Unfinished storage space on the second and third floors of Spartan Stadium will be renovated this month to make way for additional offices for University Advancement officials.
Roughly 7,000 square feet of unused space adjacent to the stadium’s tower addition will receive new lighting, wall treatments and ventilation in the process of converting the area to office space, university engineer Bob Nestle said.
Meeting space and shared work rooms also are part of the construction, which was expected to start last week.
The Board of Trustees previously authorized the Physical Plant to move forward with its plans to alter the site at its June 17 meeting.
“I think we expected (the expansion),” Nestle said. “There was not really a lot of debate about it.”
The project’s budget is set at $2.2 million, which will be drawn from the university’s general fund. A majority of the work is expected to be complete by next January, with final completion scheduled for January 2013.
The office expansion fits into the university’s five-year growth projection plan for University Advancement and comes as the university aims to ramp up its fundraising efforts.
The university is about three years into the process of adding about 60 new staff members in the department, said Bob Groves, vice president of University Advancement. As a result, Groves said his office needs the additional space.
Members of MSU Greenline, the student fundraising arm of the university’s Annual Fund, will be the first employees to actually use the space, Groves said.
“This space that we’re creating is for people that aren’t yet on staff,” Groves said.
The MSU Alumni Association also will make use of the converted storage space. Officials hope to further integrate that department with University Advancement by reconfiguring the tower’s office areas.
“The most important benefit that we’ll get is to have both the Alumni Association and the development teams in the same place,” said Scott Westerman, the executive director of the association. “The goal is to have all our customer-facing interaction in the same place.”
In the meantime, Groves said construction in the stadium won’t be a disruption to University Advancement’s day-to-day operations.
“The program starts by developing space that is undeveloped,” he said. “It will build those out and there’s a sequence of moving space out.”
Placing both the Alumni Association and University Development in the same location ultimately will benefit both departments, Westerman said.
“As we do our work, we identify people who may not have been connected with the university, and help them fall in love again with MSU,” he said. “For us to be on the same floor makes it a lot easier.”
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