Campus Construction Update, July 8, 2021

Check out this Campus Construction Update to learn the latest information about App State construction projects taking place across campus. In this episode, Associate Vice Chancellor for Facilities Nick Katers chats with University Communications' Dave Blanks about renovations to Sanford Hall, the Quinn Recreation Center, the Child Development Center and the North End Zone as well as the removal of the nearly 100-year-old Payne Branch Dam.

Transcript

Dave Blanks: Hey folks, this is Dave Blanks from University Communications back once again with a Campus Construction Update. However, I'm joined by someone who is not named Matt Dull. I'm joined by Nick Katers, the associate vice chancellor for facilities. He's in the podcast studio. Nick, how's it going? Thanks for coming down.

Nick Katers: Thanks. I appreciate it. I've listened to Matt Dull's podcast on the University Housing stuff for so long that it's fun to talk about something else. So I'm going to talk about anything that Matt doesn't have anything to do with.

Dave Blanks: Excellent! I am so happy that you're here to do that. So yeah, we're going to talk about some pretty cool stuff, renovations to Sanford, End Zone, some stuff that's going on at the Quinn and we're going to go all the way out to Payne Branch Road, but so where do you want to start first?

Nick Katers: Let me give you a snapshot. So right now there are 47 projects underway at any given time. So we do this with just seven project managers. What an awesome team of project managers that I have that manage all this stuff. They have about $201 million in placement going on right now. So we were almost at a quarter billion. You can see around campus some of the things that we've completed in the last 12 months besides the two great brand new residence halls.

Dave Blanks: Certainly!

Nick Katers: Sanford Hall finished up. That was $18 million project. I'll talk about that in just a sec. The stadium turf was replaced. The end zone was finished. Justice Hall was knocked down. That's just a small sample of that 47 projects that we have going on. So let's jump in with Sanford.

Dave Blanks: Sounds great!

Nick Katers: What an awesome building that turned out to be. So for less than half the cost of replacing that building, we're giving the campus back, essentially a brand new building. There are five floors of classrooms. We have some active learning classrooms and many new offices for the faculty with awesome views of Sanford Mall. I think we really added about 40 years of life to Sanford Hall and people that will remember getting stuck in the elevators in the past and some people even remember the childcare center on the first floor. Well, so on that first floor, that overhanging roof has been completely demolished and pulled out. That's now a student study area. It's an awesome place to just go and hang out and study. You can see across the mall. There are a number of new active learning classrooms in the building. So, it's all set for the fall semester. We're going to reopen it completely and go back to normal where pretty much every student that takes classes at App has at least one class in Sanford Hall.

Dave Blanks: That's fantastic. So faculty that were in Sanford, that had to get moved, now get to move back.

Nick Katers: Sure! So the English faculty has been sort of holed up in Duncan Hall, and they've been crammed into every little nook and cranny that we could find in Duncan Hall. We're in the process of moving them and all of their books back to Sanford Hall right now.

Dave Blanks: Of which there are many, I'm certain.

Nick Katers: Many books, especially for the English faculty. They love books. So, my movers have been getting extra workouts.

Dave Blanks: Awesome. Well, yeah, I got to tour it with Jeff Pierce. What's Jeff's title?

Nick Katers: Jeff is the director of planning, design and construction. He in charge of all the big projects.

Dave Blanks: He is a great dude! I got to tour it with him, but it wasn't complete. Now it's complete. Yeah, I'm excited about Sanford. Where else do you want to go?

Nick Katers: So let's talk about the the new end zone facility.

Dave Blanks: Cool.

Nick Katers: If you haven't had a chance to see that thing, it's a state-of-the-art, one-of-a-kind end zone facility for a school our size. The new end zone has a ballroom on the fourth floor. The football team occupies the first and second floors with locker rooms, weight rooms and offices for the coaching staff. On the third floor we're going to have something brand new to the university. We're going to have an outside contractor called Breakthrough Physical Therapy that will come in and rent space from us in the new facility and provide physical therapy services to not only the student athletes, but to the entire student body.

Dave Blanks: Wow.

Nick Katers: Yeah, it's a new partnership that we're able to do through the millennial campus designation where certain parcels of our campus are called millennial. And we can actually partner with outside agencies to use the property for an academic related purpose, but not necessarily a state-funded purpose. So a great opportunity to try something new.

