[Obadno]

Some News about the Ottawa University expansion:

https://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/...st-valley.html

With a $57 million construction project of Ottawa University's new Surprise campus completed, Kevin Eichner already is planning the next expansion phase.

Eichner, chancellor of Ottawa University, said he started the 2019 fall school year with 830 students on the campus, a 33% increase over the previous year.

The $19 million residential hall wasn't quite ready in time for the school year, which meant students were temporarily housed in local hotels and apartments until their rooms were ready by October, he said.

"We just completed our master plan for the remainder of the campus," Eichner said. "If I had to guess, probably the next building would be the library, student study center, and we need some additional athletic fields."

Eichner said he expects the 340-bed dorm to be nearly at full capacity this fall. He's also considering building student apartments instead of another residence hall.

The other two new facilities are the 98,000-square-foot O'Dell Center, which includes gymnasiums, weight rooms and locker rooms on the first floor; labs, classrooms and faculty offices on the second floor; and a press box and coaches offices on the third floor. The student union, which cost about $10 million to develop, houses a dining hall, student lounge and conference rooms and classrooms.

Architect for the residence hall and student union was Dallas-based HKS Architects, with Phoenix-based Wespac Construction Inc. as general contractor.

Architect for the O'Dell Center was Cawley Architects, while the contractor was Haydon Building Corp., both based in Phoenix.

Eichner said he expects to have 3,000 students on the 35-acre campus within the next seven to eight years.

"We are not landlocked," he said. "We have a lot of room to grow, even with what we have."

Building this campus from scratch has been a journey, Eichner said.

"Years ago, at Ottawa, we called this the moon shot," he said. "Now we've landed it on the moon. It's exciting. It's terrific but we're not stopping here."

This is great news, this state is rapidly closing in on 8 million and has a disturbingly low amount of Higher Ed options for how many people are here.

Wish ABOR wouldn't be so completely focused on UofA and ASU and would spend some time expanding on some of the minor colleges around the state as well as maybe looking into Turning Mesa Community into a Mesa College.

But now at least we have GCU, and now apparently a quickly expanding Ottawa University