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The University of Massachusetts Lowell has put the construction of its $80 million Emerging Technology and Innovation Center on hold.
The school was scheduled to meet with a project manager and to buy steel next week, according to Chancellor Marty Meehan, but before that was able to happen, the UMass Building Authority informed UMass Lowell it would not be able to secure $35 million in bond financing at the terms it had anticipated.
“We can’t order the steel without knowing how we’re going to pay for it,” Meehan said.
In the meantime, Meehan said the school is exploring its options, including seeking private funding, getting funding from President Barack Obama’s ecnonomic stimulus bill, or scaling back the project.
“We’re a campus that hasn’t built an academic building in 35 years. We need to build a building. It’s just going to be more difficult than we thought,” he said.
Meehan said the school has targeted three potential private donors to ask for help funding the project, but would not disclose their names. He also visited Washington earlier this week to investigate UMass Lowell’s chances of getting stimulus funding for the project.
“The problem is the bill just passed. It’s a large and complicated bill and it’s just not clear if we’ll have access to it,” he said.
The recession wouldn’t affect the ongoing renovation of the Massachusets Medical Devices Development Center’s (M2D2) headquarters, Meehan said, but would affect M2D2, since the Emerging Technology and Innovation Center was planned to house high-level clean rooms for M2D2.
As recently as December, the school had told Mass High Tech it was moving ahead with plans to build the 97,000-square-foot facility, which would have focused on nano- and biomanufacturing research. Meehan called the $80 million center, expected to open in 2011, crucial to the local economy, though he said the recession might have led to changes in the building.
“We’re going to build that building,” Meehan told Mass High Tech at the time.
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