Students attending Northern New Mexico College will have a new, renovated space to take care of their academic business, beginning in School Year 2017-2018.
Crews from Albuquerque-based Facility Build, are working on the second phase of an infrastructure upgrade project aimed at improving student services.
Northern President Rick Bailey said when construction is finished, students will have a new, centralized space where they can access the services they need to help them succeed.
“The idea is that we wanted a place dedicated to student services,” he said. “As Andy (Romero, facilities supervisor) said, ‘A one-stop shop for student services.’”
Student Senate President Ariadne Bito said she is pleased the administration is working on making the institution more student-friendly.
“I think it’s great that they are doing upgrades on student services,” she said. “Although they are doing a great job at the moment, of taking care of students, I think it’s very necessary to keep upgrading services, especially since our school will start the construction of dorms in the near future.”
Romero said the new space will have a larger financial aid office, an advisement portal and a testing center.
Before crews started work on the new student services wing located in the southwest corner of Northern’s Joseph Montoya Building, they tackled the project’s first phase.
That phase included converting the old financial aid office into a space for computer support workers.
“We reconfigured the financial aid office,” he said. “It was open and we made them into IT (Information Technology) offices,” he said. “Then the financial aid office got an uplift of floors, carpets and walls.”
The contractor is also working on upgrading the heating, ventilation and cooling system on both, the Montoya Building and gymnasium.
Romero said the idea is to replace the older model hydronic heating and cooling system, which relied on fluid to transfer the heat, with liquid-less system combo units. The combo units are designed to handle both, heating and cooling, and they run off of air and electricity, as opposed to water.
The facility supervisor said the new system comes complete with safeguards to help prevent a costly disaster, such as freezing pipes. He and his team have scheduled the two-combo unit housed on top of the buildings, to run on different cycles.
“If the boiler goes down and no one is home and the pipes freeze, you got a disaster,” Romero said. “This other way, the combo unit has a furnace that runs off air and the X-coil runs the air condition. The way we schedule them is if one fails, we still have some heat on them.”
Romero said repairing and cleaning up after a busted water line can be both, costly and time consuming. The last time a water line froze, it cost the College a hefty amount of money.
“These types of issues can set the College back hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he said. “We have had an incident like this happen within the last 10 years. One of the pipes busted during the Christmas break and the water flowed from the top floor to the bottom floor. We had a major problem.”
Workers are also poised to begin work on the General Education Building, to renovate the mens and womens restrooms, as well as other upgrades.
Romero estimates that the work will cost the institution about $500,000, which will come out of the revenue generated from a 2014 General Obligation Bond. The Bond netted Northern nearly $2 million.
Besides the upgrades that are currently underway, Northern officials used part of that revenue to pour and repair sidewalks throughout the campus, remove asbestos, repair roofs and improve drainage capabilities.
Voters approved another General Obligation Bonds during the November 2016 General Election. College officials have not yet decided how they will use the $1 million they expect to receive from that Bond.