The top officials of Eastern Washington University and Community Colleges of Spokane have begun floating separate proposals to develop brick-and-mortar centers here that would be tied closely to the business community and would be focused tightly on educating and training high-technology workers.


EWU is asking the Washington Legislature this session for $1.2 million in pre-design and design money for a greatly accelerated project to expand and modernize the Cheney campus building that houses its Department of Technology. It envisions spending as much as $18 million to transform the 34-year-old structure into a cutting-edge home for technology education, says EWU President Stephen Jordan. It also hopes the revitalized center could become the first of what the American Electronics Association has suggested would be a public-private statewide network of engineering laboratories available to distance-learning students who normally wouldnt have access to labs, Jordan says.


Meanwhile, Charles Taylor, CEO and chancellor of Community Colleges of Spokane, says he will discuss at a Greater Spokane Symposium Series gathering Feb. 8 a proposal to develop a multimillion-dollar technology training center here modeled after the Northwest Center for Emerging Technologies, in Bellevue. He envisions the facility as being a place where businesses would invest time and money to ensure that they could get workers trained in the very latest technologies much more quickly than through conventional college processes.


Jordan and Taylor, both relative newcomers to the Spokane area, say their proposals are tangible ways in which their institutions can attack the growing shortage of technology workers statewide and at the same time boost Spokanes chances for job growth in the burgeoning technology sector.


Both projects would require significant support from business.


In CCS case, Taylor would seek business partners, just as Bellevue Community College did when it developed its emerging technologies center, and would rely on those partners to provide the lions share of the money needed to build and operate a center here. Their return would come in fast and arguably less expensive costs for training workers to use cutting-edge hardware or software. Businesses also would serve on a board to help guide the center.


There are a lot of great things we can tap into to develop a high-tech industry here, says Taylor. We just need to pull the companies together. This is something that the community colleges are very interested in doing, but we cant do it alone. We simply dont have the money for that kind of facility. What we do have is the faculty and know-how to train high-tech workers.


At EWU, transforming Cheney Hallwhich houses the universitys technology programs but is considered antiquated by high-tech standardsinto a state-of-the-art academic technology center likely would require the private sector to come up with about 30 percent to 40 percent of the project cost, says Jordan.


Well be looking to our foundation to raise that money, he says, adding that the rest would have to come from state funds and perhaps federal grants.


EWU also hopes to partner with the Washington Council of the American Electronics Association to use what would be an expanded Cheney Hall as one of the trade groups proposed regional engineering laboratories. The AEA proposed such a network of labs in a report issued in October on the state of high-technology education in Washington. The report, which was critical of the Washington education systems ability to produce high-tech workers, saw such labs as a way to make it easier for people to gain high-tech skills.


Terry Byington, executive director of the AEAs Washington Council, says that its too early to speculate on whether a renovated Cheney Hall could become one of the labs the association envisions, but says EWU surely will play a role in helping to meet AEAs goals for high-tech worker training.


Were certainly very impressed with the strides that EWU is making, and their new technology building would be a great addition (to the effort), Byington says.


EWU officials, too, believe that upgrading Cheney Hall and bolstering engineering technology and computer science curricula based on industry suggestions, would be in line both with AEAs goals and recent pushes by the state Higher Education Coordinating Board to expand instruction in high-demand programs.


Although Eastern Washington has the programs in place and a well-respected faculty, the outdated building and components result in a loss of our competitive edge in responding to this challenge, EWU officials wrote in a capital budget request they will submit to the Legislature.


In addition to business support, EWU will have to convince the Legislature that it must greatly accelerate its proposed renovation and expansion of Cheney Hall, which Jordan wants open by 2003. He says that when he arrived at EWU, the campuss master plan called for a renovation of Cheney Hall at the end of the 10-year plan. If EWU waited until then to begin the process of upgrading the building, and followed typical legislative proceduresasking for pre-design money in one biennium, design money in the next biennium, and construction funds in a thirdthe Cheney Hall project might not be completed for 16 years.


Instead, EWU has moved the Cheney Hall project to the front of its 10-year plan and will ask the current Legislature for a supplemental budget appropriation of $1.2 million for both pre-design and design money in one request. If successful, it plans to ask for construction funding next session, which would allow it to complete the project during the next biennium.


