ORONO, Maine — With less than two weeks remaining before students descend by the thousands on the University of Maine campus, work is winding down on about $25 million in construction and renovation projects, according to university officials.
That includes about $5.5 million in work funded through a voter-approved bond to improve outdated labs, lecture halls and heating systems.
One of the biggest transformations is happening inside Aubert Hall, one of the busier halls on campus. Most students studying the sciences or engineering spend a lot of time there, taking chemistry courses and labs.
“You can’t be doing today’s science and engineering in labs that are 50 years old,” said Barbara Cole, professor and chairwoman of the UMaine chemistry department. “It just doesn’t work anymore.”
Aubert now has a collection of six newly renovated labs after a couple at a time were updated over the past several years. There are still three old teaching labs that likely will be renovated in the future.
The old lab spaces were designed in the 1950s and hadn’t seen a major update in several decades. Breakout rooms, where students can work on computers or collaborate in groups outside the lab, were often tables lining the hallway rather than actual rooms. The student workspaces restricted instructors’ ability to monitor what was going on and prevent potentially hazardous mistakes. The labs also weren’t fully compliant with Americans With Disabilities Act requirements, Cole said.
The new labs are brighter and offer better visibility, more space, multiple fume hoods and better amenities. That portion of the building is more than a century old, so crews had to deal with uneven floors and walls as they worked to update the lab spaces.
In all, the work this year at Aubert cost about $2.7 million.
The remainder of the $5.5 million bond funding was split among renovation efforts at Little, Boardman and Bennett Halls, according to Jeffrey Aceto, assistant director of construction administration.
He said the university wanted to spread that money across as many buildings as possible, hitting some of the more heavily used lecture and classroom spaces on campus.
Little Hall got $1.7 million to upgrade its first-floor lecture halls and update its heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, as well as its electrical infrastructure.
Boardman Hall received $700,000 to improve the civil engineering concrete lab facility. Bennett Hall got $450,000 to improve its classroom and lecture hall space.
There are other major projects in the works not funded by that bond. Separate voter-approved bonds will result in a $9 million disease and tick laboratory, which is in planning and design stages, as well as a $9 million Advanced Structures and Composites Center wind and wave laboratory, which is nearing completion.
The rest of the work going on around campus is being paid for through a mix of university money, private gifts and federal grants.
Smaller projects, such as the rebuilding of the Long Road entrance to the university and repaving of parking lots, are going on across the campus.
Aceto said the projects are on time and on budget, in spite of tight time constraints. This amount of work at UMaine during the summer isn’t unusual, and is likely to continue for a long time to come.
The infrastructure of the University of Maine System and its seven campuses is in serious need of improvement, according to consultants. The system has too much space for an institution of its size, and needs to decide whether to renovate and better use existing infrastructure or shed itself of property.
The system and its universities have been taking a mixed approach, both downsizing and modernizing. For example, the system is selling its downtown Bangor headquarters and the University of Southern Maine is disposing of old office buildings and moving staff into underused offices elsewhere on campus.
Across the system, there are efforts to catch up with a more than $400 million backlog in maintenance that has been put off at the campuses’ aging buildings.
Follow Nick McCrea on Twitter at @nmccrea213.