Our
new buildings:
UCAR purchases Center Green
The
afternoon of 29 August was a quiet one for UCAR vice president
for finance and administration Katy Schmoll—until her phone
rang at about 2:30. Cliff Jacobs, program director in NSF’s
Division of Atmospheric Sciences, was calling with exhilarating
news: NSF had ended months of deliberations by approving UCAR’s
purchase of three buildings at Center Green.
“I am absolutely just thrilled,” Katy
said a few hours later. “I’m ecstatic!”
The three buildings, located on a 5.6-acre campus
on Center Green Drive just southwest of the FL campus, contain
80,000 square feet of space for offices and labs. In addition,
the city
of Boulder has granted preliminary permission for
the construction of a 20,000-square-foot addition, bringing the
total new space to 100,000 square feet. This will relieve the
occasional overcrowding at the institution and give it the room
it needs to grow.
To be sure, much work still needs to be done. The
Center Green buildings will be refurbished as standard offices
instead of cubicles. And the UCAR Management Committee must decide
which offices to relocate to the new campus, a process that may
take unpredictable turns. “When you get down to actually
putting people in places, people don’t always fit quite the
way you think they’re going to,” Katy explains.
The movement to Center Green will likely begin
in October, when CGD and the NCAR director’s office
will be moved there temporarily because of the long-planned refurbishment
of ML’s Tower A. Other staff may start moving to Center Green
on a permanent basis late this year or early next year.
Katy warns that movement will continue for as long
as three to four years. This is partly because the ML refurbishment
is expected to take several years, requiring staffers to temporarily
move out of their ML offices. Another wild card: UCAR is continuing
to look into the feasibility of adding to the FL campus with a
new building.
One certainty, however, is that Finance and Administration
will move out of its leased space on Pearl Street into leased
offices at 3065 Center Green. This will put the office in a convenient
location next to both FL and the new Center Green campus.
Despite the work that still needs to be done, Katy
and her staff celebrated the news on 29 August, drinking a toast
to the new building. And they savored a congratulatory fax that
arrived from NSF’s Jacobs shortly after his phone call.
“UCAR did a great job in responding to NSF
concerns and providing the necessary information we needed to
approve your request,” the fax stated. “Job well done.”
•David Hosansky
Also in this issue...
The
NCAR Library offers a potpourri of products
One—no,
two—new Delphi coordinators
Team
UCAR/NCAR leads Boulder’s Bike-to-Work Day
Powerful
new version of CCSM aids in climate analysis
Random
Profile: Terri Cantrell
UCAR
studies daycare options: Can the institution open its own center?
It’s
a family tradition
Teaching
educators
Short
Takes
Crisis
phone line available to staff
