Excuse our dust, but UC Davis has some work to do. Over the next five years, this campus will build almost 50 projects worth $667 million. In aggregate, they'll transform this 92-year-old campus -- bringing us a welcoming new vista from the freeway, our first Olympic-sized swimming pool and sorely needed research and teaching facilities. All of this construction was in the pipeline before the UC regents announced in January that UC Davis may need to grow to between 30,000 and 31,000 students over the next 10 years. That announcement comes at a time when we need to update our Long Range Development Plan, which extends now only to 2005. Even before we revise that plan for Tidal Wave II students, UC Davis will see a lot more construction -- at $133 million a year it will be triple the annual $45 million the campus invested over the past several years. It's due to the need to refurbish our infrastructure by improving our electrical and air conditioning systems, upgrading our student facilities, offering brand-new venues for hosting public activities, adding modern research labs, teaching space and academic offices, and providing space for a growing staff. What's different from the last big building boom in the 1960s, which was financed through state funds, is the state's financial straits of the past decade have forced the campus to find more creative ways to pay for facilities. In fact, only 30 percent of campus capital construction built in the past five years came from voter-approved state building bonds, according to Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Robert Grey. Money from private and other public sources (such as the federal government), as well as a combination of the two, have been used to build new residential, research and teaching facilities. An excellent example of a public/private partnership is the proposed Genome and Biomedical Sciences Building that was brought before the regents this week, says Grey. The building, which will be about the same square-footage as Meyer Hall at 212,000 square feet, will house near the Health Sciences Complex 70 research teams from various colleges and divisions. "This building is an example of how the enterprise of our faculty is helping to pay for a building," Grey says. "Part of the funds will come from a grant sought from the Whitaker Foundation, part from the chancellor's discretionary funds and part from the UC Davis Health System, but the bulk will come from indirect-cost recovery funds authorized through the Garamendi legislation." He points out the research building is not the first to use the Garamendi funding solution. The Center for Comparative Medicine, completed in summer of 1998, was built using the same funding mechanism. The law allows the university to take out a construction loan and then pay it off using the overhead charges to research grants that would otherwise be funneled to the state. The overhead on research grants also pays for the building's ongoing operation and maintenance. Already the comparative medicine faculty is pulling in 1 1/2 times the needed indirect-cost revenue funds to pay for the building, Grey says. Here are some other examples of how UC Davis is going to build its campus: Laboratory buildings The 1996 and 1998 state bond acts, approved by California voters, will provide several basic facilities and help the campus function better. Rising on campus at this moment are the $20.8 million Walker Hall Seismic Replacement Building, also known as Engineering III, and the $39.6 million Plant and Environmental Sciences Replacement Facility. The three- story 36,000-square-foot engineering building is being built on the former site of parking lot 44, south of Bainer Hall, totally from bond funds, while the 124,000-square-foot plant-science edifice next to Hunt and Veihmeyer halls is being funded half by bonds and half by campus funds. Its labs will replace the outmoded facilities in Hoagland and Hunt halls. Teaching labs will be on the ground floor. A much-anticipated facility is the Sciences Laboratory Building. This $47.3 million building, to be paid for mostly through the 1998 state bond act, will be located west of Haring Hall along the Storer Mall. It will consolidate 10 chemistry labs and 24 biological science labs and include a 500-seat lecture hall, study spaces and a computer lab. Student buildings On the west side of the campus core, you'll see spanking new student facilities being built over the next four years. Known as the Facilities and Campus Enhancements, these structures are being paid for mostly by UC Davis students, who voted in February 1999 to tax themselves to pay the debt on $65 million worth of projects by increasing their quarterly fees. The new structures include a $45 million student recreation and activity center just north of and attached to Recreation Hall, a $5 million aquatics center and a $20 million multi-use stadium on the southwest corner of Hutchison Drive and La Rue Road. But the funding is not all coming from the students. The aquatics center will be partly funded by a $1 million gift from UC Davis alumnus/faculty member Rand Schaal and his father, Ted, with the understanding that the Olympic-regulation pools will be shared by Davis community swimmers. In addition, the stadium will be funded in part with private gifts. Arts center On the south edge of campus near the Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center, a $53.5 million Center for the Arts Performance Hall will begin construction in May next to the three-story parking facility now in the construction phase. That section of the campus is being designed as the new front door for UC Davis, highlighted by the glass-fronted theater planned as a first-class venue for performing artists from the campus and from around the world. Plans call for $22.6 million of this hall to be paid for in private donations (plus another $7.4 million to be raised for an initial operating endowment and startup costs) and another $30.9 million in non-state campus funds. Hotel and conference center Campus officials hope to choose a private contractor by early May to build an academic conference center with 150 guest rooms and 15,000 square feet of meeting space directly east of the Entry Quad from the new Center for the Arts. This center would be privately financed, developed and operated on five acres of campus land. An expanded proposal is also being studied to have the developer build a 60,000-square-foot university services building to house University Relations staff and other campus units. It would be the first leased building for administrative staff on campus, says Rick Keller, campus facilities planning director. "Housing administrative staff in a leased building on campus will preserve precious campus capital dollars for academic initiatives and program growth," he says. Campus infrastructure The state is also paying the bulk of the $12.3 million cost of expanding the chilled-water infrastructure throughout campus over the next year. That project includes a new chilled water plant and a six-story, 60-foot-tall thermal energy tank. Water will be chilled at night in the 4.3 million gallon tank, near the Cole Facility next to the arboretum, and then sent through the 11 miles of underground pipes to cool buildings during the day. By increasing our air-conditioning capacity, the upgraded system promises to keep us cooler in the summer as the campus adds more buildings. A future $5.3 million expansion to service the health sciences is also planned. Another $9.5 million in state bonds will allow us to expand our electrical capacity by 20 percent in 2001. The project will also expand service capacity to buildings on the campus west of Highway 113, which will allow other new building projects to proceed.