For those of you that have been following OU's plans to build a campus health center that would put student health, the University Medical Associates, and a diagnostic center under one roof, you can return to your regularly scheduled programming. Following last Friday's board of trustees meeting, a University spokesperson explained to the press that the estimate for the cost of building the facility has risen from 18 to 26-30 million dollars, prohibitively expensive. OU now intends to renovate Hudson Hall and Parks Hall, the current homes of student health and UMA, respectively.
I can't say I'm sorry to see the project mothballed for the time being. While Hudson has many shortcomings as a student health center, it is central to campus and much of off-campus student housing. Neither of the sites that were batted around were within walking distance of the vast majority of OU students, and at least one, the current tailgating park across from Peden Stadium, was at odds with the recommendations of OU's campus master plan, which calls for the Hocking River corridor to be left undeveloped.1
While the new center would have allowed Student Health Services and UMA to combine services and share facilities, the prospect of three separate entities occupying a single building has to make you wonder as well; the original center proposal called for 75,000 square feet of space, while Hudson and Parks together add up to over 81,000 square feet.2
To obtain the funds for building that $18 million version, budget-makers had proposed nearly doubling student fees by adding a dedicated health fee to the health portion of the general fee starting in Fiscal Year 2011, an increase from $43.25 to $82.11 per quarter. Fee hikes resulting from a Hudson renovation will likely be more modest, though a recent Post article suggested that planners hope to completely gut the building and possibly add on to the front.3
If plans for a combined health center ever do go back on the board, my two cents is that it should be built on the parking lot just east of Walter Hall, a location that is within walking distance of most of campus. The master plan has designated this a future building site on the Richland green, and it's big enough to accommodate the most ambitious of projects.4
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2 comments:
I find it interesting that suggestion of areas to be built are always parking lots...with no mention of where the parking spaces will be replaced. Parking is yet one more impact that it is forcing on Athens with out any type of recompense.
By: Anonymous on July 4, 2008 at 2:18 PM
You make a good point, anonymous. I should have included the second part of my recommendation, which is that OU expand the single-floor parking garage next to Baker Center to 3 or 4 floors, which would add several hundred parking spaces to the university roster. The location is within easy walking distance of most of Athens. It's kind of ridiculous that a campus involving 24,000 people where space is at a premium doesn't have a single multi-floor parking facility.
By: The Watchdog on July 4, 2008 at 11:30 PM
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