ECU sending desks to Mississippi cities
By Paul Dunn The Daily Reflector
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
As he piled surplus school desks into a Mayflower Transit moving van Tuesday morning, one All American Relocation Inc. employee said to another: "Man, these kids are going to hate us. They'll say, 'What, we have to go to school again?'"
Yep. Looks like it, thanks to the East Carolina University Department of Materials Management Central Stores and Receiving.
Through some old-fashioned gumshoeing and assistance by the North Carolina Surplus Property Office, the department figured out a way to donate 655 surplus wooden desk/chairs to two Mississippi communities ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.
Well, not exactly donate.
North Carolina frowns upon communities giving away state-owned property, so after ECU had exhausted its resources trying to sell the desks to local school districts, state officials agreed to sell the desks to schools in Lucedale and Bay St. Louis, Miss.
The price? $5.
For the whole bunch.
"We made every effort to support our schools in the area by offering the desks," said Lucretia Davis, 46, assistant manager for Materials Management Central Stores. "What we have now are the desks we were left with after trying other means."
But successfully hammering out a donation deal with the state didn't end ECU's challenges. Getting the desks to Mississippi would be an expensive task, administrators discovered. ECU queries to a commercial freight company in Kinston revealed it would cost $2,800 per truck load to transport the desks.
"That was one of the major things we had to figure out to make this whole thing happen," said Perry Ennis, 53, assistant director of store operations for the ECU Department of Materials Management. "It was going to be really expensive."
Enter All American Relocation Inc., a Raleigh-based Mayflower Transit affiliate that had heard of the desired donation. The company agreed to transport one Mayflower tandem-axle trailer-load of desks free of charge. On Tuesday, workers managed to stack 450 desks in the yellow-and-red truck, though ECU officials still must figure out how to transport the remaining 200.
"The desks will be really good where they're going, because they're (Mississippi) looking for anything to fill their needs," Ennis said. "These desks can probably go another 25 years."
The solid wood desks with Formica tops are about 25 years old. They were worth about $75 apiece new, Ennis estimated. They filled about 7,500 square feet in the new 63,000-square-foot ECU Surplus Properties Building on Clark Street.
Since early June, ECU has been slowly relocating the desks and other surplus to the new facility from an old 30,000-square-foot warehouse on Mumford Road. The transition should be complete by July 1, 2006, Ennis said.
Paul Dunn can be contacted at pdunn@coxnc.com and 329-9569.
