ASU making plans to refurbish campus buildings

Many of Arizona State University's aging buildings will soon receive a long-overdue fix-up.

The Legislature in June approved $1 billion for building renewal and new construction at the state's three public universities, though nearly half will be spent on the Phoenix Biomedical Campus. The Arizona Board of Regents is giving roughly $200million to ASU.

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ASU's School of Construction will get up to $32 million for a new building to house its growing enrollment.

The construction school's new home will meet the highest "green" building standards, James Ernzen, director of the school, has said. Construction professors will use the building to show students first-hand what earth-friendly structures look like and how they work.

University officials are still figuring out precisely which structures on the main campus in Tempe they want to spend their remaining $170 million in maintenance cash.

Many of the main campus' facilities date back to the 1960s and 1970s and lack sufficient life-safety equipment, plumbing, heating and air conditioning.

Richard Stanley, ASU's planning director, said the university's top priority is upgrading those buildings to meet current safety standards.

But they also need to be altered to meet ASU's current needs.

"We're going to try to improve the quality of the classrooms, change the configuration in some cases, to match the different kind of class sizes we have now," Stanley said. "Most of the work we'll be doing is addressing needs and modernizing."

The Durham Language & Literature Building, on the north end of ASU's Tempe campus, is slated for the biggest overhaul. Built in 1964, it houses the English department and School of International Letters and Cultures and is budgeted to receive $23 million in renewal work.

In all, 17 buildings on the university's Tempe campus require basic maintenance to keep functioning into the future.

"We haven't been able to get in to do the deeper guts of the buildings that you have to worry about wearing down over time," Stanley said.

From 2002 through 2006, lawmakers spent little to maintain buildings at the state's public universities, figures from the Joint Legislative Budget Committee show.

State law requires that the Legislature pay for critical maintenance, including "projects to comply with building, health, fire or safety codes."

The Legislature is supposed to use a formula that considers buildings' age and construction costs to determine how much state money universities receive each year. Lawmakers ignored the formula on the rare occasions they provided any building renewal money.

As a result, lawmakers shorted the universities about $400million this decade.

ASU's Memorial Union suffered the consequences of those cuts in November when a fire nearly consumed the entire 255,000-square-foot building.

The fire began in a second-floor storage closet and spread unchecked throughout the third floor, areas the university had delayed installing a sprinkler system for lack of cash.

The state is borrowing the $1billion for the construction; the universities must repay 20percent of that, with revenue from the state Lottery expected to cover the rest.