RANDOLPH CENTER — As leaders at the Vermont State Colleges ponder the system’s future, Vermont Technical College is planning big changes to its two residential campuses.
“We need to expand in Williston and we need to contract in Randolph Center,” Vermont Tech President Pat Moulton told VSC trustees at a recent meeting.
About 600 of VSC’s 1,620 students attend classes in Williston, Vt., and 60 live on campus. That’s actually above capacity, and VTC is currently renting rooms across the street from its residence hall on Route 2A, according to Amanda Chaulk, a spokeswoman for the college. The campus also lacks any food service, and at a recent career fair, stands spilled out into the hallways.
“One of the things we’re really missing in Williston is larger spaces,” Chaulk said.
VTC is working with White + Burke, Burlington-based real estate consultants, to prepare a conceptual plan and requests for proposals for a public-private partnership to build a new mixed-use building on an acre plot the college owns at the corner of Helena Drive and Route 2.
The same firm has been tasked with creating an asset management assessment of both the Williston and Randolph Center campuses. VSC also offers commuter classes at 10 “distance sites” in cities and towns throughout the state.
Chaulk said the college would definitely like to locate food service in the new mixed-use building in Williston, which may also include student housing, offices and commercial space the college would rent out. The college also is exploring expanding the first floor of Williston Hall into dorms.
Meanwhile, in Randolph Center, VTC’s larger residential campus, Chaulk said the college needs to sell or repurpose properties that don’t contribute to the school’s academic mission.
“We’re not closing dorms. We’re not closing classrooms,” she said.
A master planning process for Randolph is set to begin in earnest in the spring, which will include evaluating housing needs in the area in hopes of forming a public-private partnership to renovate the campus’ Old Dorm into apartments. The planning process also will include a restructuring plan for the school’s agriculture program to include sustainable farm operations.
The school also wants to sell the Enterprise Center, an office building on Route 66 that leases space to several nonprofits and serves as a business incubator. Chaulk said the college hopes to relocate many of the current leaseholders, many of whom partner with the college on projects, to existing space elsewhere on the Randolph campus. VTC acquired the building from an engineering firm in 2003, and it was rebuilt after a 2008 fire.
The college also plans to sell, lease or decommission its anaerobic digester, which turns food scraps and manure into electricity. VTC announced earlier this fall it would shut down “Big Bertha,” as the digester is known, because it didn’t have enough available food scraps to run at capacity.
The Randolph Center campus also would be the site of the Vermont Additive Manufacturing Collaborative, a partnership between the school and local manufacturers. The project would provide educational programming in additive manufacturing — that’s industrial 3D printing — but also make the school’s lab available (for a fee) to Vermont manufacturers for prototyping and small-batch production.