The effort to create a second quadrangle on the University of Rhode Island’s Kingston campus – this one surrounded by technology and life science studies buildings – has started with the Center for Biotechnology & Life Sciences, expected to cost about $58 million. The 142,000-square-foot building is set to open in January 2009, but it initially won’t have an occupied top floor.
That’s because the building cost $4 million more than has been raised, due primarily to rising costs for construction materials, College of the Environment and Life Sciences Dean Jeff Seemann said in a recent interview.
The second building that will flank the new quad will be for the College of Pharmacy, set to break ground next spring. Voters approved a bond for that $65 million building, “which will be about $75 million or $80 million overall,” Seemann said.
Another reason for the increased construction costs of both buildings, acknowledged Seemann, the school’s decision to create “the biggest and the best buildings we can,” he said. ?“We didn’t just take the state general obligation bond, which was $50 million for the biotechnology building, and say, ‘That’s it, that’s all we’re going to build,’” he said. “We look very hard at our ability to bring in resources from other places and see how much more we can do.”
For URI, the new buildings surrounding its new quad are also viewed as another step toward being a respected research university – offering an education closer to the needs of Rhode Island companies as the world moves toward knowledge- and technology-based industries as economic leaders, Seemann said.
“In the end, when we come out of this economic recession, we are going to be training students in biotech, doing research in this arena, spitting out new companies,” he added. “It’s going to be the base for a real healthy economy.”
And that’s another reason why the buildings are planned above the cost of the bonds. The school hopes to attract outside funding, such as the $1 million donation that Amgen Inc. gave to URI for the biotechnology center.
The space that’s been shelled – about 15 percent of the building – is an “opportunity space.”
“We can take advantage of public-private partnerships that are of interest to the state and the university, where corporations may want to come in and invest, where companies may see opportunities to develop a specific research facility where we have expertise,” Seemann said. “This was very thoughtful – the building is on time and on budget.”
URI spokesman Todd McLeish said the biotechnology center is the only capital-improvement project in which the school expects to leave vacant space.
At Rhode Island College, Vice President of Administration and Finance Ivy Locke is in charge of capital-improvement financing. She said the school is now renovating a floor of the Henry Barnard building and two buildings on its East Campus. A bond issue is funding renovations of Building 3 and Building 7 on the East Campus, a combined about $6.05 million project. It’s a “huge” time for building at the school, she said.
She said rising construction costs have delayed projects a little, but the school is hoping state lawmakers may be able to provide some additional funding.
At URI, the new quad that’s being built is still on track, despite the setback on the vacant fourth floor of the biotechnology building, Seemann said.
The school also has future plans for a chemistry building and a new College of Nursing building.
For now, Seemann said his office and URI will continue lobbying for funding to complete the top floor of the biotechnology center.
There will also be naming opportunities – for the buildings, classrooms, laboratories, offices and even the quad – that range up to about $5 million.
“Somebody is welcomed to name the whole [College of the Environment and Life Sciences], if they’d like,” Seemann added. •
