Construction projects engross system schools

UNC-Chapel Hill isn’t the only campus in the state with bulldozers and piles of dirt gracing its quads.

Most UNC-system schools have reached their peak in construction projects funded by the 2000 bond referendum, said Jeff Davies, UNC-system vice president for finance.

“There’s more construction in progress right now than there ever has been before,” Davies said.

The state’s bond money paid for 316 projects, and work has been completed for only 116 of them, he said. The other 200 are under construction.

Only one of the 16 schools, N.C. School of the Arts, is completely done with its bond projects. Most of the others will finish by 2007, Davies said.

UNC-CH and N.C. State University, the schools given the most bond money and doing the most complex projects, are poised to continue until 2008 or 2009.

The state allotted UNC-CH $510 million, almost three times as much as it gave East Carolina University and more than 10 times as much as it awarded Fayetteville State University or UNC-Asheville.

The only institution that received an amount comparable to UNC-CH was NCSU, with just $50,000 less.

Appalachian State University received $87 million, more than half of that channeled to one project: a library complex. The rest was split between eight projects, said Clyde Robbins, the university’s director of design and construction.

But Robbins isn’t concerned about ASU’s construction falling short of the projects at its sister schools.

“You would expect flagship universities to have significantly more than we do,” Robbins said.

Five years after the bond money was issued, UNC-CH is working on 42 of 149 planned projects, some of them independently funded. ECU has completed 12 projects and is working on 26, and Fayetteville State has nine projects under construction.

The bond money was doled out according to the results of an 18-month probe by the Board of Governors into the adequacy and equity of facilities throughout the system, Davies said.

William Barlow, engineer for N.C. Agricultural & Technical University, said enrollment was the determinant factor.

Davies said any correlation between size of enrollment and amount of money received is coincidental.

When system schools are ranked based on largest allotment figures and 2004-05 enrollment sizes, most schools fall in similar spots on both lists. Only two varied greatly.

University type was an important factor, Davies said. A research university such as UNC-CH or NCSU requires more expensive facilities than a teaching university such as N.C. Central, which was given $118.7 million in bond money.

“(N.C.) Central may have had a higher percentage of buildings that needed renovations, but they didn’t need a $120 million science complex,” he said.

Contact the State & National Editor at stntdesk@unc.edu.