NEWS
After two years in the works, FAU’s Harbor Branch campus will soon benefit from millions of dollars.
On March 22, the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution Foundation (HBOIF) sold the state and St. Lucie County 384 acres of its land for $24 million. The sale is a big deal because it is the final step to the merger between FAU and Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute (HBOI), an FAU campus in Fort Pierce that focuses on ocean engineering and marine biology research.
Essentially, the land sale is an indirect way for the state to support HBOI. According to Jack Aylor, director of development and foundation relations, the process involves some giving and some receiving. HBOIF had to give the state an incentive in order to get itself rebuilt after being severely damaged by hurricanes in 2004 and 2005.
“HBOIF would have either sold the land or given it to the state. The institution needed operating dollars for HBOI. So, we turned to the state,” Aylor said of the motive for the merger.
The funds from the sale will be invested back into HBOI, though some of it needs to be used to lease the land on which the campus sits, since it is now owned by the state and St. Lucie County. In other words, HBOIF will pay the state in order to lease back the land that it had just sold to it.
The money does more than just pay rent, however. Megan Davis, Ph.D., an associate executive director at HBOI, said that the money will open up room for new initiatives by HBOI.
“The Harbor Branch Foundation has invited Harbor Branch, working with the deans from the Colleges of Science and Engineering, to submit proposals for research and education programs at Harbor Branch. The foundation is keenly interested in seeing a stronger graduate-student and postdoctoral program.”
The land sale itself took more than 11 months to complete, much to the frustration of all those involved.”We had a piece of property that had slowly been taking shape over years. It had never been surveyed,” confessed HBOIF Chairman Jim Seitz. “It took us six months and [more than] $100,000 just to survey the land and get its outside boundaries.”
HBOIF still owns a little more than 100 acres of land, and Seitz is hoping to get rid of it at some point, though he is reluctant to sell to just anyone.”We don’t want to sell the land to someone who doesn’t complement HBOI. There would have to be an arrangement, whether it’s to fund co-op programs for the students or hire researchers,” he said. “Otherwise, we won’t sell the rest of the land.”
About the foundation
HBOIF is a direct support organization, making it solely responsible for HBOI.
“The $24 million goes into our funds,” Seitz said. “The goal is to provide perpetual funding to the university forever, or at least until we run out of money.”
The foundation provides grants for specific research departments in HBOI but tries to ensure that the projects are worthwhile.
“They come to us on an annual basis and say, ‘This is what we need.’ We evaluate these things through our grants committee. We ask, ‘After we give you this money, what are you going to do?'” Seitz said of the funding process. “We don’t want to just do things. We want to do important things, to fix something, improve something.”
Since the money afforded to research programs does not come from a bottomless pit, the foundation has to pick and choose where the money goes.
“We want to grow the breadth and the depth of these things. We don’t want to take a small amount of people and fund them forever, because new people bring new ideas, new students, new energy, new thoughts,” said Seitz. “This is how research evolves.”
According to Seitz, not too many people are aware of what goes on at HBOI and the marine research they conduct.
“We have to make the world know what great things are happening here. But we have to start off small, with the county,” he said. “Think of it like a pebble dropping in water and its rings expanding.”
Plates of money
Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution Foundation, an organization that solely supports FAU’s Harbor Branch campus (HBOI), makes more than $3 million a year by selling license plates through the state. Although its cut of the profit is only $20 to $25 a plate, this adds up at 150,000 plates a year. According to Jack Aylor, director of development and foundation relations, the income from each license plate supports a different wing of research at HBOI and is one of its largest single sources of revenue.
