Florida Atlantic University doesn’t want you to know how it spent $35 million of taxpayers money on a building that doesn’t work.
After the university opened the Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute in Jupiter with great fanfare in January it shut it down with no fanfare on July 30.
Little is known about the reasons behind the shutdown, the cost to reopen the building, the loss of experiments caused by the shutdown and who is going to pay for it all.
On Monday, the university said the building reopened — sort of. Research and lab animals cannot return until other thresholds are met and that could take up to eight and a half months, an internal email provided by the university said.
The state put up the money to construct the three-story, 58,000-square-foot building. A foundation headed by David J.S. Nicholson gave FAU $10 million to help run innovative programs within it.
In a state often credited with the best public records laws in the nation, FAU has gone to great lengths to keep you in the dark on why the building closed and who’s paying to fix it.
OnGardens.org made numerous attempts to get more information but the university as the sole keeper of records that could have answered basic public questions stonewalled.
Here’s how:
Continue reading “A $35 million brain center was closed for four months. We may never know why.”