ROCKFORD — Business leaders are calling on Rock Valley College trustees to move forward with plans to build a manufacturing training center to strengthen the region's workforce.

College trustees said in October that the community college was talking with the former GateHouse Media to lease additional space in the Rockford Register Star News Tower, where Rock Valley would develop the facility, called an advanced technology center, to serve the region’s manufacturing workforce.

The training center remains a high priority for business leaders.

The October announcement represented an about-face for the community college, which in 2018 signed an agreement with the city to develop the training center at Colman Village, an idle factory campus in southwest Rockford owned by the city. College trustees said they pivoted to the News Tower at 99 E. State St. because of the urgent need for workforce training and because neither the city nor its partner, Rockford Local Development Corp., was able to secure sufficient financing or guarantee when construction would begin at Colman Village.

Nearly five months later, however, Rock Valley has yet to commit to building the advanced technology center at the News Tower or anywhere else. The college hired a Rockford architecture firm last fall to produce a structural analysis of Tower, but RVC President Doug Jensen and board Chairman Patrick Murphy would not discuss the study or the nature of their talks with Gannett, the name of the newspaper's parent company after a merger with GateHouse.

Murphy would say only that talks with the newspaper ownership are continuing and that the college remains committed to establishing an advanced technology center “downtown or in southwest Rockford."

The project remains a top workforce priority for the region, said Mike Paterson, chairman of the board of the Rockford Area Economic Development Council, though he wonders what happened to the urgency displayed by RVC back in October.

“We could work all day long to try to influence the college trustees, but they're going to do what they're going to do,” Paterson said. “They seem to march to their own drum and that's unfortunate. I'd love to see the advanced technology center move five steps forward. At the end of the day, the trustees are responsible to those that elect them.”

Rockford Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Einar Forsman said he is eager to hear Jensen and college trustees tell the community where the project stands.

"RVC has initiated many of their targeted efforts such as the Workforce Equity Initiative and a robust mechatronics curriculum that will help develop talent and get students into a workplace over a short term," Forsman said. "The planned construction of an ATC to house all targeted programs also remains critically important. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any new movement in this area, as the last information I was aware of is where an architecture firm was performing an inspection of the proposed Register Star location.”

The college paid $35,000 to the Rockford architecture firm of Larson & Darby for a structural analysis of the News Tower. The college, citing the ongoing negotiations, denied the Register Star's public records request for that taxpayer-funded report. Rock Valley did provide the newspaper with 75 pages of emails between the college and Larson & Darby regarding the News Tower study. However, those records shed no light on the status of the ATC project because the college redacted nearly all of the correspondence.

Wherever the training center lands, Murphy said, the college won't spend a penny more than $9.2 million — the same level of investment the college pledged when the project was planned for Colman Village.

Murphy has discussed the project privately with Mayor Tom McNamara.

“We believe that the ATC is a critical need for not only our businesses but also for our citizens,” McNamara said. “So I've offered to the college that if there is a role that we could play that we would consider playing that role, within reason.”

The mayor said he's not in a position to say whether the city could or would provide financial assistance to move the ATC project along because the scope of the project is still unclear.

Rock Valley trustee John Nelson said he was disappointed that the college has not yet chosen a site for the training center, even after more than a year of discussion and after more than $375,000 in public money was spent on preliminary designs and studies.

The college's decision to abandon Colman Village means that Rock Valley and the city must refund RLDC $346,027 for predevelopment work that the agency did for the project when it was planned for Colman Village. College trustees meet Tuesday to consider approval of a $173,013 refund to RLDC. The city must refund the agency an identical sum.

“We did our due diligence,” Nelson said of the Larson & Darby analysis of the newspaper building. “And right now, that location — the News Tower — I think it's fair to say that it's up in the air. It may not work out. It depends on a myriad of factors. But I also have to say that RVC is committed to building the ATC as soon as practically possibly and we're working toward that end.”

Isaac Guerrero: 815-987-1361; iguerrero@rrstar.com; @isaac_rrs