Site has been approved; architect selection is next; borrowing, fund raising, cost recovery and budget allocations will cover the cost of the $78-million project
The site for the new Life Sciences Building has been approved and architect selection is under way, members of the Advisory Committee on University Planning (ACUP) were told at their March 6 meeting.
John Noonan and Robert Vaughan of Facilities Management briefed ACUP about the Life Sciences Building, which is expected to be completed by spring 2004. The site - the block of land roughly bounded by Olive and Meeting streets - was approved by the Corporation at its meeting last month. Once the architect has been selected, the design work is expected to be completed by winter 2001, Noonan and Vaughan said.
Donald Reaves, executive vice president for finance and administration, described how borrowing, fund raising, cost recovery and budget allocations will cover the estimated $78-million capital cost of the project over the next few years.
The annual cost of the project is estimated to be $7.2 million, Reaves said, a figure that fund raising will reduce to $5.6 million. Increases in the University's indirect cost recovery - the funds Brown gets as reimbursement for conducting federally-sponsored research on campus - are expected to yield about $1.8 million. Currently, Brown's indirect cost recovery rate is about 57 percent, Reaves said. It is expected to rise to about 63 percent, he said, because of the increase in the volume of research the University will conduct once the Life Sciences Building is in use.
Additional cost recovery will be realized when the medical school no longer has to pay $700,000 a year to rent off-campus space for a number of its programs and centers. That rent money will be redirected to the budget for the Life Sciences Building, along with another $1 million from the medical school budget and about $2.1 million from the education and general budget.
Provost Kathryn Spoehr, who chairs ACUP, reminded members that although the Life Sciences Building primarily will house laboratory and research space, the relocation of various departments and affiliated programs to the new building ultimately will free classroom space elsewhere on campus. She also noted that the Corporation is taking care to ensure that the design of the new building will harmonize with the rest of campus. "The Corporation is very sensitive to `building massing' on that location," she said.
Earlier in its meeting, ACUP heard President Sheila Blumstein's response to the committee's proposed budget and thanked the members for their hard work.
After the Corporation approves the full budget in May, ACUP will decide how to spend an additional $450,000 left on the bottom line of its initial report, Spoehr said. "We have an ambitious agenda for spring that includes some issues ACUP has never addressed before," she said.
ACUP's next meeting will be March 13. Graduate Financial Aid and the Undergraduate Finance Board are on the agenda.