‘Transformative for the college and the City of Reno’

The University of Nevada, Reno’s third-party development agreement with Edgemoor Infrastructure & Real Estate will deliver the new College of Business building a full three years earlier — possibly more — than if the university had pursued funding for the project through the Nevada Legislature.

Edgemoor of Bethesda, Md., will construct the 128,000-square-foot COB facility, as well as an approximately 150-room hotel and conference center on 2.2 acres, as the cornerstone of the university’s Mathewson Gateway Project. A seven-story, 800-space parking garage at the corners of Lake and East Ninth streets was constructed to service the Mathewson district and opened this past January.

Pursuing a public-private partnership with Edgemoor allowed the university to significantly expedite the development of the new College of Business, said UNR Gateway project manager Vic Redding.

“Normally, academic buildings on campus — and this is true of all higher ed — are built in partnership with the state,” Redding told NNBW last week. “But each institution only gets one capital request per legislative session, and it’s been several sessions since the Legislature has approved a capital request to move forward.

“The university’s top capital request for a state partnership is a new life sciences building, which is phase 2 of the Gateway project,” Redding continued. “The normal state process is a three-biennium process. If they approve planning and design in the first biennium, then they approve construction funds in the second and FF&E (furniture, fixtures and equipment) in the third, so best-case scenario you are looking at a seven-year time frame, if everything gets approved.”

Under the agreement, Edgemoor will handle all capital expenditures required to develop the College of Business and subsequent hotel, which is expected to break ground in 2025. A hotel brand has not yet been selected, Redding noted. The university, meanwhile, will pay Edgemoor $9.75 million in annual lease payments for 30 years, and at the end of the lease agreement UNR will fully own the College of Business.

Gregory Mosier

 

There is no public money used in the construction of the College of Business or Gateway hotel project, Redding noted. This type of public-private partnership had never been done in Nevada higher education, he added, but having a private developer construct educational facilities on a lease-back agreement is a model that’s been used on campuses in many other states.

After gaining approval from the Nevada System of Higher Education Board of Regents, the college put out a national request-for-proposal and eventually selected Edgemoor Infrastructure & Real Estate.

“We are at a scale where all the national developers were interested,” Redding said.

Clark Construction, also of Bethesda, is the general contractor on the project. However, Redding noted that 76 percent of the construction value of the project had been awarded to Northern Nevada subcontractors. Vertical construction of the new College of Business is underway and is expected to be completed next summer. Full completion of the facility is slated for July 2025.

Increases in student enrollment, coupled with limited capacity in outdated facilities at the existing Ansari Business Building, drove demand for the new College of Business, said Gregory Mosier, dean of the COB. The six-story, 110,000 square-foot Ansari building was completed in 1982.

The highly competitive nature of business education at the university level is also a primary need for a modernized educational facility, Mosier added. He highlighted business education facilities in neighboring western colleges such as University of Utah, Utah State University, Boise State University and Oregon State University, which all have constructed new business buildings over the past decade. Those campuses offer the type of learning environment that today’s students require, Mosier noted, and they are vastly different from the outdated educational model of long halls, small classrooms and that dreaded analog wall clock where time slows to a crawl hanging above the blackboard.

Vic Redding

“Nobody wants to sit dutifully in a seat and stare at the chalkboard while the professor writes on it,” Mosier said. “We all remember what that was like.

“When you look at what we want to do around workforce development and to serve the growing needs of people who are educated in business disciplines in Northern Nevada, we have to have the kind of facility that allows us to bring people in from around the region, country and world who will help contribute to our economy.”

The College of Business doesn’t even occupy all six floors of the Ansari building, Mosier added. The COB is spread across just over 30,000 square feet on the first two floors of the Ansari building; the middle two floors are used as general university classroom space; and the top two floors house the College of Liberal Arts. When the COB exits the Ansari building, that space will be absorbed by the College of Liberal Arts and additional university classes, Mosier noted.

The College of Business also has the largest student enrollment of any program at UNR. Mosier said that COB enrollment has grown from about 2,000 students to more than 3,500 since he arrived on campus in 2007. Total student enrollment during that time has swelled from about 15,000 students to more than 21,000.

“We’ve seen significant growth,” he said. “We are out of space (in the college of business).

“(The new COB) will be a significant improvement from where we are, and it’s really in line with all those universities I named earlier. They all have built comparably sized or bigger buildings.”

The new College of Business building will be constructed to meet the needs of 21st-century business students. It will include a student commons area, team rooms and study niches, financial suite and lab where students can learn how equities trading works, IT technology suite, student success and advising center, Ph.D. research lab, conference rooms, 300-seat auditorium, and faculty offices on the top floors.

“We really need to be bigger in terms of student population in the business school,” Mosier said. “Northern Nevada and its economy are growing like crazy, and we need people with business skill sets in order to serve the workforce needs in the region. We have to attract more students to come to college, participate in our programs, and enter the workforce.

“We think this project will be transformative for the college and the City of Reno,” Mosier added. “It’s such a high-prominence location, and it will be clear to everyone who travels the I-80 corridor that this is a community that values education and we are doing the right things to contribute to this economy.”