desperately seeking help/ smarty templates

I work for a University and I'm planning to use Gallery2 for our department photographer's website. I've managed to get most of the customization for my install of Gallery 2 finished. However I'm stuck on incorporating our University template into Gallery2.

I've made a copy of the matrix theme in the theme's folder and renamed it to my own theme. Then I modified the theme.inc file with the correct information. I've also modified the theme.css file. Then I made a folder named "local" in the template folder as I'm supposed to. My modifications to the .tpl files here is working with one annoying exception.

The University template requires us to include external html files. So I changed the include to be the smarty type of include and it's not working. Following is an example of the original include and how I changed it to be a smarty include.

<!--#include virtual="/unlpub/templatedependents/templatesharedcode/includes/comments/developersnote.html" -->

{include file="/unlpub/templatedependents/templatesharedcode/includes/comments/developersnote.html"}

I've double and triple checked that the paths are correct. At this point I'm going totally nuts trying to figure out why it won't work. I've attached a screenshot of the error to this message. I've also included the developersnote.html file that I'm trying to include so you can take a look at it.

ANY HELP WILL BE GREATLY APPRECIATED. THANK YOU!

thanks for your help. You were right, it was a file path problem. Also I had to do php includes to get it to work properly. example as follows:

{php}
include ("unlpub/templatedependents/templatesharedcode/includes/comments/developersnote.html")
{/php}