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Iowa Central projects continue

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
Iowa Central’s Greehey Family Student Success Center is scheduled to open this fall.

With the Iowa Central Community College campus closed and students finishing the semester with virtual classes, the college’s construction and maintenance projects are still going full steam ahead.

The biggest and most noticeable project is the construction of the new $12.15 million Greehey Family Student Success Center, which will house veterans services, enrollment services, student advising, financial aid, the registrar, counseling, housing, career services, distance learning, early intervention support and security all in one place.

Iowa Central President Dr. Dan Kinney said that the progress on the Greehey Center is going well, but is a tiny bit behind.

“The contractors over there have done an amazing job in the times that we’ve faced with social distancing and all that came down,” Kinney said. “We’re continuing to move progress forward on that and we should be in that building early fall. It should be completed early this summer where we can start moving over hopefully in July.”

The general contractor on the project is Kolacia Construction, of Fort Dodge.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
Darius Brown, a freshman Iowa Central student from St. Paul, Minnesota, swipes his keycard to gain access to his resident hall. Iowa Central’s security and door locks update is wrapping up.

Kinney said most of the delays have been caused by the weather last fall, but that it hasn’t slowed progress that much. The COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak hasn’t had much effect on the project, he added.

“We were nervous at the beginning of what was happening of getting projects in, not knowing how the COVID-19 affected other businesses and industries that really are in the construction world in putting the materials and things together,” Kinney said.

Overall, Kinney said he is “very satisfied” with the project and thinks it’s been looking very good and the building will be “a stellar focal point of the campus.”

“It’s going to be a beautiful facility and it’s going to be a great facility to help better serve the students that we have that are coming to Iowa Central Community College,” he said.

Kinney said the “most important” project that is currently wrapping up is the college’s safety and security project, installing additional lighting, updating cameras and replacing the exterior door locks on all buildings with keycard locks.

--Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert Kolacia Construction is the general contractor for the Greehey Family Student Success Center. The project is making good progress, Iowa Central Community College President Dr. Dan Kinney said.

Recently, with most of the campus being closed, the electronic locks installed by Walsh Locks out of Des Moines have been helpful, Kinney said.

“If we needed a certain building open for only an hour during certain periods of the day, we were able to go into the computer and do that,” he said.

Earlier in the semester, Iowa Central’s student housing were the first buildings with the new locks.

“I heard a lot of good remarks about it — they felt safer in the residential halls,” Kinney said. “If the door is propped open, say someone puts a rock in it so it won’t completely shut, it sends an alert to the security phone and they can go over to those doors and get them shut properly.”

Campus safety was the top priority with this project.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
Progress is being made on Iowa Central Community College’s Greehey Family Student Success Center. The facility is slated to open in the fall of 2020.

“As a college president, if we were to have an incident happen on our campus, we could easily, through this one program, lock the whole college,” Kinney said. “All the exterior doors, getting into the residential halls and all the buildings can be locked at one time to go into a lockdown quicker than we would have ever been able to do that.”

Another major building project the college is currently undertaking is the new Industrial Training Center in Storm Lake.

“That’s going to be a really great addition to Iowa Central Community College and definitely to our Storm Lake campus because we can really expand on the industrial training that we’ll be doing over there,” Kinney said. “They’ll have a couple of classrooms and offices, but the more important part is the new welding facility that will be in that building and the industrial maintenance lab that will also be added into there.”

The building project, headed by L&L Builders, of Sioux City, is scheduled to be completed this summer and will open in the fall.

“That’s going to be a really great addition to really help serve local businesses and industries, providing them the workforce that they need,” Kinney said.

Other projects the college is working on is a resurfacing of the parking lot for the Applied Science and Technology building on the Fort Dodge campus, and the parking lot for the Webster City campus. Both projects will be completed by Fort Dodge Asphalt.

“With not having a lot of students and staff on campus, it’s going to be easier for them to get in and complete that project,” Kinney said.

Bemrich Electric will also be working on upgrading the electric component of the AST building as well.

“The future is very bright for Iowa Central as we continue to move forward,” Kinney said.

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