Extreme makeover: campus edition
By Leanna Roy
News
Editor
August 31, 2010
 With the unavoidable maze of orange detour fences, campus pedestrians may have trouble finding their way to class on their first day back to school. However Dennis Hastings, UWindsor's executive director of Facility Services predicts that students will find the detours worth the hassle after the university's almost 60 active campus wide projects near completion.
Some small changes students should look out for are classroom and lab renovations in Dillon, Memorial, Essex, Biology and HK, and extensive roof work on Odette, Chrysler Hall South, Dillon. "Dillon Hall east exterior is mostly complete," according to Hastings. "Some work however will continue on the uppermost roof for a couple of weeks, but it should not affect the use of the building."
Students can also expect entrance and washroom improvements in the IT Services building, continued improvements to the residences, sidewalks, landscape improvements, recycling enhancements, including more instructions at some recycling stations, improved fire alarm systems and last but not least, sand volleyball courts.
So where did the university get the money to fund all of these renovations? "Projects are funded from a variety of sources," explained Hastings.
"It should be noted that [Sunset construction] is a City of Windsor road project and they have made several improvements to both the sewers and the road that should make the look of Sunset much better."
The majority of the large projects are funded by the government, while some of the smaller ones are funded by a combination of government, research agencies and the normal amount allotted to projects through the operating budget.
"We have been very fortunate over the last several years to receive substantial grants from the province for some of our major renovations and of course the province and the federal governments have each contributed $40 million towards the engineering building," said Hastings.
As the summer comes to an end, the construction season follows. Hastings says that most of the work being done around campus is concluding and that the first phase of the engineering building will be ready for occupancy sometime next spring. "Students returning to campus will likely notice that a substantial amount of work has been done on this particular site over the summer," that the first phase of this building will be ready for occupancy sometime next spring.
"All in all, it has been a very busy summer," and everything should be back in order as the semester begins. Progress on all university renovations can be viewed on the Facility Services website.
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