Students and faculty gathered outside the newly remodeled Ross L. Handy Campus Center in preparation to cut the ribbon to mark the reopening of the building. As the ceremony of the Campus Center started up, Superintendent/President Geraldine M. Perri stepped up to give a speech about it.
The $3.8 million and year-long project was remodeled with open space and new rooms that are geared towards community meeting between students, clubs and resources at Citrus. But the remodel came late, nearly 3 months late and almost 300 thousand dollars over the initial estimate of $3.6 million.
These extra costs slowly started coming out as construction began in October of 2018. The first change order for the Campus Center was approved in October and it increased the cost $33 thousand. The second increase came in January with a total increase of 84 thousand dollars and that was followed by the final change order in May of this year. That change order brought the total cost of the Campus Center to $3,895,002.92, a total of $204,002.92 over budget.
The change orders state that the increases can come from many small things that slowly increased the costs in small increments. For example, in the second increase, there was a kink that had to be resolved with the hot and cold piping and that ran up the cost $557.92.
The Clarion reached out to the architecture firm, Horizons Construction Company for comment, we were told that they were not allowed to speak to reporters and to send in our questions through email. As of time of publication, we have not heard back from them.
During the opening ceremony, the tardiness of the project was not addressed nor even mentioned. The superintendent just dove straight into her speech, “The Ross Handy Center opened in 1964. Now 55 years later, we’re about to cut the ribbon on this newly renovated, high tech, student focused facility and we are so pleased to have the members of the Handy family with us,” Perri said in her opening speech. “Our campus center is where our students will get the opportunity to come together to study— I hope—to interact and socialize.”
Students were excited and happy with the new campus center as they see a new feature that help elevate the school to a higher standard, such as Avril Martin, a business, political science and philosophy major who has been a student since before the renovations of the campus center began
“It’s a beautiful campus center and I look forward to seeing what this place has to offer. It has meeting rooms, a fully stocked area where you can sit down, eat, chill with friends, things like that, so it’s a great place. I love what they have done to it,” Martin said.
Martin was completely surprised by the update.
“It’s night and day, this one is totally modernized, it’s for today’s students and we can move forward as a school. It gives us a place to have a think tank, to have a study group that’s really open to students and accessible where we can interact with staff and other members of our school,” Martin said.
Luke Miller, psychology and philosophy major, will have a first hand experience in the campus center as a staff member and a student.
“It looks sick, I’m super excited. I was not here before it went under construction so until today I’ve never been inside but I work at the campus center in the ED building. So it’s been exciting over their because we are all anticipating the move. The building looks awesome,” said Miller.
Miller along with other members of Citrus are excited for a new venture and opportunity at Citrus. In the upcoming semesters, it will be seen if the $3.8 million project and extended opening will be a worthwhile investment for Citrus.
