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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/31952/full/31952/hebert-stepping-down-as-palo-alto-campus-ceo/ <br /><br /> <b>Hebert stepping down as Palo Alto campus CEO</b> <br /> Friday, March 23, 2007 | by <p>joe eskenazi </p> <br /><br /><p>In the movies, “My work here is done,” is typically the cue for the white-hatted cowboy to mount his steed, gallop down Main Street past the waving yokels and into the sunset. <br /><br /> Shelley Hebert, the CEO of Palo Alto’s Taube-Koret Campus for Jewish Life, is not mounting any steeds, and she lives only half a mile away from the campus. Nevertheless, her work here is done, and she’ll leave her post at the end of the month. <br /><br /> “My intention was always to work my way out of a job by making the project successful,” she said this week. “I always intended that to be [between] finishing the city-approval process and starting construction.” <br /><br /> Hebert, who has headed the campus since early 2003, will not have a successor — her duties will be taken over by Daniel Ruth, CEO of the Jewish Home and Alan Sataloff, the Palo Alto JCC’s CEO.<br /><br /> After 18 meetings — a lucky but laborious tally — Palo Alto’s city council unanimously approved the campus’ building plans in September of last year. And Hebert aggressively hopes shovels will dig into ground by July, so now would indeed be the interim between approval and construction. <br /><br /> The massive campus, which will include senior housing and the JCC, has cracked $117 million in fundraising to date, almost certainly the most successful fundraising endeavor in the history of the Bay Area Jewish community. <br /><br /> A number of the campus’ major donors have augmented their gifts: The Koret Foundation and Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture recently upped their initial twin donations from $7.5 million to $10 million apiece and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund last year doubled its offering from $5 million to $10 million. <br /><br /> Campus officials had long said it would take a kitty of about $135 million to obtain bond financing and commence construction. <br /><br /> Because of historically high construction costs, Hebert estimates that every month the campus delays its groundbreaking will cost $1 million. With that in mind, she last month announced a series of cost-saving maneuvers that would lower the overall fundraising goal from $155 million to $140 million and allow bond financing (and construction) to commence when the campus’ coffers hit somewhere in the neighborhood of $125 million. <br /><br /> Hebert has managed to do that without scaling back the 430,000-square-foot project. <br /><br /> One suggestion she and her staff came up with was asking the campus’ largest donors to pay off their gifts in four years instead of five. To date, 29 donors have given $1 million or more and the campus’ 45 most generous donors account for $112 million of the $117 million amassed. If the gifts were paid in four years instead of five, Hebert estimates that would save the campus $2 million in finance costs alone. <br /><br /> “Finance costs add nothing to the quality of the project,” she said. “And yet it’s a real cost. It’s money that has to be paid.” <br /><br /> Hebert and her staff requested the faster pay schedule from large gift-givers at the same time as asking for augmentations of their original gifts. The Koret and Taube Foundations quickly agreed to the four-year schedule while adding to their gifts. <br /><br /> The campus has also found money by liberalizing its ultra-conservative cost projections. Based on membership numbers for the JCC of San Francisco and Foster City’s Peninsula Jewish Community Center, the Palo Alto JCC has given itself a six-month shorter time-frame of four years to reach its desired membership of 10,000, which predicts a larger cash influx in a shorter period. It has also found an extra $1.8 million in the budget allocated for permitting processes that was deemed expendable. <br /><br /> “We budgeted very conservatively. But as you get new information, sometimes you get lucky,” said Hebert. <br /><br /> “In some cases costs go up, but here’s an example where actual costs came in significantly lower than expected.” <br /><br /> And while Hebert will be gone, she’ll never be far off. <br /><br /> “I plan to stay connected. I don’t expect to have a formal role. But, hey, I only live half a mile away.”</p> <p> </p>

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