Stanford University has the power and the prestige to demand a lot from Santa Clara County. The school has 11,269 staff members and a consolidated operations budget of $5.1 billion, only slightly smaller than the county’s $5.6 billion budget for 2016.
Stanford is unquestionably an economic engine for the county and the entire Northern California region. But Kirk Girard says the school is also a valued partner in working to make the county a better place for everyone.
“We respect that they are going through a massive capital improvement program measured in billions of dollars over a relatively small period of time,” says Girard, a professional engineer and director of the Santa Clara County Department of Planning and Development.
“They respect that everything they do, they want to be in compliance with all the rules. Seismic safety, fire safety, drainage and erosion control, habitat protection. They respect the role that we play and we respect the fact that they have a need to grow and remake the campus on a schedule that is predictable with a permitting process that is as efficient as it can possibly be.”
There are dozens of projects either underway, nearing completion or preparing to open across the Palo Alto campus.
The recently completed Bing Concert Hall is an 844-seat vineyard style hall described by Stanford’s department of project management as “an acoustically exceptional venue that is well-suited for a range of music groups from small chamber ensembles to a medium-sized orchestra.”
The Knight Management Center is a collection of eight buildings that the university describes as “a comprehensive physical environment that allows the Stanford Graduate School of Business to deliver new methods of teaching management and leadership while inviting more collaboration from across the Stanford community.”
The school went through a bit of a lull in capital improvements during the recession, but has sprung back to life in recent years, says Leslie Crowell, deputy county executive for Santa Clara County.
“If you go to the campus, it’s construction all the time,” she says.
Let’s do it better
Girard has made a personal effort to take what was a good relationship between the county and the university and make it even better, Crowell says.
“Kirk went through the CLT (Center for Leadership and Transformation) program at Stanford when he was relatively new,” Crowell says. “He knew Stanford was asking the planning and land development department to approve things and the combination of his exposure to the program and his work really led to the effort to transform the permitting process.”
Girard says he simply asked Stanford what steps the county could take to streamline the process to get projects moving.
“They convened all their capital product managers,” Girard says. “There were more than 30 people in the room and they went through a process of identifying and prioritizing their needs. They have a very structured approach to getting projects from the vision stage to occupancy. So we started designing our regulatory process to match the capital delivery project system that they had in place.”
The effort pays dividends for the entire county as it creates a process that not only enables capital improvements on the Stanford campus, but with other communities and businesses.
“It’s continually improving and evolving because they have a continuous improvement process where the last time they did a project isn’t quite as good as the next time,” Girard says. “That’s infectious and fits in well with the culture we’re developing here.”
Spirit of collaboration
Crowell says the CLT program was born out of a relationship formed between the county and Behnam Tabrizi, a best-selling author, global business consultant and consulting professor at the university.
“He teaches classes to county employees here on-site and then we take executives up to Stanford for a four-day program for leadership training and he arranges all the people that speak about it,” Crowell says. “It’s a more innovative way of thinking about continuous improvement and leadership and leading from where you are, empowering employees, trying to shake the bushes around bureaucracy.”
The spirit of collaboration between large business or institution and the local governing body is typically the exception rather than the rule, Girard says.
“It can be a constant negotiation with big-time players where they trade off their economic contributions and they want a break from the rules,” Girard says. “That’s not just Stanford’s approach, not even close.” ●
How to reach: Santa Clara County Department of Planning and Development, (408) 299-6740 or www.sccgov.org
