While the University of Maryland oversees many on-campus construction jobs, a department within Facilities Management plays a role in projects across the state.
This university hosts one of two regional centers that oversee capital and campus building projects in the state of Maryland. These building projects are funded by either the state or the campus. The capital projects usually cost more than $5 million and are funded by the state and private donors, while the campus projects are mainly funded by their respective universities and private donors.
The regional center, also known as the Design & Construction Department within Facilities Management, oversees construction projects for eight campuses, said Bill Olen, capital projects director.
These universities include Bowie State University, Frostburg State University, Salisbury University, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, University of Maryland Eastern Shore, University of Maryland University College, the College Park campus and various other University System of Maryland sites, such as The Universities at Shady Grove and within the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center.
This university’s regional center is currently overseeing 13 capital projects at the seven other institutions, Olen said. The largest of these projects is the Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Education Facility at Shady Grove, which will cost about $163 million, Olen said.
In addition to creating this new facility, the regional center is also working to expand the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center, which offers academic and professional development, to include a new building with research labs, said Darryll Pines, this university’s engineering dean.
“In 2008 we started a partnership between the engineering school and the Southern Maryland campus,” Pines said. “A program was created for chemical engineers where the last two years of the curriculum can be in Southern Maryland and at College Park to allow students to get a degree locally.”
Although some of the construction is occurring off the campus, this university also has its own capital projects and investments, said Mark Beck, the university system’s capital planning director.
Capital projects at this university come to $105 million for fiscal 2017, according to a state capital budget document. Some of these projects are A. James Clark Hall, the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Innovation, the Edward St. John Learning and Teaching Center and Cole Field House, Beck said.
The Maryland Senate and the House of Delegates will debate the fiscal 2017 budget in March, Beck said. After two to three weeks of deliberation, the General Assembly should finalize the budget, “but no one will know until the last day of the session how the capital budget will work out,” he said.
However, this university is slated to receive more funding than any other campus in the proposed 2017 budget, Beck said.
“It is nice to see the support that College Park got from the state this year,” Beck said. “It is a big campus, has lots of students and lots going on. The University of Maryland, College Park campus is fairly consistent in receiving funding, and something is always going on because it’s so big.”
