By Faith Lynn
Staff Writer
Only a little more than one-year remains until the Drescher Graduate Campus is fully finished, and even during construction the site is already proving useful to current students.
Assistant Vice President for Construction John Elliot said all the buildings are on or ahead of schedule, and if circumstances continue to cooperate, everything except the proposed faculty housing and some student apartments will be finished in January 2004.
“We are on time … in fact, we’re a little ahead of schedule,” he said.
At present, Elliot said, construction crews are putting up concrete decking and structural steel supports for some of the buildings. The parking structure is also going up and the site is being readied for winter, he said.
Much of the progress can be seen from almost any point on campus. All of the roads are finished and lit, which is a point of interest for students. Opening the lower road to parking has created as many as 75 spots that Elliot said he didn’t believe students were using to their full advantage.
“I would definitely encourage some of the students to park along Lower Road A and alleviate some of the stress on the rest of campus,” he said.
Elliot said the high-priority buildings were coming along very well. The Graduate School of Education and Psychology is 40 percent finished, with the crews currently working on putting up drywall. The School of Public Policy’s new home is almost as far along. Next in line is the Graziadio School of Business and Management.
Ten of the 14 student apartment buildings will be ready for the next academic year, Elliot said. Those will primarily house graduate students, but Elliot said he thinks they will probably be opened to undergraduates in the event of another housing crunch like the one at the beginning of this year. Elliot said the other four buildings, if not finished in time for school next year, will only be a month or two behind.
“We’re going to do the best we can to get them done as soon as possible,” he said.
In addition to the graduate schools and student apartments, faculty condos are planned, along with an Executive Center and a Learning Center.
The Executive Center will serve as something like a convention center for conferences and the annual Bible Lectureships. Elliot said it contains 32 rooms and various meeting rooms. He said Pepperdine plans to hire an outside, impartial professional management company to run the Center, so that each school that needs to use it will have its fair share.
The Learning Center is a complex including a library, computer lab and other resources for the graduate students housed on the new campus.
Elliot said the faculty condominiums will be completed in 2004, though at the current rate they may be done well before then.
Elliot said he was pleased with the progress so far and is confident that the project will remain on schedule “unless these rains slow us down.” He said he remains worried about inclement weather causing problems with the construction.
“Mud is a problem,” he said, citing weather as the biggest factor in
the speed of construction. Elliot said he was pleased with the recent progress made in pouring concrete during the dry weather, since once concrete is on the site, progress is much easier.
Other unforeseeable issues can affect progress as well, Elliot said. A month ago, port workers threatened a strike that would have stopped shipment of materials, possibly for weeks. Depending on the mode of transportation for materials, shipments can be easily disrupted, and there are also inspection factors to be considered.
“We set targets, but all it takes is one government official who doesn’t sign off … But we’ve got a real good head start,” Elliot said.
And even when the buildings are technically finished, he said he is not quite sure when to allow the use of the facilities, since construction crews may still be at work on other aspects of the structure or on the buildings around it.
“The concern is, at what point is it safe to say ‘we’re done’?” Elliot said.
Equipment may still be strewn around the site, and he said if workers are still around when people begin to move into the buildings, overcrowding slows the construction process down a good deal. In the meantime, however, Elliot said he is very satisfied with the progress that has been made thus far.
October 31, 2002