CSULB Online 49er: v9n129: Campus begins beauty makeover

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Campus begins beauty makeover

By Jo Appleton
Summer On-line Forty-Niner

While Cal State Long Beach students are off for the summer getting their beauty rest, ‘there’s no rest for the wicked ones’ who are still on campus working at getting it beautiful before the start of the new fall semester.

The Outpost cafeteria located on lower campus, across from the SSPA Building, is undergoing constructive work to have new campus awnings installed with wooden trellis’s, so that plants can be placed around the top perimeter of the building.

The project involves removing old columns, awnings and concrete around the café and replacing them with 16 new columns, eight on either side, that will be finished with brick veneer. A wooden lattice awning will provide a decorative trim around the top and be lined with planters, said Scott Charmack, associate vice president of physical planning and facilities management at CSULB.

The Forty-Niner Shops are funding the project to make the popular little café more appealing, said Charmack, who said it’s one of the smaller projects on campus.
But at the cost of $69,284, it may be a small project but it has a big ticket.

“It sounds simple, but it’s not,” said Sue Brown, director of physical planning on campus.

The primary reason the cost for the project is so high, Brown said, is because the columns, originally planned to be attached to the building, have to be designed in a such a way to be able to support themselves, a structural detail that drove costs higher than expected.

The structural engineers for the job did not permit the concrete columns to be attached to the building, they must be free standing structures in order to withstand the weight of the wood trellises, Brown said. In spite of the setback, Charmack said that The Outpost project will be completed before the fall semester.

In addition to the Outpost, the SSPA building is also going under a facelift. Contractors have been working on the building since July 8 to remodel business offices and classrooms in the building’s basement. The building has remained open during construction work but contractors are scheduled to seal off the basement Friday for the removal of old floor tiles and asbestos treatment, according to a department memo Tuesday.

There are 40 to 50 other construction jobs going on around campus, said Charmack. Among the bigger ones is the science building across from the Student Union, which is making progress but is still at least two months behind schedule, said Charmack.

There are 70 to 80 trades people working daily on the job, which was originally scheduled for completion in January 2003, but Charmack said the contractors now have estimated the completion time to be sometime in March. The contractor not meeting the schedule deadlines created the delays, said Charmack.

In other construction business, the Fine Arts buildings, FA1 and FA2 are almost finalized, according to Charmack, and the department is now occupying them. FA3 and FA4 are still in progress with final details of health and safety codes, seismic and fire specifications and disabled students accessability being completed.

The original scope of the work to be done will not be met because of funding limitations, said Charmack, but all four buildings will be back in operation by the start of the fall semester.

Finally, the telecommunications infrastructure overhaul is well underway at different locations around campus. The most apparent one being the open trench on West Campus Drive across from the library. It’s the underground work for the new 1,800 square foot building being built to house the new voice and data equipment, according to Charmack.

The building is one of three that will be used as main distribution points to run copper cable from to feed the voice data signals around campus. Charmack said fiber optics are typically used but that it would have been too expensive to wire a campus as big as CSULB, so the university decided to use copper instead.

The two other buildings being built are to feed cable to other parts of campus. One is being built within the management and facilities yard, near the south end of Lot 11, which will be 1,100 square feet. The third building is the smallest at 700 square feet, and will feed the West side of campus, which is primarily housing, said Charmack.

The telecommunications infrastructure project is a two-year project that is only about five months along, but Charmack said that the plan is to get the underground and exterior work completed first so that when students return in the fall semester, major roadways and parking structures will still be accessible.