President R. Gerald Turner said legal issues are delaying a final announcement between SMU and the Bush Library Selection Committee. He made the comments last week in front of a gathering of the SMU Student Affairs staff.
Details of the contract between the university and the selection committee are taking longer than expected, causing Turner to say that he has given up trying to predict when an announcement will occur.
He did say that the process is still coming along well and that there are no large problems holding up the acquisition of the library complex.
Turner believes it “still looks good” that SMU will get the library complex, but at no point said that it is a done deal.
Turner’s comments came on the heels of a Dallas Morning News story that said SMU did not own a proper storage facility for the temporary location of George W. Bush’s documents from his presidency – a sign that despite the legal hold-ups, federal officials are acting on the assumption SMU will be the site of the library complex.
The National Archives and Records Administration deemed two potential sites unusable.
The first is the former United Artists movie theater located south of Yale Boulevard and east of Central Expressway. It sits adjacent to property purchased by SMU in the past few years on that side of Central.
At the Student Affairs gathering, Turner said the former theater is likely to be knocked down since the school now has no practical use for it. The land it sits on is more valuable than the building, which is too small at 20,000 square feet of storage. The National Archives is looking for a facility with 60,000 square feet of storage space.
A second possible site are the grounds of the old Mrs. Baird’s bakery, which is located at Mockingbird Lane and the service road of Central. SMU currently uses it as a storage space for university purposes but the National Archives cannot use the site because it is too close to the road. It requires there be a 100-foot perimeter setback from any roadway. SMU has no current plans to demolish the old bakery building.
The National Archives is in the middle of a search for an adequate storage space somewhere within a 25-mile radius of the intersection of Lovers Lane and Central – an intersection one block north of SMU’s campus.
SMU was named by the selection committee as the sole finalist for the project in late December 2006 and entered into exclusive negotiations with the committee. Since then both the school and the committee have said little publicly about progress made between the two sides. Baylor University is technically still in the running for the project, but would only become involved if the committee and SMU had a break down in negotiations.
