Controversy surrounding the destruction of Building 26 at The Ridges has led at least one public official to suggest that Ohio’s state government bring back The Ridges Advisory Committee.
Recently uncovered documents hint, however, that was the state’s intention all along.
An interpretative summary of the Ohio law passed in 1988 that gave Ohio University control of The Ridges, written by the Ohio Legislative Service Commission, states that “the provisions relating to the advisory committee continue in effect indefinitely.”
The committee, a group of local and OU representatives who met between 1988 and 1991, was tasked with recommending ways the university could use The Ridges. Though it ceased meeting in 1991, the committee was never dissolved.
The summary goes on to state, “the advisory committee may recommend that portions of (The Ridges) be dedicated to particular uses or preserved in an undeveloped state.”
The committee was tasked with creating a “comprehensive land use plan” for The Ridges but did not undertake reviewing it or recommending changes to it.
“We prepared such a plan (for The Ridges),” said Karen Harvey, a member of the committee and an Athens County commissioner at the time. “I can’t see that we would have served any real purpose (in reviewing the plan). At that point in time, we gave OU a tool.”
Harvey believes the committee’s duty was to prepare the plan and stop meeting — a fact three other then-committee members agreed with.
“There’s a lot of background to this and lots of practical reasons as to why things happened,” said Jean Andrews, a staff member in the department of physics and astronomy who paid close attention to the committee’s action in the late 1980s.
In 2004, former OU President Charles Ping told Andrews in an interview that opposition to OU receiving the land was only a “small, vocal group who had a kind of Pollyannaish view of the past.”
Ping did not respond this week to a request for comment.
Andrews and Tom O’Grady, the president of the Athens County Historical Society & Museum’s board, remember the time differently.
“There was a community movement to ensure that the community was involved in making decisions regarding the buildings and land on The Ridges,” O’Grady said. “The community never thought that OU shouldn’t be involved; rather, that a public trust be established that included the university and the community so that the asylum grounds and buildings would be repurposed to serve both.”
dd195710@ohiou.edu
