Saanich municipal council recently approved the construction of Centre for Trades Education and Innovation, a new trades facility at Camosun’s Interurban campus. As mentioned in last issue’s News Briefs, the $30-million project received a unanimous approval from council, much to Camosun’s delight.
“I’m very, very pleased,” says Camosun dean of trades and technology Eric Sehn. “Very excited. It puts us into the next phase of the project and it puts us that much closer to starting the full-fledged actual physical preparation of the site. It’s really going to start to come to life. It’ll start jumping off the pages a lot more now. So we’re really, really pleased.”
Construction on the building, which will be where the Tillicum Lodge used to be before it was removed last year, is set to begin in early March and Sehn says the college aims to have the new facility open by September of 2015. He says the new building will be an upgrade on the existing facilities, which are in need of some change.
“Our buildings right now are obviously showing their age,” says Sehn, “and I think we’re going to have learning spaces that are a lot more user-friendly, a lot more natural light is a big part of it, a very energy-efficient building.”
Sehn says there has been no significant opposition to the project, and part of the reason for that may be that CamosunŃwho are the largest trades trainers on the island, training 2,200 students each yearŃhas been doing trades training at Interurban for over 40 years, so the community is used to the campus and its expansion. Plus, as Sehn explains, they’re not adding as much as it may initially seem.
“What we’re really doing is improving our space,” he says. “There are a bunch of old buildings being used [currently], these old wooden portables that foundation carpentry students built 25 years ago, and they’re falling apart. That’s four classrooms ; we’re still using them, they’re horrible, but we’re using them. We have no choice, because we have nowhere else to put people. Everybody agrees that those things have got to go. So we’ll be demolishing those four buildings. We’ll have 10 new classrooms in the new building, but we’re taking out four, so the net gain is actually six.”
This also helped quell Saanich council’s concerns about an increase in students both driving to and parking at the campus; it won’t add huge numbers, just give a better building to those already there, while adding a small amount of new students.
The environmental concerns were also something the college had in mind. “There are some issues, of course, putting a trades building there without some impact, obviously, on the land,” says Camosun vice president, administration and chief financial officer Peter Lockie. “You just never know, taking it to council, whether they’d have some issues there. We satisfied council that we’d done everything we could to minimize the impact on the environment.”
Not only is Camosun attempting to minimize impact on the environment, they’re aiming to take this building all the way to LEED Gold certification, which means it will meet a set of strict environmental guidelines.
“With a trades facility, that’s very challenging, considering some of the work going on in there,” says Lockie. “It’s going to be challenging to get LEED Gold, but we have a plan to do so.”
Lockie adds that Camosun put no shortage of research into the planning out of the building. He calls it a “contemporary trades training facility” and stresses the legwork that went into the planning process.
“Our team went around BC and Alberta touring new facilities and learned from the mistakes and the best features of all those facilities,” says Lockie. “So what it’s going to give is a state of the art teaching and learning facility for students going forward. That’s really what it is.”
The Camosun College Student Society (CCSS) are also pleased to see the project moving ahead.
“We’re pleased that Saanich council has greenlighted the construction of this building,” says CCSS external executive Simka Marshall. “Our trades students are currently housed in really aging facilities.”
Marshall says that the CCSS is “excited that this is happening,” and she’s hopeful that it might lead to more upgrades at Camosun.
“In addition to this, there are a lot of other improvements and new buildings that we need,” she says. “Hopefully this is just the beginning to seeing improvements all around campus.”
In the meantime, Sehn is looking ahead, focusing on construction to begin.
“We’re extremely excited and I can’t wait to see that site start to get leveled off. Then it’ll really get exciting,” says Sehn, adding with a chuckle that it will also “be noisy, and dusty.”