New stuff, new people, new classes, fresh start and orange traffic cones?! Students coming onto campus for the first time and students coming back are probably curious what all the construction is about. What are they building? When will it be done? What’s it for? Let us put those questions to rest.
“There are 3 really big projects and the thing you might want to say is, we are expanding the footprint,” Executive Director of Facilities Bill King said. “Right now we are at about 1.1 million sq.ft. and we’re expanding that by 25% in a very short amount of time. There’s no other college, there can’t be no other college expanding their footprint by 25% in 1 year. That is a lot to add to a college. and so that is a huge undertaking for the facilities group.”
The first major construction project is the The Roger M. Rogers Nursing & Health Center that is going to be located the corner of S Fleishel Ave.
“It’s about 150,000 sq. ft. [and] it’s going to open the spring 2015,” King said.
The campus is also adding a new residence hall is on South Baxter Avenue across from Vaughn Hall that is scheduled to open in the fall of 2015
“We are building a 248 bed residence hall on a parking lot,” King said. “We’re expanding the parking right across the street [by] adding 75 more spaces last year and we added quite a bit of parking over at the nursing. Anything we were going to lose, we are replacing.”
The third and second largest project is taking place on the West Campus.
“The last project we have going on is our energy center expansion,” King said. “It’s about a 60,000 sq. ft. expansion. I believe it’s scheduled to open spring 2015”
The construction is scheduled to be finished by fall of 2015 and should not result in anymore road detours on South Baxter.
“These are all monster projects,” King Said. “Probably in my lifetime will there never be this much construction going on at this college. This is abnormality for a college to undertake at one time.”
