Lack of funds has Ivy Tech reassessing Elkhart County worker training facility plan

Ivy Tech Northwest/North Central Chancellor Thomas Coley outlined in a recent interview the college’s evolving vision of the training facility that was proposed in 2012.

As originally proposed, the college was looking to create a $14 million, 55,000-square-foot Advanced Manufacturing Training Center to facilitate hands-on training on the most modern equipment available.

However, following several years of less than anticipated buy-in from community stakeholders, the college in late 2014 made the decision to shift its focus away from launching with the originally proposed, all-inclusive facility to meet the “big” vision of its training goals to a slower, more phased-in — and less expensive — approach.

“By doing it that way, it will allow us to do manufacturing training for both hard and soft skill training, which is what the industry says it needs most for entry level employees,” Coley said.

The estimated cost for that plan is about $5 million for the first phase of construction.

“For that first phase, we’re looking at utilizing a ‘flex lab’ concept, which would allow for a focus on the training of core skill sets first, and then expansion out into more industry-specific specialties later on,” Coley said. “It’s what we call a stackable curriculum, where you progress from one phase to another.”

As part of that evolving vision, it was also decided that the name of the facility should be changed from “A Center for Advanced Manufacturing” to “A Center for Workforce Training” in order to better reflect the college’s goal — at least initially — of providing students with entry-level skill sets needed to be productive employees in the workforce.

Money not coming in

Even with that change in focus, however, Coley said fundraising efforts over the past year have not improved, forcing the college to pull back and re-evaluate where it would like to go with the facility moving forward.

“The need for the space is still there, but it is a project that requires community support,” Coley said. “It has been disappointing that we haven’t been able to find a way to communicate to the community the value of the manufacturing training we were going to provide there in order to get the funding support to build the space.”

Adding to that disappointment was a Jan. 7 decision by the Elkhart County Redevelopment Commission to pull a $500,000 pledge it made to the college back in January of 2014 for infrastructure improvements to the training center property.

According to the commission, that decision was based on the fact that the July 2016 contract deadline for Ivy Tech to have its new facility move-in ready is fast approaching, though there has been little to no construction completed at the site to date. The commission also pointed to what they felt was an unacceptable change in the scope and vision of the project as a deal breaker.

Left out

That decision came as quite a surprise to Coley, who said he would have appreciated being invited to attend the meeting in order to ensure the commission had all the facts before making its decision.

“It would have been nice to at least have been given the opportunity to give my perspective, because some things were said at that meeting that were not accurate,” Coley said. “Up until their decision to pull their funding, we hadn’t changed what our overall goals were for the center. We modified them to move it forward, but we had not abandoned our original goals for the project. There was a reference that we were only going to be focusing on soft skills, and that’s not accurate. That was always part of it, but when you’re talking about overall training, our plan definitely involves technical skills as well.

“Now whether hearing from us would have influenced their decision or not, I can’t say. But I think they need to know that we’ve never changed our goals with what we wanted to do with the training center, and we’re still committed to it, because it’s needed.”

Given this unexpected withdrawal of funding by the commission, coupled with the less than stellar fundraising efforts over the past year, the college has essentially been forced to put the project on hold for the time being as it prepares a reassessment of the current plan.

“We had hoped at this point we would have funds to do the flex lab, but that does not appear to be the case,” Coley said, noting that the college has only been able to secure about $1 million in pledges to date, and would need to raise at least another $1 million in order to be able to get construction started on the flex lab facility. “So we’re now assessing what our options are, and our plan is to do a feasibility study in the community to see what support is out there. The community has to see the value in it, otherwise we won’t have the enrollment or overall support we need to make it sustainable. So we still have work to do to get that message out and build those relationships that are needed to move forward.”

Cheering for Ivy Tech

Laura Coyne, community development director for the county and adviser to the Elkhart County Redevelopment Commission, said that the county’s decision to rescind its funding support for the proposal should in no way be equated with a lack of support for the college as a whole.

“We were very supportive of a branching-out of our economy into higher skills and advanced manufacturing,” Coyne said of the college’s original proposal for the facility. “We are still glad to have Ivy Tech in our community, absolutely. The role of the Redevelopment Commission is to help revamp the economy and its infrastructure to sustain itself, and in fact advance itself, in tough times. We’re not so much disappointed in Ivy Tech — they reached out with a vision to the manufacturing community. But we are just not there yet. We continue to be a champion of advanced manufacturing jobs and the salaries they pay, for Elkhart County, and Ivy Tech’s role in making that happen.”