Chicago officials used grossly inflated and sometimes double-counted repair estimates to justify a plan approved by the City Council last month to raze and rebuild Kennedy-King College just 27 years after it was constructed, a Tribune review of city-commissioned consultant reports and maintenance records shows.
In arguing to spend $150 million to move the Kennedy-King campus just blocks from its current South Side site, Mayor Richard M. Daley and City Colleges Chancellor Wayne Watson described the present school as the city’s worst fixer-upper, plagued by leaky roofs and cracked concrete walls and in such bad shape it could cost up to $96 million to repair.
Besides questionable repair numbers, that estimate was inflated by costly items that weren’t repairs at all but totally new facilities, such as a multimillion dollar culinary arts center, the Tribune found. What’s more, only three years ago a consultant hired by the city concluded that it would cost just $17.5 million to put the school’s physical plant in good shape.
The Daley administration wants a new Kennedy-King as the centerpiece of a sweeping redevelopment project for the Englewood neighborhood that will include new homes and retail shops.
Key to arguments that the mayor and City Colleges officials used to win City Council approval was a claim that junking the present crumbling facility was a no-brainer.
For not too much more money than it would cost to repair the existing facility, they argued, a shiny new college with modern amenities could be built.
In a glossy booklet passed out in the City Council to justify the new building, City Colleges officials included pictures of water-damaged ceilings and other signs of disrepair and stated the renovation bill would total between $75 million and $96 million.
“The building has basically started decaying in front of us,” Watson told the council’s Finance Committee in September.
A few days later, Daley also bad-mouthed the condition of the facility, telling reporters, “It is very difficult to say we’re going to put $80 million or $90 million into it every so many years.”
The far higher repair costs touted by Daley and Watson were not the product of detailed analysis but grew from a single brainstorming session of city and college staffers, said James Vanek, managing architect of the city’s Public Building Commission, a key participant in the meeting.
Some components of that estimate seem to have as much underpinning as notes jotted on a cocktail napkin over a business lunch. For example, it called for spending $10 million to $15 million to replace the school’s roof. The roofing cost was based on the notion–which was erroneous– that a state agency had spent $6 million on a new Kennedy-King roof in the mid-1980s, Vanek said.
In reality, that roofing job cost only $2.2 million, state officials said.
Such disparities in the rehab estimates heighten the confusion of some construction experts. “It doesn’t make sense to me,” said Chicago architect John Frega, who has worked on many college projects. “It should be looked at very thoroughly before the decision is made to eliminate a building that’s only 27 years old.”
Asked recently about problems with the repair cost estimate, Watson disclaimed any responsibility for the figures and downplayed the importance of the rehab costs.
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“If we repair Kennedy-King College today, whether it costs $70 million or $7 million, you would still have a college that is functionally difficult to manage, functionally difficult to navigate, functionally not a place you would want education to take place,” Watson said.
The existing building, which spans Wentworth Avenue between Marquette Road and 69th Street, is costly to operate and inefficient to use because of its mazelike layout, Watson has argued. In addition, the structure is difficult to keep secure because of its numerous entryways, he maintains.
More important, Watson has long pushed for a new Kennedy-King as a way to revitalize Englewood, the economically depressed South Side neighborhood where he grew up and still lives. As president of Kennedy-King before he took the chancellor’s job last year, Watson lobbied behind the scenes to replace the facility.
That effort stimulated an undercurrent of criticism recently from faculty members across the seven-campus City Colleges system who questioned the wisdom of moving Kennedy-King when the school’s enrollment of for-credit, two-year degree seeking students had slumped from about 10,000 two decades ago to 2,453 this fall.
But Watson’s dream coincided with Daley’s redevelopment vision for Englewood, which in addition to the new school included new shops, a district police station and 400 new homes. The students and faculty would provide ready foot traffic for the new stores, the mayor suggested.
Watson likes to tell visitors that his father graduated from Kennedy-King when it was called Wilson Junior College, founded in 1935 and named for President Woodrow Wilson. In 1969, the school’s name was changed to honor Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy after their assassinations.
