Framingham State Plans $45M Dorm
Dale M. Hamel, Framingham State College's senior vice president of administration, finance and technology.
Framingham State College has the fortune of being located off the heavily traveled Route 9. But its prime location along a major MetroWest artery also has put space at a premium.
In order to address those space needs, the college is planning a new $45 million dormitory and the eventual conversion of its O'Connell Residence Hall into an academic center, according to Dale M. Hamel, the college's senior vice president of administration, finance and technology.
"The new residence hall is a very significant building because it will increase the number of residential beds by 150," Hamel said.
The plan is to build the new dormitory near its State Street entrance. It will have 450 beds. Once the new dorm is online, the college will rehab O'Connell Residence Hall - which has 300 beds - into an academic center.
Age Appropriate
Aside from providing additional beds, the college hopes the new dorm will keep more upperclassmen on campus, Hamel said. The new rooms will be suites of four to five bedrooms around common areas, which will offer upper classmen more privacy, he said. The older residence hall has rooms off both sides of the hallways, with large common bathrooms, which are less attractive to older students, he said.
The new dorm is "important for the social life of the school and interaction between lower classman and older students," Hamel said. It will also let the school meet a state guideline that requires on-campus housing be available to half of an institution's undergraduate population. The school currently has about 3,900 undergraduate students, with housing for about 1,500.
The college only provides on-campus housing for 45 percent of the day undergraduate students, which will rise to just over 50 percent when the new dorm is up and running.
Construction on the new dorm should start in the spring of 2010 and be finished in the fall of 2011. The dorm will have a new parking lot with 120 spaces. The state has also purchased three private homes for a total of almost $2 million next to the area where the new dorm will be built, allowing the building to be set back farther from State Street and allow better access to the building site.
But that's only part of the college's plan for its future.
Once the new dormitory is up and occupied, the process to change O'Connell Hall into an academic center should begin. That will allow additional classroom and office space.
Eventually, the college would like to renovate the classroom building Hemenway Hall and build a stand-alone science laboratory building near it.
And all of this is dependent on a financial ballet of sorts. The State College Building Authority, the agency that owns and builds residence halls at state colleges, will float bonds for the $45 million project and construct it.
The building authority will also sell the O'Connor dormitory to the state's Department of Capital Asset Management, which owns and takes care of many state buildings, including academic facilities at public colleges. DCAM will buy out the $7 million in remaining debt on O'Connell Hall from the building authority. It will then spend $2 million dollars to renovate it for academic use, Hamel said.
"This allows us to plan for the future needs of the college," Hamel said. "It will allow us to reposition the functions of the college and where they are placed over the next few decades. It lets us place a new building as the front door of the campus, which doesn't often happen," Hamel said.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments