Green light given to repair NWC’s Cody Hall

Posted 1/16/18

The work will include the basic repairs needed to reopen the facility, fixes to residence rooms and hallways and will also involve remodeling the common areas. The cost for repairs to the 450-student occupancy residence hall is estimated at just …

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Green light given to repair NWC’s Cody Hall

Posted

With one dissenting vote, trustees approve $3 million dorm project

After months of discussion, analysis and multiple architectural evaluations, the Northwest College Board of Trustees voted last week to move ahead with proposed repairs to water-damaged Cody Hall.

The work will include the basic repairs needed to reopen the facility, fixes to residence rooms and hallways and will also involve remodeling the common areas. The cost for repairs to the 450-student occupancy residence hall is estimated at just over $3 million, the bulk of which will come out of reserves.

“I’m really pleased with the board’s decision,” said NWC President Stefani Hicswa. “The board has done some really nice work with due diligence and looking at return of investment.”

Cody Hall has been closed since last summer, when extensive water damage was discovered; school officials closed the residence hall for the 2017-18 school year as they explored options.

Options discussed over the past six months ranged from demolishing the facility to a from-the-ground-up remodel, each with its own price tag. Also taken into consideration were the long-term ramifications of potentially eliminating a residence hall, and what that could mean for recruiting and retaining students in an uncertain economy.

“For a while, I wondered if it would be better just to tear it [Cody Hall] down. Then I wondered if it would be better just to fix it up a little bit,” Hicswa said. “The time we’ve taken to come to this recommendation has been very beneficial. We really looked at it from the perspective of the long-term needs of our college campus.”

Now that the board has approved the funding, the project will be put out for bid, with an eye toward a completion date and reopening in August 2019.

“A best-case scenario would be whoever gets the bid to start right away, and be ready to go this fall,” Hicswa said. “But the most realistic timeline would be August 2019.”

Shortly after the extent of the damage to Cody Hall became clear last summer, a committee was appointed within the Board of Trustees to look at the scope of the problem from all angles. On the committee were trustees Dusty Spomer, Luke Anderson and Carolyn Danko, with Anderson named committee chair. Hicswa credits this group with crunching the data and coming up with workable solutions.

“We had several meetings with this committee to get to the recommendation we put before the board,” Hicswa said. “The committee had me provide them with information, such as return on investment analysis, to look at our residence halls from a big-picture standpoint. As we’re making some of these decisions for repairs, we’re creating a long-term, 50-year plan.”

Though the recommendation was expected to pass the board, it wasn’t a slam-dunk. Trustee John Housel cast a lone dissenting vote for the project, expressing his concern that other matters affecting the college — such as pay raises for employees — should be addressed first.

“We have resolutions that we passed last meeting, in which our priority is to increase funding for employee salaries,” Housel said to the board. “What we’re looking at in the finance committee and what those resolutions spoke about was that we want to have permanent increases to salaries on this campus. That is a priority, and to me, that priority is higher than the priority of a building.”

In touring Cody Hall late last year, “the damage in the basement part wasn’t nearly as bad as what I had visualized, and what could have been,” Housel said.

Based on what he saw, he urged the board to consider a less-expensive fix, one that would still allow the doors to re-open.

“I don’t think it’s going to take that much to repair,” he said. “It’s my position that anything that does not directly deal with our employees and how to get their salaries higher as we have said in our resolution, takes a backseat, or even beyond a backseat, in terms of how we are allocating our limited resources.”

Trustee Danko countered that the college’s revenue comes from enrollment, stating that without sufficient housing, students will explore other options.

“If we don’t have a place to put these people to enroll, we won’t have the money,” Danko said. “If we actually sit down and figure out what happens if we lose 450 students who decide to go to Casper, that’s a lot of money to lose in enrollment.”

Board President Nada Larsen agreed with Danko’s assessment, reminding the board the recommendation was more than just a quick fix.

“Just fixing what is absolutely wrong over there [at Cody Hall] is probably not going to get us anywhere,” Larsen said. “If we expect the building to hold together for another 20 years, we need to do what’s best for it.”

Hicswa said the funding sources for the Cody Hall project and employee salaries are different, and that it would not be prudent to use money intended for facilities improvements on ongoing salaries. She agreed that Housel’s points were valid, and if the rest of the board had agreed, re-prioritizing would have been a viable option. As it stands, however, the repair project will move forward.

“I think we can use the analysis that we put together of the various funding sources to be able to do Cody Hall. Then we can look at our operations budget to prioritize the salary directives,” Hicswa said. “But with all of our aging buildings, we need to step back and look at what we’re doing and how that impacts our campus long-term. That’s what the board did with this decision.”

Administrators are currently working through a list of architects who have expressed an interest in the project, said NWC Vice President for Administrative Services and Finance Lisa Watson.

“Once an architect is chosen, they will work together with the structural engineers to bid out for construction,” Watson said.

“I wouldn’t expect that we’re going to be able to go out to bid by the end of the month, but we hope we can do everything we can to move this along as quickly as we can,” Watson said. “The dream would be that we could have the building open by the fall [2018]. I’m not sure that’s possible, because now we’re into January. Part of the challenge could be the different contractors and their availability: Are you available to do a project of this size and scope come May 1?”

Watson said quality of work will be at the forefront of the project.

“If it happens [quickly] and we can make it work, awesome,” Watson said. “If it doesn’t, we’re just going to have to the best we can with timing. It’s more important to get the job done right, obviously, more than anything else.”

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