Oregon State University is moving into a new round of construction.
The university’s capital projects group finished its work in May and the Legislature acted in June on providing the required state bonds. So now it is full steam ahead on plans to refurbish Cordley Hall, create a new arts and education complex and finish the remodeling of Reser Stadium, which will include a new wellness center and a campus welcome center.
Upfront costs for the three projects are approximately $380 million.
The project list also will have a bit of a ripple effect across campus. The Plageman Hall student health service is moving to the Reser wellness center, leaving Plageman available for other purposes. The arts and education complex is displacing the maintenance and facilities shops just south of the Kerr Administration Building. The shops will be part of a larger operations complex on 35th Street that will also include capital planning and development as well as transportation services.
In addition to the annual appropriations that the university receives from the Legislature, the bonds for the projects are necessary to act as kind of a down payment for the work. Gifts will play a major role in closing the financial loop on the arts/education complex and Reser, while general revenues will assist with Cordley.
The Reser project also will use revenue from stadium events, leases and conference proceeds to pay back the bonds.
OSU is scheduled to receive approximately $140 million of the funds the Legislature authorized for spending at the seven state universities for fiscal year 2022 and $146 million for fiscal 2023. The appropriations represented a 7.5% increase from the last legislative session.
“I’m very grateful for the increased support of public higher education by Gov. Kate Brown and Oregon legislators,” said OSU Interim President Becky Johnson in a statement released by the university. “This support will greatly contribute to student success and graduation, while also advancing the valued statewide work of the OSU Extension Service and OSU research innovation and discovery that serves Oregonians, communities and our state’s economy.”
Here is a look at the three projects:
Arts/education complex
The $70 million building on 15th Street will include teaching, performance and rehearsal spaces, a new visual arts museum, and shop and maker space with a studio for designing sound and lighting. The project will use $35 million in state bonds and $35 million in donor gifts.
Peter Betjemann, who has served as OSU’s director of the School of Writing, Literature and Film in the College of Liberal Arts since 2016, will serve as the director of arts and education at the new complex, which will consist of 49,000 square feet.
“As a public institution acting on behalf of the people of Oregon and the world, we have a special responsibility at OSU not just to present art but to engage audiences,” Betjemann said in a statement released by the university. “The Arts and Education Complex is much more than a new arts building. It’s an architectural and curricular space devoted above all to inclusivity — a place where students, visitors and audiences will find heaps of educational content and boundary-breaking interventions in the old notion that art exists for a privileged few.”
Betjemann will oversee the management of the arts complex staff, programming, curation, fundraising, marketing, public relations, budget, and community and educational outreach.
Betjemann is the author of “Talking Shop: The Language of Craft in an Age of Consumption,” which examines how the rise of arts objects influenced literary production. His current scholarship looks at how literary-themed paintings in the 19th century engaged with racial violence, Native dispossession and African slavery.
Construction of the new complex is estimated for completion in the winter of 2023 or the spring of 2024.
University officials emphasized that the creation of the new complex will not affect the LaSells Stewart Center on 26th Street.
“LaSells Stewart Center will continue to be a central part of the overall campus, providing a 1,200 seat large auditorium (Austin Auditorium) for some events, conferences and meetings, a smaller 200-seat auditorium (Construction and Engineering Lecture Hall), as well as a large lobby and four smaller meeting rooms used for OSU and community events, meetings, gatherings and faculty and student conferences,” said Steve Clark, OSU’s vice president for marketing and university relations.
No information was available on the size of performance spaces in the new complex.
The LaSells Stewart Center benefits from the convenience of the large parking lot across 26th Street at Reser Stadium. Clark said OSU does not anticipate any parking problems for those attending events at the new complex.
“Parking for the (complex) is provided at numerous nearby locations throughout campus and will ably accommodate events held at the center on nights and weekends and those scheduled during the days as part of the center’s educational purpose,.” Clark said.
Reser Stadium
The university has been working to modernize and improve the football stadium since 2005, when the east side was completely redone. The south end zone was upgraded between the 2006 and 2007 seasons, and the north end zone/Valley Football Center/locker room complex was redone in 2016.
The “Completing Reser Stadium” project involves replacing the west side grandstand and press box as well as adding the wellness center and welcome center to ensure use of the facility — and revenue generation — beyond certain Saturdays in the fall.
The initial construction cost is estimate at $153 million and will be paid for by $85 million in gifts, $40 million in state bonds and $28 million in OSU revenue bonds. However, a Gazette-Times report in May showed that over a 50-year span the stadium project will cost approximately $325 million.
The other $170 or so million include renewal costs of $50 million and interest payments and operational costs of $60 million apiece.
Work on the stadium will begin as soon as the 2021 home season ends Nov. 13. Construction will continue until the summer of 2023, with the stadium existing without a west side for the 2022 home season. Clark estimates that capacity for that season will be in the 27,000 range.
No official number has been established for the new capacity of the stadium. At its peak from 2007 to 2015 the stadium had an official capacity of 45,674. The Reser attendance record is 47,249 for a 2012 game against Oregon.
Capacity dropped to 43,000 after the north end zone work, and the remodeling project will end with capacity at approximately 35,000 to 39,000. As recently as the 2010 season the Beavers averaged 45,509 fans per home game.
Yet Clark said for that May report that loge tickets and premium seats will produce the needed revenue to offset the cost of the project.
“But it also has been indicated that those projections are believed to be low,” Clark said then. “They are not optimistic. They are not aggressive. They are conservative.”
The OSU Board of Trustees voted unanimously last Tuesday for President Johnson to begin negotiations on a lease agreement with Samaritan Health Services in which the two entities will share the four-story, 32,000 square foot wellness facility. Rent and other payments from Samaritan also are expected to help offset the upfront cost of the project.
The wellness center will serve, OSU students, staff and community members. The previous student health service operation at Plageman served only students.
The stadium, wellness facility and welcome center all have tentative completion dates of July 1, 2023.
Cordley Hall
At more than 235,000 square feet, Cordley, which was built in the 1960s, is the largest academic and research building on campus. The building sits west of 26th Street between Campus Way and Orchard Avenue,
Houses OSU’s integrative biology, botany and plant pathology departments.
The goal with Cordley, said the capital projects report (see the full text at the web site) is to “transform an aged facility, which was designed for research 50 years ago, into a modern research and education facility.”
Key pieces of the redo are updated classrooms, more flexible laboratory spaces, and modernized mechanical and electrical systems, including fire and seismic safety upgrades. The project also features the addition of a utility plant to expand the cooling capacity for temperature-sensitive research labs.
The project is the largest campus building effort in university history. The Learning and Innovation Center (LinC) is 134,000 square feet and Austin Hall in the College of Business is 100,000 square feet.
Phase 1 of the Cordley project, which includes the west side and the utility plant, is scheduled for completion in the summer of 2022. Phase 2 on the east side is due to be finished in the summer of 2024.
The work is projected to cost $159 million, with the financial plan calling for $102 million in state bonds, $48 million in OSU bonds and $9 million in capital improvement funds.
Article was originally published by Corvallis Gazette-Times.
