As Columbia draws closer to breaking ground for its Manhattanville campus, local organizers are pushing the University to complete its community benefits agreement.

Despite pledging $150 million towards community benefits in a December memorandum of understanding, Columbia has yet to finalize details on how the funds will be allocated. While the University has engaged in negotiations with the West Harlem Local Development Corporation, an independent organization created by the local Community Board 9, to specify details of the funds’ use, an agreement has yet to be reached.

“We’re trying to hammer it out and get it finished. We are pushing and close to the end,” LDC officer Susan Russell said. When asked for a time frame, Russell only said “soon.”

Specific uses for the funds were built into the memorandum of understanding, a shorthand document that promised initial community benefits. The memorandum pledges $76 million from the University over the next 12 years toward unspecified programs possibly including job training, education, and health care. It includes $24 million toward affordable housing and $20 million worth of access to Columbia facilities, and commits the University to build a $30 million public demonstration school. The memorandum, submitted on the same day in December that the City Council was voting on the expansion project, appeared as a political move intended to mitigate and compensate for adverse affects of the Manhattanville expansion. The memorandum made it politically safer for City Council members to press ahead with an affirmative vote.

The drafting of the community benefits agreement has sparked protest among local residents and activists who charge that the LDC has misrepresented the community and that there are inadequate benefits and a lack of transparency.

“How can you claim to be a voice of the community, and you never want to hear that voice, and you don’t feel accountable to that voice?” Community Board 9 member Norma Ramos said at a January board meeting.

According to several LDC officials, at a recent closed meeting, top LDC officers asked University officials for an advance on funding in order to begin allocating benefits, even though a formal agreement has not yet been signed. “Nothing of any interest really came out of it,” LDC officer Maritta Dunn said.

The cash advance, still being negotiated, aims to allow the entirely voluntary LDC to begin hiring permanent staff to “make the transition into a functioning fund management entity” that will monitor the distribution of community benefits, Russell added.

“Someone has to decide what’s going to happen with all that money,” said Russell, who is also chief of staff for City Councilman Robert Jackson (D-Manhattanville and Washington Heights).

University spokesperson Victoria Benitez said Columbia administrators are “still meeting quite regularly with the LDC,” but declined to comment further on ongoing negotiations, citing University policy.

Columbia made an additional statement reaffirming its commitment to community benefits when the Empire State Development Corporation adopted its General Project Plan this summer, highlighting specific civic facility improvements, localized scholarships, and business development programs. This additional statement of promise prompted meetings between LDC and Empire State Development Corporation representatives, Russell said.

“There are many amenities in the GPP that impact the community, and we want to make sure there’s clarity all around,” she added.

The General Project Plan requested that the state invoke eminent domain for the two local businesses remaining in the expansion footprint and any residents who have not relocated by 2018. The possibility of eminent domain in the near future places additional pressure on negotiations to finalize a community benefits agreement, Dunn said.

“ESDC can go forward at almost any point that they feel like—we have no control over them ... so everybody is just waiting to see where do we go from here,” she said.
University President Lee Bollinger said Columbia hopes finally to strike a deal with the two outstanding property owners within the footprint.

“We’re always hoping with the two holdouts that we’ll reach an agreement,” he said. “And you just never know. ... If it doesn’t happen, we’re still very hopeful that the state will follow through and give the land to us. And we’re hopeful that that will happen in the next several months.”

Melissa Repko contributed to this story.