Funding for Master Plan to come from mixed sources

In March, the Kent State Board of Trustees approved the 10-year Master Plan, a comprehensive layout of major changes planned for the university.

Phase one of the master plan, which began over the summer with renovations to the Student Center and Eastway dining facilities, is slated to be finished in 2020. The second and third phases will be stretched out over longer periods of time in the following years.

“The first phase was, nominally, $200 million,”  Michael Bruder, the executive director of facilities planning and operations, said. “That was approved to move forward into the design and construction phase… by the Board of Trustees.”

Each individual project’s funding and financing within each phase must be approved by the board.

Funding comes from a mix of sources, which includes KSU local funds, state funding and public private partnerships, according to official minutes from the March Board of Trustees meeting.

KSU local funds, Bruder said, come from returns on investments by the university.

“We were able to realize some gains from some of our investments,” Bruder said. “They had a successful year so they pulled out some of the interests, or gains, from those.”

The state of Ohio also allocates around $20 million in funding to Kent State every two years. Part of that funding but not all of it, Bruder said, will go toward master plan construction funding.

The third section of funding comes from a mix of philanthropy fundraising and private partner funding. Bruder said fundraising is often the least predictable funding channel.

“Some of them are solely slated as philanthropy, which means that the timeline has to be variable,” Bruder said. “Because you’re not sure when the donors are available, when they commit and so on.”

Bruder identified the two largest projects within phase one as the construction of the new business administration building, which will serve as a “gateway” to the university from East Main Street, and an overhaul of the old Art Building, which will be renamed the Design Innovation Hub.

The business administration building will come with an estimated price tag of $72.3 million, with funding coming from investment returns, allocated state funds and the private partner on the project, Signet Real Estate.

The Board of Trustees approved the partnership, funding and design Wednesday at their quarterly meeting.

Bruder said construction is set to begin in the summer of 2019 and is expected to be finished by the fall 2021 semester.

The business building will be located where Terrace Hall and the C-Midway parking lot is located, meaning they will have to be torn down and bulldozed to make way for the new facility. Bruder said teardown and excavation of the hall will take place in early summer of 2019.

“We are going to be constructing some classroom and studio space in the MACC Annex for the fashion school,” Bruder said, later explaining the space previously occupied by architecture students will be redesigned for this purpose.

This, however, is only a temporary fix for fashion students: Bruder said, with anticipated extra funding coming from the state next year, plans to do smaller-scale renovations and expansion of Rockwell Hall will provide space for all fashion students to work within the fashion building.

ROTC students and faculty, who were the primary occupants of Terrace Hall, will be relocated to the Michael Schwartz Center.

To replace the parking spaces lost with the excavation of the C-Midway lot, a parking structure will be built near the new business building. The exact location, design and cost, however, are not yet known.

The redesign of the old Art Building into the Design Innovation Hub will come at an expected grand total of $44.9 million, with $24.9 million from local funds; $15 million in state funding allocations and $5 million coming from Kent State’s dining partner, Aramark, according from a university statement from June 2018.

The DI Hub will feature student workspaces and resources, including 3D printers, to service students across all majors.

A dining hall will also be built within the new facility to service students who have few on-campus dining options while they attend class and work on front campus — something the university has known to be in high demand.

“The university really wanted to respond to that (demand),”  Bruder said. “Student government had actually passed a resolution asking for that, so we’re in the design process and I’m really excited about it.”

Bruder said the design phase of the DI Hub project is about “30 percent done.”

Alongside these big projects,  the university is undertaking a project to add lab spaces into the Integrated Sciences building basement, a 13,500 square-foot, currently unused, space. The board has approved $8 million for this project.