Recordpub.com - Time for a new KSU art facility? Lefton: Tired of 'Band-Aid' fixes

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By Dave O'Brien
Record-Courier staff writer
Kent State University's Art Building needs a facelift. And a new coat of paint. Its heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems are aging and its roof leaks. Every year, the building needs more attention.
However you put it, the Art Building " with the aging Van Deusen Hall on one side and the recently rebuilt Stopher and Johnson residence halls/Honors College on the other " is in need of millions of dollars of work.
KSU President Lester Lefton and the faculty know this. In a recent meeting with KSU's Faculty Senate, Lefton called the art buildings on the regional campuses "beautiful," while the Kent campus Art Building "has been left in disrepair."
"I'm tired of patching it with Band-Aids," he told faculty senators.
The HVAC system in the building wastes energy and needs constant attention, he added.
Fixing the roof could cost between $1 million and $2 million alone, whereas building a new home for KSU's artists might cost the university $3 million, Lefton said.
The split-level Art Building " which also appears to need another coat of paint " was built in 1972. Some of its neighboring buildings, including Oscar Ritchie Hall and Stopher and Johnson halls, already have been renovated or rebuilt in the past few years.
Other academic buildings on campus that often are cited as needing renovation or rehabilitation include Satterfield Hall, home of the English and modern languages departments; Bowman Hall, home of the history, political science, philosophy and justice studies departments; and Van Deusen, home of the College of Technology.
The roof of Satterfield Hall also is scheduled to be replaced, with the project currently under design for work to be completed during summer 2009, according to the Office of the University Architect. Members of KSU's faculty have grumbled about having their classes scheduled there for years.
The buildings Lefton named as being thorns in KSU's side are "not dangerous, but they are run down," he said.
An additional problem? There's no new money for new buildings at KSU in the shrinking state budget.
Ten years ago, the capital improvement appropriation for university buildings in the state's biennial budget was $740 million, Lefton said. This year, it was $413 million.
Another problem is that academic buildings don't create a revenue stream like new residence halls full of students paying thousands of dollars to live in them each year, Lefton said.
In light of this, KSU is considering "all options," he said, and take care of what it currently has for the foreseeable future.
"This is a university that is going to be here for hundreds of years," Lefton said.

3.	Posted by Rob Anderson November 23, 2008
	Good gawd...talk about a day late and a dollar short, folks! Oops, I'm sorry...while absolutely everyone in the trades at CE&O knows about the delapidated condition of certain buildings on Campus, they're supposed to keep their mouths shut so's the likes of Doc Lefton and the University-architect-weenies can sound like rocket scientists(?)...yeah, right. Not on your best days, boys & girls. Administrative decisions over the years to put off a reasonable modicum of preventive maintenance is what has lead to the compounded deterioration of such captial investments as the Art Building. Sorry, "ksu3231" or whomever the heck you are...but the Art Building is nothing if not absolutely as stunning, inside and out, as it is "high-maintenance"...especially given the critical points within where the use of asbestos was deemed apporpriate. Even such normal maintenance as the preservation of the brick facade of Saterfield Hall, much like the facades of the Library and the Williams Hall/Smith Hall/SRL complex buildings, have been neglected to the detriment of their expected life spans! Hell, the "Bob-with-two-ohs" couldn't even schedule his MRWs to clean out the flat-roof drains on a regular basis...sigh. Additionally, who would have ever expected a policy-wonk the likes of himselfness, Mike McDonald, or the head architect-weenie-what's-his-name, to challenge the decisions of the powers that be whenever it came crunch-time for University budgets.