Campus Construction Update, October 24, 2022

Associate Vice Chancellor of Facilities Management Nick Katers and Director of University Property Michelle Novacek join Dave Blanks in studio to discuss the top 8 projects planned for App State's Boone campus.

Transcript

Dave Blanks: Hey, folks. This is Dave Blanks from University Communications. I am back, finally back, with a campus construction update. We've had quite the lull. The new residence halls are pretty much done. Right, Nick Katers and Michelle Novacek?

Nick Katers: Absolutely. That project, which went on for probably four years now-

Dave Blanks: Yeah.

Nick Katers: Is really at completion. The last building that we're tearing down is actually coming down right now.

Dave Blanks: Eggers is going down, and what's going to go in the place of that?

Nick Katers: The Bowie-Eggers site will be the last surface parking lot to make up for some of the space that we took when the stadium lot was consumed by those three beautiful residence halls.

Dave Blanks: Exactly. Nick, I should tell the people who you are. So this is Nick Katers, associate vice chancellor for facilities management, in the house. Hello, Nick.

Nick Katers: Thanks, Dave, for having me.

Dave Blanks: Yeah, I appreciate you being here. And Michelle Novacek, who is the director of university property. Correct, Michelle?

Michelle Novacek: That's right.

Dave Blanks: All right.

Michelle Novacek: That would make me the DUP.

Dave Blanks: The D-U-P. So, Nick, what are we going to be talking about if we're not talking about the residence halls? App is doing a lot.

Nick Katers: Absolutely. And we continue to have one of the best budgets that we've had in several years from the state legislature and from the UNC system office. So we have some really big projects coming up. Overall, we have 60, 65 projects that are going on all the time. But today I think we're going to talk about the eight big ones that are getting ready to start up, and it will really transform the landscape of the university over the next three to four years.

Dave Blanks: Wow. There are 65 total projects, approximately, at any time going on?

Nick Katers: Oh, absolutely. And a project is really anything over $30,000 that looks towards upgrading any part of the university. So even small classroom upgrades all the way up to a $50 million new building.

Dave Blanks: What are the top eight big ones that we're talking about today?

Nick Katers: Okay, so we'll kind of plow through these in the order that they're going to start and how they'll impact different parts of the campus. So the very first one, getting ready to start up in the spring, is Wey Hall, the art building. Wey Hall is the oldest building on campus that has never been renovated.

Dave Blanks: I didn't know that.

Nick Katers: Yeah. So the art department is excited about this. It's a three-story building. You might recognize it. It's the one with the giant air freshener on the front.

Dave Blanks: Very recognizable.

Nick Katers: So I'm not sure whether or not the air freshener will make a return post-renovation, but-

Dave Blanks: Oh, man. I hope so.

Nick Katers: We're quite a ways down the road to getting this project started. The most complicated part of the Wey Hall renovation project was trying to find a place for all of the art students and some of their specialized labs across campus.

Dave Blanks: Yeah.

Nick Katers: So there's quite a few different capabilities within that building that we had no ideal substitute for. So Wey Hall's going to close down at the end of the fall semester, except for the first floor, which has some pretty specialized wood shop, metal shops, and a couple other things in there. So we'll keep the first floor open while the second and third floors start renovation. And then those shops where we can't find a substitute for, will move out into sort of temporary facilities that we create. So Wey Hall closes down after the fall semester, and the faculty move into our new temporary office building.

Michelle Novacek: Nick's throwing it to me now.

Nick Katers: I am throwing it to the property director.

Dave Blanks: All right, Michelle. What is our new temporary office building?

Michelle Novacek: So let me just say that we are really lucky to have East Hall still standing, but with no students living in East Hall.

Dave Blanks: It has seemed unusually-

Michelle Novacek: Quiet.

Dave Blanks: Yeah, quiet.

Michelle Novacek: Yeah.

Dave Blanks: Quieter than normal. So, yeah. No students in there.

Michelle Novacek: Those now become offices.

Dave Blanks: Okay.

Michelle Novacek: So each and every one of them has a sink in it, which I think is going to be a big draw.

Dave Blanks: That's kind of cool. I wish I had a sink in here.

Michelle Novacek: You know what? In all honesty, they're really nice spaces. They're 207 square feet, which is bigger than what most people are used to for an office.

Dave Blanks: Wow, yeah.

Michelle Novacek: They also have windows that open.

Dave Blanks: Awesome.

Michelle Novacek: It's not all perfect, because there's no elevator and there's no air conditioning. But, hey. It's space. It's on campus. It's central.

Dave Blanks: It's currently built.

Michelle Novacek: It's built. Exactly.

Dave Blanks: It's completed, yes.

Michelle Novacek: Exactly right. And it puts you there on the main quad pretty much.

Dave Blanks: Well, it is a good location, close to Sanford.

Michelle Novacek: It is. It is.

Dave Blanks: So, yeah. So when are they moving out of Wey into East?

Michelle Novacek: So we're looking at December now.

Dave Blanks: Okay. All right.

Michelle Novacek: Coming up soon.

Dave Blanks: That is coming right up. What's next on the docket, Nick?

