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$5.19M needed to build NMC’s tourism building
It’s been 16 years since plans for the Northern Marianas College’s business and hospitality learning building were approved in 1998 but those plans have yet to be realized.
In June this year, a rough cost estimate was presented to the college for the conceptual classroom and lecture hall of this building.
Richard Cody of Taniguchi Ruth Makio Architects and the American Institute of Architects presented the estimates to NMC’s facilities manager John Guerrero.
Five classrooms of 900 square feet each on the ground floor is estimated to cost $900.
The floor’s toilet block was estimated at $236,250. The floor’s elevator was estimated to cost $80,000.
The building’s courtyard, about 6,000 square feet, was estimated to cost $60,000.
Excavation was estimated to cost $25,000.
For the upper floor, the seven classrooms, also 900 square feet each, were estimated to cost $1,260,000.
The lecture hall, which would measure 5,200 square feet, is estimated to cost $1.56 million.
The upper floor’s deck ran $310,000, and the stairs ran $65,000 in estimated costs.
The total estimated cost is $5.19 million, factoring in overhead and profit of 10 percent and a business gross revenue tax of 5 percent.
Lately, the college has called itself an avenue for the workforce, as it believes it can provide the education and training needed for the possible end of the contract worker program in the next five years.
Plans for the college’s reconstruction to suit this vision, like plans for the hospitality building, have stalled due to competing or overlapping needs, according to regent William Torres, chairman of the Board of Regents fiscal committee on facilities.
He earlier said that an annual $3 million in Capital Improvement Project funds from the local government would significantly push these efforts forward.
In an interview, Torres essentially said that if $3 million in CIP funds were given to NMC annually, the college could find ways to appropriate the remaining costs to finally construct the hospitality building.
NMC was not allotted any CIP funds for fiscal year 2015, according to the CNMI CIP spending plan submitted to the Office of Insular Affairs.
