CODY ENGLANDER
Staff Writer
Before next season at Chautauqua Institution, Vice President of Campus Planning and Operations John Shedd, Administrator of Architectural and Land Use Regulations and Capital Projects Manager Ryan Boughton and the Buildings & Grounds Committee will look at on-grounds projects to invest in.
“We are still developing the list,” Shedd said. “We have a really big list as usual, so we’re creating that. Ryan is in charge of that, so he’s been soliciting and obtaining recommendations from different department heads and different people. He still hasn’t received a lot of those back yet, so we’re in the middle of tabulating it, estimating it and then it’s got to be prioritized.”
The Buildings & Grounds committee is a recent addition to the Board of Trustees, responsible for oversight of buildings and grounds within the Institution.
“They’re creating some very diligent and detailed requirements for process on creating capital projects and having them be successful getting on the list to do for 2027, and we are also still waiting for confirmation on how much money we’ll have to spend for capital. We believe we’re going to be in the $4.3 million range,” Shedd said.
This budget includes Chautauqua preservation projects, such as the Athenaeum Hotel, along with request projects that are not funded by the capital budget.
Shedd said non-preservation-oriented projects would need to find funding and reach a threshold of priority to authorize additional spending. He said, “our primary list is focused on preservation of what we have.”
This preservation includes creating an environment of “health, safety and welfare,” according to Shedd. This includes tripping hazards and tree trimmings.
“The next part of that is collecting those capital requests,” Boughton said. “That’s also what we’re currently in the process of doing, and then we’ll do the prioritization. Prioritization has the metrics that different people submit to us, the priorities that we see in terms of, ‘Hey, we can’t do this.’ For example, the building has a leaky roof. Well, we don’t want to spend money inside the building until it’s not [leaking], right? So that’s kind of our [priority].”
The addition of the Buildings & Grounds Committee has given Boughton and Shedd more meticulous metrics for the prioritization process. That complexity includes the difficulties and differences involved in revitalizing older buildings and fixing newer buildings, according to Boughton.
“The thing that we never want to under-stress is that Chautauqua is a relatively complex place, and the role that we have is unlike a lot of organizations, from the historic component to the part that you know,” he said. “There’s a lot that goes on here in the summertime, but there’s also a lot that goes on through the rest of the year, so that when everybody comes back for the next summer, it looks like it did when they left the last year.”