Nick Katers: Sure. So the next big project that people will see will be the Holmes Convocation Center Parking Deck. We're going to take the surface parking deck that's sort of behind the Convocation Center on Faculty Street, and we're going to put in a 600-vehicle parking deck, which will add quite a bit of additional capacity to that side of campus, which has been really lacking in parking solutions. So, if you think about basketball season being the big ticket item for Holmes Convocation for the next few months, we're going to start work as soon as the basketball season is complete in 2023. And hopefully that's into March, because they're going to be that good this year. We'll start with some utility relocates, and then we'll begin to build the parking deck. And that one should go up pretty fast. We want to have the parking deck reopened by the fall of 24.

Dave Blanks: Okay. All right.

Nick Katers: So about a 16-month construction period to give us a net gain of about 500 parking places.

Dave Blanks: Well, so how does that stack up against the other decks that we have already?

Nick Katers: They're mostly pretty similar in size.

Dave Blanks: Okay.

Nick Katers: I think the Blue Ridge Deck, which a lot of people still call, the Stadium Deck, I think has between 400 and 500 spots.

Dave Blanks: Okay. Yeah.

Nick Katers: The River Street Deck is our biggest one. This will be more comparable towards the River Street Deck. We'll get as close to 600 as we can in this new parking deck.

Dave Blanks: All right.

Nick Katers: So pretty excited about that. That's the first of, I think, several parking decks that will go up over the next 10 years.

Dave Blanks: Right. Okay. Well, anything else on the Holmes lot you want to cover?

Nick Katers: I think it'll be a inconvenience for about 16 to 18 months while this is shut down. And we're moving faculty and staff from the west side of campus to east side as part of the relocation. So everybody's nerves are going to get a little frayed here as we lose about a hundred spots during the construction period.

Dave Blanks: Is that how many are in that lot right now? That little one behind Holmes?

Nick Katers: Yeah, it's between a hundred and 150 spots right now.

Dave Blanks: So who's going to have to get displaced? Is it the people from the JET Building and the Holmes, faculty and staff?

Nick Katers: Pretty much. Those are the everyday people. And then of course, event parking for football, basketball-

Dave Blanks: Oh, yeah.

Nick Katers: Will be shut down for one football season and one full basketball season.

Dave Blanks: Right. Well, that'll come with its challenges, but, yeah. Definitely some growth we need.

Nick Katers: Definitely.

Dave Blanks: What's next, Nick?

Nick Katers: Okay, so the next one is Edwin Duncan Hall. It's really bigger than it looks. It's a 90,000 square foot building.

Dave Blanks: Wow.

Nick Katers: And it has been our swing space for the last few years. If you remember, originally Duncan was the College of Education building, and in 2011 we got the new College of Education building, and it's sort of been existing as temporary swing space without a real steady presence in there. So the intent here is to renovate Duncan Hall to become the home of the fine and applied arts college. And so fine and applied arts will form the anchor for this new building as it's complete. This will probably start next summer. We're still in the process of kind of finalizing some of the specifications on whether or not we're going to include the Octagon in this renovation.

Dave Blanks: That's my go-to parking space, Nick. Please don't get rid of the Octagon.

Nick Katers: The Octagon's pretty special. We used it as class space, even.

Dave Blanks: I remember that.

Nick Katers: During COVID. We'll try to open Duncan again in the fall of 24.

Dave Blanks: Okay.

Nick Katers: And at the same time that we're doing Duncan, we're going to put on an addition to Peacock Hall. And it's important to kind of tie these two buildings together because they sort of exist in the same area, and we want to disrupt as few of the parking spaces as possible. So we have combined a Peacock addition with the Duncan renovation so that we use the same architect, the same contractor, and hopefully the same lay-down space so that you don't lose your space.

Dave Blanks: Right. Yeah.

Nick Katers: In the Octagon parking lot.

Dave Blanks: Well, thank goodness.

Nick Katers: And that's going to be extremely complicated, and it will add some definite friction to that part of the campus. So the Peacock addition will give us between 40 and 50,000 square feet of new space. So this is an addition sort of out into the Peacock parking lot for the-

Dave Blanks: I was trying to picture that. Yeah. I wonder if there's anything about it on the future site. I don't know. Let's see.

Nick Katers: So I think the future site has some conceptuals, but if you can picture the plaza that's there in Peacock and where the solar array is out towards the bus circle.

Dave Blanks: Yes.

Nick Katers: That's about as far as it's going to extend.

Dave Blanks: Okay. All right.

Nick Katers: So we won't be taking up the whole Peacock parking lot.

Dave Blanks: Gotcha.

Nick Katers: We'll eventually close in all the plaza.

Dave Blanks: Okay. All right. So that's also going to be a fall of 24 completion for that?

Nick Katers: So Peacock will be a little bit longer. That one's going to be a fall of 25.

Dave Blanks: Okay.

Nick Katers: Completion, because it's a new build. We're going to have to go a little slower.

Dave Blanks: Gotcha. That's the new build. But just stepping back a little bit to Edwin Duncan, that's a reno.

Nick Katers: That's a renovation.

Dave Blanks: Okay. All right.

