminary budget hearing about how CUNY assessed the campuses that need immediate repairs.

Now that the funding has been allocated, will you be performing any additional assessments?

And what colleges will be allocated funding for repairs?

In April, CUNY students and staff rallied for the needs for repairs, citing issues such as broken elevators, mold, flooding, among others.

How will CUNY ensure these problems are addressed quickly?

You want to take that, Dr.?

Yeah, sure.

Thank you for the question.

Let me first start out by saying, obviously, we're very happy with the $50 million.

It matches to $100.

As you recall, we asked for $100 million.

As the Chancellor alluded in his testimony, you know, our community college is struggling from an issue of deferred maintenance and the state of good repair.

As I stated at our hearing, there are multiple ways.

We look at how to prioritize first the campus size and physical infrastructure, the age and condition of the facilities, the state of good repair and deferred maintenance, and then campus needs and strategic priorities.

And all of that, it is really grounded around a couple of areas.

Number one is grounded around the fact that we have done what we call a facility assessment of our facilities, and we know exactly what

systems are going to come offline at a certain time, you know, in six months or a year.

And based on those, knowing those things, then we allocate resources to make sure that we don't have any problems.

In the winter months by, you know, system going offline because it's not, we didn't repair it at the time that we needed to do that.

Furthermore, what we also try to do is really try to really focus on tackling what we call

bathrooms and a whole approach of just dealing with bathrooms and making sure that we have or dealing with

trying to package everything together so we could get the whole issue of economy of scale and trying to do a lot more with less.

And then lastly, I think it's really focused on which other vital systems that we know need our most immediate attention, and those are the ones that we prioritize.

And then we try to distribute those funds across all the schools, so every school at least gets something.

But some schools get more than others based on the age of their infrastructure.

When you do do that assessment, would you be able to share with the committee what that looks like and what's the timeline?

I know that, for example, City Tech, their library ceiling fell.

Is that one of your priorities?

It was on the news.

So when you do decide on and assess those needs and how you plan on addressing those issues, would you share with the committee what your timeline is and what schools did you prioritize and put first?

Sure.

I'm not sure what was on the news was actually what actually happened, but let's...

Too bad I can't play the clip for you, but...

Yeah, no, I understand that.

But not everything we hear in the news is actually factual.

But the fact is that we...

We will definitely be able to provide you that information.

So the news is lying on CUNY?

Excuse me?

Is the news lying on you?

It hasn't in the first time.

Oh.