Dave Blanks: Cool. That's exciting. I guess we've been partnering with companies like that in the food services aspect for many years.

Nick Katers: Yes. This is really the first shot at putting it in sort of a non-food-service environment.

Nick Katers: So that's third floor is Breakthrough.

Breakthrough Physical Therapy.

Dave Blanks: And the ballroom is actually for not like footballs or, you know, it's like a grand ballroom.

Nick Katers: It is actually called the Grandview Ballroom.

Dave Blanks: There you go!

Nick Katers: So it's used for all kinds of get togethers. I know that campus services has things planned from wedding rehearsal dinners to fundraisers. It'll be actively used during the football games as more Yosef Club space.

Dave Blanks: That is exciting, too. I got to get a tour of that. I got to go over there and see it because I haven't been to the End Zone project. So what's the deal like if somebody does, is interested and wants to see it. Like how does that work? If somebody who doesn't work here, they're just listening. They're getting an update. How does that work?

Nick Katers: There's going to be a new athletics...it's not really a bookstore. It's called a bookstore, but it's really an athletics team store that gives you a chance to get into the first floor. You can kind of walk through to the back and see onto the field and see into the locker rooms. That's going to be opening this week. Other than that if you want to schedule time with either athletics or facilities, we're happy to take people through in some groups to show them different parts of that new facility because we're very proud of it.

Dave Blanks: Awesome.

Nick Katers: Well, let's move on. Let's talk about the Quinn.

Dave Blanks: Sounds great.

Nick Katers: Right across from the new end zone where we had the visiting football team for the last couple of years, the Quinn Center gym was kind of dark. The floor was really hard. Athletes were injuring themselves pretty frequently in there. It just wasn't a state-of-the-art modern facility. As part of the overall stadium renovation concept, we went into the Quinn Center. We completely replaced the floors. We replaced the lights, the basketball goals, put a new paint job on the whole thing.

Dave Blanks: Wow!

Nick Katers: That is, that's an awesome facility. If you're inside the Quinn using the student recreation center part of it just take a look inside the gym because it's an awesome sight to see. It's state of the art. It'll do wonders for basketball and volleyball practices.

Dave Blanks: That's a huge change. When did that occur?

Nick Katers: We just finished up that project about four months ago. So it's been one of our pandemic projects.

Dave Blanks: Right!

Nick Katers: We were able to get a lot of stuff done when nobody was using any of the buildings.

Dave Blanks: Perfection! So where else do you want to head? I know we did mention Payne Branch, which I didn't know was connected to Appalachian State at all. If you don't know, listeners, Payne Branch Road is as you're heading out of town, like you're going to Tweetsie. So you're heading Southbound on 321 and is it right after the big curve that everyone knows?

Nick Katers: Yeah, it's that first big curve and you kind of dive down into where the river is.

Dave Blanks: Right.

Nick Katers: So, most people know that New River Light and Power is part of Appalachian State University. New River has been around for over a hundred years and for the first 40 or 50 years, they relied on hydroelectric dams to generate power. This is the second dam that New River Light and Power had. The first one is...

Dave Blanks: On the Greenway right?

Nick Katers: It's on the Greenway. You can see the ruins there. It's kind of a historical site now.

Dave Blanks: Yeah, they have a marker and everything. It's cool.

Nick Katers: So the second one was an old dam that had been breached in one place. It was still impounding a lot of water, a lot of sediment. It really impeded the flow of the river. So, as a partnership with a bunch of outside agencies, New River Light and Power threw in some money and got the grant process rolling. We took out the old dam completely. We removed 1,300 dump truck loads of sand and sediment from behind there. We've completely restored it to an active trout stream now.

Dave Blanks: Wow, that's fantastic!

Nick Katers: It's just beautiful. If you get a chance to get out there, there's a small park area that we've created with some benches and you can see just the incredible improvements that have been made to that piece of App State property.

Dave Blanks: Cool. How far down Payne Branch is it because I've never actually been to that location?

Nick Katers: If you get off 321 at Payne Branch Road, as soon as you turn onto that road, about a hundred yards down, you'll be able to see where the dam used to be.

Dave Blanks: Okay. All right. Cool. Well, where else do you want to go, Mr. Katers?

