Johnson State College will soon be getting $9 million dollars for campus improvements and renovations as part of a $72 million loan that the Vermont State Colleges have collectively taken out. JSC will be using the bulk of its grant towards the renovation of Stearns Hall, which is expected to cost seven million dollars. The rest of the money will be spread out across a number of smaller projects.
“Whenever a college or university wants to borrow money, you have to look at its ability to borrow, which essentially means its ability to repay,” says JSC President Barbara Murphy. “College systems and universities have bond ratings, so when you go out on the bond market you get a lot of professionals to decide, ‘how solid are you?’… and we have an ‘A’ bond rating, which is the best you can get.”
“The total bonding amount [for the VSC] is approximately seventy-two million,” said Sharron Scott, dean of administration. According to Scott, JSC will be awarded $9.25 million, out of the $72 million the VSC as a whole is getting.
Refurbishing Stearns
“We will be spending the vast majority of our share on a renovation of Stearns,” said Scott. “We’ll be transforming it from…being just a dining facility with some ancillary functions to being a true, 24-hour student union center. It’ll have the current dining room, obviously, and kitchen servery area, but in addition it’ll also have a new convenience store, and café. It will have what we’re calling the “Fireplace Lounge,” which will be a new gathering space for students…on the top floor of Stearns. There’ll be spaces for the Women’s Center, Student Government offices, student conference rooms. There’ll be a new movie-viewing room, which will be set up very much like a movie theatre, with stadium-style seats.”
Stearns is the top priority in the Facilities Master Plan, an ongoing chain of improvement projects, the most recent of which was the Pedestrian Promenade, a walkway that replaced the Ring Road in front of Martinetti Hall (BM: 9/13/2007).
“We picked [Stearns] for many reasons,” says Murphy. “Number one, it’s our most flawed building on campus. It’s the building that has the dining room, Public Safety, the mail room, the bookstore – these are its present functions…It has, as you may have noticed, no elevator, a central staircase, which is considered not a great feature to have in the event of a fire… It’s got a lot of problems.”
According to both officials, the reconstruction of Stearns will absorb seven million of the nine million dollar loan. The high price tag, Scott explains, is due to “a substantial increase in prices [in recent years], both for wages and things like structural steel and wood…. The other thing is that this building is somewhat complex to work in. It’s made of cast-in-place concrete, and it’s built very, very, very soundly, so in order to any renovations in it, that will cost a fair amount alone. It also has a fair amount of mechanical and electrical work that needs to happen.”
The cost will be felt by students.
“There will be a significant student fee to support this,” Murphy adds. “Five hundred dollars a year, at Johnson. Six hundred dollars a year at Castleton and Lyndon for their projects – I wanted to try and keep it as low as we could.”
Murphy talks to students in the SGA. “The position of the students, and this is true of the trustee who is a student who sits on the board of trustees, is, this will be worth it. This is worth it, to bring some facilities up to where they should be, and to position the college well for the future.”
ition charges, and financial aid can absorb part of it. “There are a lot of students who will not feel [the loss of] five hundred dollars out of pocket,” says Murphy.
Scott expects the construction to last about 26 weeks, which “might be a little more aggressive than what we end up with, but it would be fantastic if we were done by the end of the fall semester next year.”
She adds: “We are going to be temporarily relocating the facilities that are in Stearns sometime between the end of the fall semester and the time when construction will start, which we’re… anticipating will be sometime around mid-March… We’re working right now on the specific locations.”
The restructuring will also mean that some facilities are permanently moved to other buildings. According to the plans of Freeman-French-Freeman, which will be doing the renovations, the bookstore and the mail room will be moved to Dewey, and Women’s Studies and Public Safety will be moved, although a destination was not specified. Various other changes – including a convenience store, a movie room and computer kiosks – are also in the planning. The full document can be viewed online in PDF format. “This is a really exciting opportunity,” says Murphy. “When we redo Stearns, I think it’s going to kind of anchor the quad…and it’ll be a wonderful new student facility.”
Opening a Gateway
According to Murphy, almost a million dollars will be spent on the creation of a “gateway to campus.” Since the Ring Road was replaced, an overhead shot of the major transport arteries would look something like a stethoscope leading up from college Hill Road, with the left branch heading past Governors and Senators, and the right branch terminating at the Bentley Parking lot. This parking lot is the site chosen to be the gateway to campus, for which Murphy was enthusiastic. “We’ll landscape it, we’ll designate a walkway, we’ll designate drop-off areas, and kind of reconfigure the parking lot.” She emphasizes that although the price tag might seem high for reconditioning a parking lot, “we’re thinking of it more as a real front door for Johnson State, not just a parking lot.” Scott estimates that the campus gateway project will begin in the spring of 2009, and will last from four to eight weeks.
Hectic Electric
According to Scott, $200,000 will go to electrical upgrades. As Murphy explains, “[this] project is to upgrade an electrical transformer. The part of campus that’s by the college apartments… has an outdated facility that serves the college apartments and that end of campus. It needs replacement. This is probably the least… exciting part of our project, unless you’re the director of facilities,” who won’t have to worry about needing to do an emergency repair for the old system if it breaks down.
“We are [also] going to put several hundred thousand dollars into the SHAPE facility to upgrade the varsity gym,” says Murphy. “That floor periodically needs redoing, [and] you can only sand it and refinish it so many times.” The bleachers will also be replaced, in addition to some unspecified work.
The remainder of the money – $575,000, according to Scott – will be put towards science and other “curricular areas.” All told, the present wave of Master Planning will take effect soon and be felt well into the future, accompanied by the facilities shuffle as Stearns is remodeled.
“I think that these changes are really, really valuable to the campus,” says Scott. Although she admits the movement of such Stearns features as the musical events in the Base Lodge may prove trying, “I think the end result is so terrific that we’re all going to find a way to make it work.”