The new building that will house St. Thomas’ Physical Plant and engineering program opened last month after heavy rain delayed construction through the spring and summer.
Associate Vice President of Facilities Jim Brummer said the building opened Oct. 27, and so far, the Physical Plant’s central receiving, grounds and recycling departments have moved in. The engineering program is still working on setting up its space.
Brummer said the new building allows Physical Plant to centralize its programs and work more efficiently. Previously, central receiving was located in a South Campus parking lot, grounds were spread out over campus and the recycling department was in the basement of the Physical Plant building.
“In the middle of the winter, we were receiving valuable product materials in, you know, snowstorms, rainstorms,” Brummer said. “Now we have a secured indoor receiving department … so we’re not damaging any packages or materials.”
St. Thomas will be moving from its current recycling program to a single-sort system. According to Brummer, the new building will help ease in the new program, and because everything is centralized, the 22 dumpster locations on campus may be eliminated.
“Instead of using the small bins that are, you know, typical 90-gallon that you would use in your home … they’ll go into a compactor,” Brummer said. “We’ll be able to store them longer and have less pickups, which will be less trucks on campus, which will be less usage of fossil fuels, which will reduce our cost.”
Junior Brittany Pluim said she thinks the new building will help the university be more environmentally friendly.
“It’s good for the environment,” Pluim said. “The fact that it’s all in one spot helps, too. It’s not all over campus; it declutters the campus, cleans it up, so that’s good.”
Brummer said the new building will also allow engineering students to have more space to work, especially on their senior projects. Currently, engineering students work in the basements of the Binz or other science buildings.
“It’s all about space,” Brummer said. “It’s space that they didn’t have. It’s space for them to do their senior engineering projects that were typically done out of various locations. Garages we had on campus or wherever we could find room. Now they’ve got a dedicated space to do those sort of courses and studies.”
Freshman Lex O’Brien, a chemical engineering major, said he is looking forward to the move into the new building.
“It’s better than being in the basement of Binz where we don’t really have a blackboard or anything,” O’Brien said. “It will be nice to actually be in a … better teaching environment where we can learn and study.”
Grace Pastoor can be reached at past6138@stthomas.edu.