On Friday, March 1, 2013, at the school faculty meeting, President Butts announced, construction on campus will be stopped due to the governor needing funds allocated to SUNY Old Westbury for other state projects that have not yet been disclosed. Construction projects that are already in progress will be finished, but all other planned projects such as the demolition of the Academic Village will have to be put on hold.
The library which is one of the most visible construction projects on campus has enough funds to go through with phase one and two of construction but phase three will be up in the air until the funds are raised. In an interview with Stephen Kirkpatrick, Library Director, he was able to lay out exactly what projects in the library will move forward and what projects will be on hold.
According to Kirkpatrick, the main floor of the library will be done with construction by the end of 2014, maybe a little sooner. On the main floor, there will be power track math, the writing center, math learning center, and a new library computing center with more computers than we had before. The reference librarians will still be located on the main floor to help people, they will just be in new offices. This will all be brand new; the building is being completely gutted out so its sill a large project.
There is going to be a new elevator and stair case at the front of the building that will take you upstairs where only part of the work will be done by 2014. Because of funding, we are not going to be able to have the whole third floor done. There will be a fifty seat flexible room that can be used as a classroom but may also be used as a conference room with all the bells and whistles for audio and visuals. There will also be a forty seat lab for library instruction. Also, on the third floor there will be two quiet rooms built but we are not going to get all of the other rooms at this time because of the loss of money. The concept is, instead of having the floor wide open the way it is now, it’s going to be broken up. We want it to be possible for people to work in groups and talk and not bother other people. So the library is being designed with a lot of closed space for different sized groups; we will not be getting all of the quiet rooms we hope for but we will get two of them in this first part of the construction. Kirkpatrick says we will miss the others, but we can still sit in the open the way we did before.
On the third floor, there will be another space built but it is not certain how this space will be used. It was originally supposed to be a media lab intended to service the visual arts students outside of the classroom but as of now, how the space will be used is not certain. Currently, we have four MAC’s on the lower level to service those visual arts students.
Kirkpatrick also stated we do not have the money to continue working on the side of the library on the third floor that faces the gym. This part of the library will have to stay the same until we get extra monies. Also, if you go down to the lower level, the Curriculum Materials Center, CMC, will stay as it is. Also, downstairs, where audio visual used to be, in back in the darkest area, all of that is being ripped out. The concrete floor has already been dug up and a new heavy duty one will be put in that can support compact shelving. Since people are starting to use electronic books more verses text books, we are cleaning and sorting through the books we do have to put them on the compact shelves in the dark corner to free up the beautiful space for human beings to use and actually enjoy. So were not getting rid of books, we will still have books, we are just putting them out of the way. In the end, we will have some new oak regular shelving downstairs; but that will also have to wait until some of the later money.
To completely finish construction on the library, we are going to have to lobby for the rest of the money but Kirkpatrick in confident President Butts is going to work hard on that. At the end of 2014, we will not be rolling right into the new construction, how long of delay cannot be confirmed at this time. Most of the construction will be done by the end of 2014, but we will also see a lot of new resources on the main floor of the library done by the Fall of 2013.
As for the construction that was supposed to be completed on the rest of campus we will be getting new windows in the Campus Center in addition the Health Center will be moving from the old side to the I Wing of the Campus Center. In the Health Center we will be adding gynecological services for the women here on campus. The H Wing is in the process of renovation and is finishing up. The H Wing has not been renovated in over forty years. The elevators in the campus center have also been replaced. The two bridges should have been completed already but construction on this project will go into 2014. Finishing touches are now being put on the Clark Center and we can look forward to seeing a huge panther at the entrance.
The budget cuts are an overall disappointment but we can’t forget the opening of the New Academic Building in the Fall of 2012. The NAB was New York State’s largest project in the SUNY system. According to Kirkpatrick, the construction we are able to move forward with is huge progress and he is confident SUNY Old Westbury will receive the money to completely finish the job.