In 1972, the school moved to its current facility, built for $31 million and largely funded by a state agency then known as the Illinois Building Authority, the predecessor of today’s Capital Development Board. The sprawling multilevel concrete structure won a national architectural award for its design in 1970.
Now, however, City Colleges officials have nothing good to say about the school’s design. “It’s very difficult to know if that building would have ever worked, given the way it was put together,” said Vincent Williams, an aide to Watson.
Marvin Fitch, a former partner in the architectural firm that designed the school, said the building had no design flaws that would have hastened its obsolescence. “I think that’s a false excuse, probably,” Fitch said.
Though the facility has required substantial repairs over the years, it is not clear whether that work was made necessary simply by wear and tear or fundamental structural problems.
Current administrators contend that the roof, actually a compilation of many roofs divided into sections, leaked from the start. In 1984, the Capital Development Board decided to replace it, citing defective building design and construction.
The agency took no legal action at the time against the architects or contractors.
But Vanek of the Building Commission, which has handled recent Kennedy-King rehab projects, said he is unaware of any design problems that would keep the roof from being watertight.
Nevertheless, the roof has leaked badly in recent years because the repair job commissioned in the 1980s was botched by using the wrong material, both college and state officials agree.
Numerous repairs have since been made under a warranty that accompanied the new roof, but new leaks appeared anyway. Vandalism and urban violence may have also played a part in deterioration. Roofing experts familiar with Kennedy-King said the new roof was frequently punctured by bullets and even by bicycle frames that had somehow been hoisted up three stories.
By 1996, when the consulting firm of R.M. Chin & Associates was hired by the city to assess infrastructure at all City Colleges campuses, it found Kennedy-King, the biggest building in the college system, needed the most repairs. But the report also said Kennedy-King was one of the two most “efficient” of the campuses, based on the large share of its total area devoted to instructional use as opposed to hallways and offices.
Chin recommended a package of repairs totaling $17.5 million, including another replacement of the roof “as soon as possible.” The study pegged the cost of that replacement at only $1.5 million–a far cry from the $10 million to $15 million aldermen were told the job should cost.
Through a spokeswoman, Raymond Chin, the firm’s president, declined to comment on the study.
Tribune questions about the high repair estimates for the current Kennedy-King sparked finger pointing between Watson and Vanek. Watson said last week that the numbers came from the Public Building Commission, and Vanek said they were a “team effort” devised during a “brainstorming session” of staffers from the Building Commission, City Colleges and a consultant.
Vanek said the group used the Chin report recommendations as the starting point, then factored in inflation and additional professional fees. Estimates for major repairs to the roof, exteriors walls and ventilation systems were added on top of that.
However, the costs of many of those repairs had already been included in the Chin figures, meaning that some were double counted. Vanek conceded that “a little bit” of duplication occurred.
The cost estimate handed to the City Council also included more than $15 million to $20 million in projected expenses that aren’t really repair costs at all. That money would go to add a new culinary arts institute to Kennedy-King and upgrade laboratories and other facilities.
Vanek defended the high repair estimate as an attempt to show “funds that would be necessary to make that building a workable facility” and said he had been reluctant to lowball rehab costs.
Concerning the roof, Vanek said he stands by the $10 million to $15 million estimate. He said that also includes the cost of renovating concrete plazas that double as roofs for underground facilities.
But last spring, the Public Building Commission replaced about one-third of the Kennedy-King roof and patched other areas at a cost of $678,000. That price tag might seem to suggest that it would cost about an additional $1.4 million to replace the rest of the roof, but Vanek said the real cost of finishing the job would be higher because the areas repaired last spring were the most easily accessible to work crews.
Watson maintains that numbers aren’t the central issue.
“Right now, individuals in that community are worth $26,000 a year to a correctional institution down in Southern Illinois. . . . We can continue to supply the correctional institutions with their enrollments or we can build institutions in this community to keep them here and educate them.”
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