$1.5 million allocated for Brooks Hall repairs
Brooks Hall is receiving another $1.5 million for renovations.
Steve Lawrence, associate vice president of Facilities Management, said $1,420,000 of that money will go toward renovating and upgrading heating and cooling systems, control systems for heating and cooling, and remedying “noise issues” with already-installed equipment.
“It’s a big building, and it’s an old building,” he said. “You probably don’t realize the sheer amount of equipment when you have a building like that. There are so many rooms and so many floors.”
The remaining $80,000 will go to replacing old and damaged carpet in classrooms, Lawrence said.
Of the $1.5 million for the project, $300,000 will come from the Deferred Maintenance Fund, while $1.2 million is coming from general university funds.
The original renovations, including installation of underground water pipes and air conditioning ducts, originally cost $5.65 million with an additional $750,000 approved in September.
The Board of Trustees unanimously agreed to allocate the money at its Thursday meeting.
“This is actually the third allocation of money,” said Trustee Brian Fannon of the renovation project.
Lawrence said there were “size issues” with some of the equipment, and the heating and cooling equipment was noisy.
Payback
At the meeting, Fannon said the university will seek a refund from the engineers of the original renovations.
“It’s a design issue, from how the renovation was designed,” he said. “After the building was opened, the problems came up. So you need to take care of the issue, determine if somebody made a mistake, which we think they did.”
David Burdette, vice president of finance and administrative services, said the majority of the repairs will not be intrusive to classes or other academic activity.
“This allocation of funds will allow us to get it right, and the majority of the work will be done over the holiday break,” Burdette said.
The focus is to make the repairs, Lawrence said, and afterward, the university will deal with seeking refunds for the original work.
“We’re focusing right now on making repairs to the building and getting systems to run properly,” he said. “After we finish that, we’ll work on the other issues.”
