PARRY SOUND – The drawings are in and shovels could soon dig in.
On Tuesday evening Canadore College officials presented town council with drawings of the new campus that is expected to be complete by March 31, 2011.
The college’s president, Barbara Taylor, and vice-president of academics Jim Connell intend to meet with all of the area municipalities and First Nations in the coming months to update them on the college’s Parry Sound plans.
“It’s particularly special for me to be here this evening, because I remember a meeting last June where council was discussing what the Town of Parry Sound might be able to do to assist us in terms of securing a location for the campus,” said Taylor on Tuesday. “I really want to commend the staff at the Town of Parry Sound who worked endlessly with our staff at the college to end up in, I think, in an absolutely ideal location – I think the first order of the day is to say thank you to council and thank you to the staff at the town of Parry Sound. It took us a while to get there and get these kinds of approvals we needed from the Ministry of the Environment, but we’re going to have a campus that is visible in the community, that encourages people to consider post-secondary education and we’re very, very excited. This is a good news story. We certainly hope shortly after that we will be having students on site in a very visible, vibrate campus to serve the town and all the other municipalities and First Nations in West Parry Sound.”
The single-storey building will measure close to 15,000 square feet and will be home to current and new programming.
“In the floor plans that we have designed for programming in various areas – skilled trades, our existing academic upgrading can be expanded, hospitality and tourism training as well as labs,” said Connell. ”The whole building itself will be wireless, we’ve also built in training labs that will allow for online delivery of programs as well as blended delivery. It’s a bit of an assisted lab delivery it is a bit of a combination of in-class and online. We really see that as important to the flexibility of the future in terms of reaching out to different audiences. The campus itself is going to be welcoming to all comers. It’s going to be a community campus as well as an academic programming campus. We’re really, really excited to be able to move this project forward with the assistance of the Town of Parry Sound.”
Environmentally, Taylor said staff has worked hard to ensure that the design of the campus will disrupt the surrounding landscape as little as possible.
“We’ve been joking with our facilities director that he’s not going to buy a lawnmower,” Taylor said with a laugh. “We’re not going to cut down trees and then put down grass that then has to be maintained. We’re going to try and maintain the natural planting and as much of the natural environment to protect the habitat. It will be an environmentally responsible building.
“I think it’ll be a building that picks up on the theme of the north in terms of our environment and our history - I’m really excited that it’s not a rectangle (shape). Some people called it a boomerang and we said, ‘no, no, no, it’s in Parry Sound, it’s a hockey stick shape.’”
Future expansion
Connell added that the building will be constructed to allow for an expansion in the future.
“We’d be able to put in a second floor and the footprint would be the same size as it is now,” he said.
With such a tight timeline, Coun. Conrad van der Valk asked when the college planned to go to tender with the project.
“We are in the pre-qualification stage now,” said Taylor. “The architects are ready to go, so we are in that process where contractors are being pre-qualified, then, very, very shortly we will be going to tender and we, quite frankly, given the time we have and the nature of the building, we will make the March 31, 2011 deadline…it is a requirement that we have to spend the money before March 31, 2011, because of some of the environment concerns that were raised we were slowed down at the beginning of the process, but I’m very please that we’ve been able to satisfy the Ministry of the Environment criteria and we’re good to go. “