Nick Katers: Right. So it's kind of chewed up right now. Duncan looks like it's got between eight to 10 classrooms in it, and it's got a lot of little tiny offices. We're going to try to make them more typical of the offices on the rest of campus and try to get to a little bit larger standard.

Dave Blanks: Gotcha. Okay. But not like, "We're adding a floor!" It's not going to be anything like that.

Nick Katers: No.

Dave Blanks: All right.

Nick Katers: And because it's a renovation, I really can't do too much beyond the edge of the building.

Dave Blanks: Right.

Nick Katers: So some of the drainage issues that we have, we have been solving in sort of a separate way. But definitely being able to address the whole building will fix a lot of the problems, especially the first floor of Duncan.

Dave Blanks: Yeah. Absolutely. All right. Well, cool. Where else you want to go?

Nick Katers: So the last three are kind of combined, and these are the exciting ones because we have some really innovative ways of delivering the Innovation Campus first building. So there's three parts to the Innovation Campus under design right now. The first is the Conservatory Building, which has been envisioned for a number of years. Conservatory will be the anchor point for the new Innovation Campus. That'll start this fall. This one was funded at $54 million by the state legislature. Right next to that, as you get to the top of Bodenheimer, we're going to also put in some faculty and staff housing, which is an incredible need in the area and has impacted how we can attract new faculty and staff to the university. We're working through a public-private partnership with an outside developer that will put in faculty-staff housing using a 50-year ground lease structure. So no state dollars for this.
We give them the land, they give us 156 housing units in two- and three-bedroom configuration, and we have enough room for faculty and staff to transition into the university while they look for a permanent place to live.

Dave Blanks: Gotcha.

Nick Katers: And then the third piece that ties it all together is a Zero-Carbon Energy District. This Zero-Carbon Energy District will include geothermal wells throughout the whole area to do heating and cooling in all these buildings. There'll be solar panels on all of the faculty-staff housing, as well as the new academic building, the Conservatory. Also up there to create the majority of electricity is going to be somewhere between two to four new wind turbines.

Dave Blanks: Oh, wow. All right.

Nick Katers: So these turbines will provide the majority of the electricity. The idea again is we want to get as close to zero electricity need up there as possible, but definitely to a zero-carbon environment. This is an exciting project because it really sort of advances Appalachian's commitment to sustainability.

Dave Blanks: So is the 54 million just for the Conservatory?

Nick Katers: Yes.

Dave Blanks: Or is it for the ... Okay. All right. Okay.

Nick Katers: So there'll be a little bit of the 54 million that will go into some of the prep for the next few buildings that could conceivably go up on the Innovation Campus. But this is going to be a great district, completely self-contained from an energy perspective and a heating and cooling perspective. We won't run steam lines from the steam plant up there. This will all be generated up on top of the Hill.

Dave Blanks: Gotcha. Wow. Big changes up there on top of Bodenheimer.

Nick Katers: Yep.

Dave Blanks: So that's where the baseball field is up there as well.

Nick Katers: Yeah.

Dave Blanks: Does it affect them in any way?

Nick Katers: So the baseball field will probably not be affected in the first couple of phases. Down the road as we expand the other buildings that'll be on the Innovation Campus, we may look at putting additional geothermal wells by the baseball field, and perhaps next time we replace the field turf, we'll even put geothermal wells under the stadium as well.

Dave Blanks: Nice. Wow. Well, the field looks great right now. It's very accommodating, and-

Nick Katers: Yeah.

Dave Blanks: It's a nice place to check out if-

Nick Katers: It's one of the most beautiful stadiums, definitely in the Sunbelt, but most of the Southern colleges I've seen. That baseball stadium is fantastic.

Dave Blanks: I think it's a pretty easy sell, especially now during autumn. Man, it's gorgeous up there right now.

Nick Katers: Yeah. In fact, and we just added a new scoreboard.

Dave Blanks: Yes!

Nick Katers: The Athletic Department was able to come up with some funding to add a new scoreboard to sort of update that facility as well.

Dave Blanks: Right. Yeah.

Nick Katers: So it looks fantastic.

Dave Blanks: I think Governor Byers helped with that quite a bit.

Nick Katers: Yeah.

Dave Blanks: So anything else we want to cover today? Michelle, I can't believe you've talked so little.

Michelle Novacek: My boss is sitting here.

Dave Blanks: Well-

Michelle Novacek: What could I possibly say?

Dave Blanks: Say, "Yes, exactly. Wow. Yeah. Well put." I don't know.

Nick Katers: Michelle's big thing is also not just real estate, but helping with the space management. And it's very complicated as we move people around campus. She's the point of entry for most of the space management pieces that go on as to where people move.

Dave Blanks: Right.

Nick Katers: So those are kind of our on-campus projects. So maybe next time we'll talk about Hickory or we can talk about some of the other projects. I know everyone's really fascinated what's going on in Hickory and what does that look like coming up in the future, so.

Dave Blanks: Absolutely. Well, Nick and hopefully Michelle too, we look forward to having you back next time. Thanks so much for being here today, and we'll do it again. Okay?

Nick Katers: That's fantastic. Loved it.