In our cover story, The two-headed college town (See April 5 issue), a few other people chimed in on the issue about the distinctions between the Consortium and the UniverCity Partnership. One such party was local community activist Lynne Simonds, who is currently running for District 4 City Council seat.

Here are some of her comments:

"A month ago a friend told me about the Partnership. Before he spoke to me I didn't even know it existed. He had been on the original task force. When I heard about it, I thought it was a good idea, but his concern was nothing's really happened. They had a lot of good ideas but nothing has become of it.

"I don't even know who this [Armand] Carriere guy is. I went to this Website after this constituent said to me we thought this really had a lot of energy, a good idea and it was one of the many responses you could have had to the PILOT [payment in lieu of taxes].

"The only reason I knew about it was because a constituent told me about it. I was going to look into that if I got elected. Especially, because some of the things that this task force decided to do I thought were great – didn't cost a lot of money, got the colleges involved, got the businesses involved, got the city involved – looking at things in a different way.

"We are not involved at all. Think about this. A group of citizens were involved. They were a task force. They created a model. Someone gets hired to implement the model, and it's not being implemented. When did that whole PILOT thing come about 2003? Now it is 2007.

"My biggest argument is that we are not inclusive. See, sometimes we create things in a vacuum. I would bet that if you polled people, who would know about UniverCity Partnership. When you put together this group, the consortium should have been at the table. They could have said, well this is what we do now and we can do this because we want to do this. It's like everything else -- people get left out of the loop all the time. And collaboration and the sharing of ideas don't happen."

Simonds also offered her commentary on PILOT.

"I just don't think it was well conceived, the whole concept of PILOT. First of all you have to determine what are the contributions on the part of non-profits. What non-profits are you talking about? Are you talking about colleges? Options: a menu of things they could do. Is it a dollar value?

"This idea that Murray had is a good way to approach it. You had a group of citizens that came up with a plan. How can we buy into this plan? What is it worth? What would we do if we didn't have nine colleges in the city? There is a lot of revenue produced by them. Maybe there's another way of doing it. Maybe you say to Clark University, you know what, you have to buy all your school supplies from local companies.

"We need a more thoughtful way. We need to be more proactive and come up with action plans not reaction plans. Not think that a PILOT program is a panacea that is going to fix what is broken. The system is broken. That's what needs fixing. That's what a city council should do – create policy that makes sense for everybody living here. If we are happy here, guess what other people will come.

Carriere has to go create relationships with these colleges. Theoretically, that takes time. Now if you have a Mark Bilott [CEO of Consortium], who already has a working relationship with the schools through the consortium, why do you need the Partnership? It could have been much more inclusive right from the go get. I work with a lot of college students and I see that there's lots of places where there could be much more carry over. A perfect example, we have gotten college students involved fall in love with the community and stay.

The question should be: How effective are both? Maybe if there was more community input, or if the input they were given was acted upon, maybe it would become more successful. Who knows about the consortium other than people that deal with it? Who really knows about this UniverCity Partnership?

Simonds took the subject a step further saying, "Here's a story: Why do we need another $500,000 to market the city? We don't need to bring people here. We need to satisfy the people here and then other people will come. It has to be inside out."