And I said to myself: This is the business we’ve chosen

At some point this stuff just gets exhausting:

CU buys $3.75M home for Boulder chancellor

The CU Foundation closed on the home for $3.75 million, which is located adjacent to the University Hill neighborhood and less than a mile from campus.

“The CU system and CU Foundation determined after careful consideration to invest in a property in Boulder just minutes from campus, providing the best use of resources to meet the immediate and long-term needs of the campus,” CU spokesperson Jeff Howard wrote in an email.

The current chancellor’s residence is a half mile from campus. It’s a ten minute walk at most.

CU will not sell the existing chancellor’s residence, 3600 Caddo Parkway, because a large portion of the area where the house is located is expected to be utilized for faculty and staff affordable housing.

The house is in a huge open field. If the campus is really going to build faculty and staff affordable housing (I’m not holding my breath) there’s no reason the house couldn’t continue to be used as the chancellor’s residence. Except:

“It is unwise to renovate a house that is, according to the (CU Boulder) master plan, likely to be torn down in the not-too-distant future,” Howard wrote. “Furthermore this decision is allowing the campus to begin exploring the opportunity sooner for redevelopment of the Caddo Parkway property.”

Wut? The back story here is that the Caddo McMansion was built for (of course) Gordon Gee when he became president of CU in 1985. He then skipped town fifteen minutes after it was completed. A few years later another CU president decided the president’s residence should be in Denver not Boulder, so the president’s house was handed off to the Chancellor, who is at the top of the administrative food chain for the Boulder campus (the president is president of the CU system).

I’ve been in the Caddo house several times, and it’s a perfectly adequate representation of what it is, i.e., tacky nouveau riche conspicuous consumption c. 1987, as if 1987 qualifies as an ancient structure that has to be scraped. Which brings us to:

The nearly 40-year-old existing chancellor’s home needs approximately $3.7 million in renovations, Howard said, which includes deferred maintenance and updates.

Examples of the maintenance and updates that would’ve been needed include deep cleaning, flooring replacements, upgrades to comply with building codes and the Americans with Disabilities Act, roof inspection and leak repairs, duct cleaning, exterior cleaning and mitigation of water damage in the downstairs area and kitchen.

Why do these people have to lie like this? By a miraculous coincidence those “renovations” are going to cost exactly as much as it cost to buy a mansion in the most expensive neighborhood in Boulder. In fact those renovations, which include obviously unnecessary items like new floors, would really cost maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars at most (this is almost certainly a big overestimate) assuming CU isn’t going to pay $100,000 per hour for maid service for a “deep cleaning.”

This is another example of how rich people of sufficiently high social status don’t ever pay for anything. The new chancellor’s salary is I’m just guessing here something like maybe $600K or $700K, and he gets a mansion for free, but apparently he didn’t like the available mansion, so a new one was duly found and purchased for him. (Tax people: how is this kind of thing treated for income tax purposes. Is this some sort of in-kind benefit, the annual rental value of which is imputed as salary? Or is it totally free to the beneficiary?).

It just never ends.