More than brick and mortar


Planning for the EWU project is still preliminary, but Jordan says hed like to more than double the size of Cheney Hall, which currently has about 22,500 square feet of usable floor space. The project would include essentially enveloping the current building, by constructing state-of-the-art laboratories in brand new space around the outside of the current structure, then gutting the current structure and remodeling its space for classrooms and offices, which then would be in the center of the larger building.


With the proposed project, EWU expects that it could boost the number of full-time equivalent students in its technology program to about 300, from 225 currently, which already reflects heady growth from recent years.


But Jordans plan is more than brick and mortar; it would involve expanding and adapting the universitys technology curriculum and increasing its ties with the business community to ensure that EWU produces. It would be a real shame if we did this project and all we ended up with was a remodeled and expanded Cheney Hall, he says.


Jordan says university officials from the technology, computer science, and physics departments all would be involved in planning for the project, as would the advisory councils made up of business representatives that already help guide the universitys curriculum. Its possible that some computer science and physics programs could end up being housed in the expanded building.


Exactly what functions and curriculum eventually would be located in an expanded Cheney Hall is unclear so far, he says, because the centers makeup needs to be in response to the needs of high-technology employers. This is an open-book discussion of what it ought to be, Jordan says.


Training workers


Similarly, at CCS the idea of developing an emerging technology center is mostly vision right now, though Chancellor Taylor says time is critical.


This cant be something we do five years down the road, he says. I want to find out whether this is something the business community is interested in, and if it is, we need to get going on it.


Taylor says he hopes to gain that insight at the Feb. 8 symposium, which is to run from 4 to 6 p.m. in Gonzaga Universitys Jepson Center. Symposium organizer John Stone, a prominent Spokane developer, says the idea will be discussed in detail at the gathering, which will have three guest speakers in addition to Taylor: Neil Evans, former Microsoft Corp. chief information officer who now is executive director of the Northwest Center for Emerging Technologies; Robert Ketchum, of the North Idaho College; and Doug McQueen, of the University of Idaho Research Park in Post Falls.


The idea behind an emerging technologies center is to churn out trained workers quickly by melding the interests and resources of high-tech employers with the quick-turnaround, vocational teaching of community college instructors. Though CCS is good at producing trained workers for technology that already is established, Taylor says, it doesnt have the funding to train for tomorrows technology.


We need to be training for technology that is coming, and its coming at a rapid pace, he says.


Employers, Taylor says, know what skills they need, and if theyre closely involved in the operation of such a center, they can decide what equipment and software is needed to achieve that training and will have the financial resources to make it available quickly.


High-tech companies will benefit, he contends, by getting trained workers quickly and at less cost than they can do on their own, since they would be cooperating with a host of other employers in a shared facility.


Companies will have to work togethernot just lip service but really work together, Taylor says, adding that the plan wont work without the support of Spokanes premier high-tech employers, such as Avista Corp. and Telect Inc.


Hes helped to organize similar efforts before. While president and CEO of St. Philips College, in San Antonio, Texas, he helped secure corporate partners for a center there called the Instructional Technology Transfer Center.


In Bellevue, organizers of the Northwest Center for Emerging Technologies landed such corporate partners as Boeing Co. and Microsoft Corp. Spokane, he says, will need that kind of support as well.


Taylor says hes not sure where such a facility would be built here. Some people would lobby to put it in the Spokane Valley, while others would want it near the growing Riverpoint Higher Education Park. Others likely would want it near technology parks they are proposing to build.


Frankly, I dont care where it goes, as long as its someplace where everyone will use it, rather than ignoring it because it wasnt built where they would have preferred it, he says.


Being new in town, he says, helps in that regard: Im the neutral guy. I dont have any allegiances to anyone, other than to serve the community.


Both Taylor and Jordan believe their separate projects are non-competing and together would be simply additional components in the educational machine needed to produce more technology workers here. The emerging technology center, Taylor says, would produce the worker bees found on the production floor and as assistants in the development labs. EWUs programs, meanwhile, would produce the supervisors and managers who run the manufacturing lines, and Washington State University at Spokane, as well as Gonzaga University, can provide the people who develop new products for those other workers to create.


We have to look at the whole array, says Jordan. There are so many diverse jobs, so many diverse groups.