Texas Universites Surplus

From: Pat Barron <pat_at_transarc.ibm.com>
Date: Mon Jun 12 17:06:21 2000

On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, Owen Robertson wrote:
> I just called a local (Fort Worth, Texas) University, asking about surplus
> property, and they said that all Texas Universities are required to turn
> their old computers over to the Texas Criminal Justice (or something like
> that) Department. Has anyone else heard of anything like this, or know why
> they have to do this? Does anyone in the Dallas/Fort Worth area know of any
> Universities that sell surplus property to the public?

My guess would be, that any such requirement would be on public
(state-funded) universities only. I can't imagine any way a state would
be able to, for all intents and purposes, seize the property of a
private university. So, you might try finding schools that aren't
state-funded, and see if you can buy surplus from them.

Another snag you might run into is the problem with funding agencies.
When I was at Carnegie-Mellon, I worked on a DoD-sponsored research
project. We never surplussed *anything*, and we never threw anything
away (at least, in the 2.5 years that I was there). The reason was, that
our funding agency (who had paid for all of our hardware) required that,
if we wanted to surplus something, we had to first go through a process to
put it on a list to offer it to other government agencies. Only after the
equipment had been on this list for several months, with no interest from
any other agencies, could we dispose of it. We were told at the time that
the estimated time from deciding to surplus something, until we were
actually permitted to do so (assuming that it was not snapped up by
another agency in the meantime), was at least 12 months.

--Pat.
Received on Mon Jun 12 2000 - 17:06:21 BST