Nick Katers: Let's talk about some of the other things that we're doing. The Career Development Center is a project to sort of consolidate all of the functions that used to be in the JET building. We're putting it now in a more centralized location on campus, in the Plemmons Student Union. So this'll have offices and study space and counselors available all centralized in one location. It even has the opportunity for recruiters to be able to come in and do interviews in this space. It's 95% finished right now. We're waiting on some furniture to have our grand opening, but it will be open for the students in the fall. If you get a chance, while you're in the Plemmons Student Union, you have to stop by and take a look at the new Career Development Center. It's going to be a first-class facility,

Dave Blanks: The location, obviously, will get way more foot traffic than the JET building was getting.

Nick Katers: Definitely. If you think about where McAlister's was, and there was an old sort of dark study area up there next to McAlister's, that's where the Career Development Center is now.

Dave Blanks: McAlister's is still there though, right?

Nick Katers: Yeah. McAlister's is still there. We only bit off a little piece of their dining area, but we're going to compensate in other ways to move them out.

Dave Blanks: Excellent. Anything else you want to cover today, Nick? We've done a lot. We've done so much today.

Nick Katers: So let me just talk about the Child Development Center, which is moving along. So, we have a hundred or so kids on a waiting list to get into the Child Development Center from faculty, staff, and student parents. We only have about space for 65 people in the current Child Development Center. This new expansion to the Child Development Center will give us another 55 slots for children and that's both infants and toddlers. We've been working long and hard to get this new facility in place. We had a lot of challenges trying to get land from the county zoned into the town, and there's a trout stream that runs through it so there's all kinds of other things that we've been dealing with. But I think we're on the verge of a breakthrough here. And I'm hoping that the new Child Development Center capacity will be open late fall, early winter so that we can start working off some of this waiting list.

Dave Blanks: That's very soon. So that's the one that's over on Poplar Grove?

Nick Katers: Poplar Grove. Yes.

Dave Blanks: Okay, cool. How long has that been around, like that particular building and has it been updated?

Nick Katers: So it's been added on a couple of times. It's a fairly old residence that we inherited sometime, a while ago. I'm not sure the exact date. I think we've been running it for a number of years though. It's in need of some renovation and we need the new place just to do repairs to the old place.

Dave Blanks: Yeah, I gotcha.

Nick Katers: A couple of other little highlights that people might be interested in. I know that everyone gets frustrated when you go to a football game and your cell phone, it gets no cell coverage by about the middle of the first quarter.

Dave Blanks: It's just something we've kind of accepted.

Nick Katers: So we have we have partnered with a company that's going to put cell phone repeaters throughout the stadium and the new end zone facility. We're taking the cell towers that were on Gardner Coltrane and we're moving them up to Bodenheimer so that Verizon, Carolina West and AT&T will have better coverage across the campus. I'm excited that this is going to make spotty coverage into something that's a little bit more reliable.

Dave Blanks: That's cool. Wow. So, when's that occurring?

Nick Katers: It's actually underway right now. The new tower is being built. We have to get it off of Gardener Coltrane because we're getting ready to demolish Gardner Coltrane. So, again, I'm touching into Matt's area here.

Dave Blanks: Right? That's all right. It's all connected, right? Same campus.

Nick Katers: Right — same campus. So you'll see Gardner Coltrane come down over the next six months, piece by piece. We're not going to do anything cool, like an implosion.

Dave Blanks: I know! I was bummed about that.

Nick Katers: So it was built at a time where we know you don't want to explode it because too many nasty things in the walls.

Dave Blanks: I get it.

Nick Katers: We're going to take it down piece by piece.

Dave Blanks: Yeah. It looks like it's already underway there, too. Like the windows are out on Gardner Coltrane, so yeah. And Matt's area, it looks, it looks fantastic, too. I know that is definitely in your purview as well.

Nick Katers: Definitely looking forward to opening the third residence hall by the end of July. We'll get it open about two weeks before the students get here. Last year I burned a lot of stomach acid trying to get those first two open. The elevator inspector finished up about three hours before the students.

Dave Blanks: Wow. We cut it that close?

Nick Katers: We were that close on that.

Dave Blanks: Wow, down to the wire. Well, I'm sure this one will go just as well. Maybe not as dramatically, going down to the wire with the three hours.

Nick Katers: I hope not.

Dave Blanks: Nick, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Come back again.

Nick Katers: Yeah, sure. We've got plenty to talk about.

Dave Blanks: Cool. Thank you, Mr. Katers.

Nick Katers: Thank you.