SUNY Oneonta’s Netzer Hall is well into a complete $65 million renovation as part of a broader campus facilities and sustainability plan.
Some windows were absent and holes took the place of doorknobs, while most of the concrete was exposed inside the building Monday, Sept. 28. Some construction workers worked inside the 77,000-square-foot building, while others dug geothermal wells out front.
“We’re fundamentally changing the character of the building,” said Lachlan Squair, the university’s associate vice president of facilities management.
Squair said the building renovation is an “adaptive reuse into a hub for student services and student support.”
Doug DePew, the project manager with Binghamton-based Fahs Construction, said the project will “be like the Vatican. A place inside a place,” to be completed in 2028.
He said he has worked with SUNY Oneonta for many years and benefited from a collaborative relationship with it. DePew said he hopes to continue working with the university as a result.
Squair said the geothermal wells, dug more than 600 feet deep, will enable the building to use “about a third of the electrical energy that it did previously,” similar to renovations to Alumni Hall completed in 2023.
“There’s a very little amount of fossil fuel use for backup generation and some snowmelt outside,” Squair said of Netzer Hall, and electrical use “will be offset by a solar array we’re about to build on another area campus.”
That project, slated to begin construction later this year, will be a “1.6 megawatt ground-mounted solar array” that is likely to cover “7 to 10% of our campus (electricity) usage.”
The school plans to replace all its underground electrical cables for about $25 million, Squair said. It will “address aging infrastructure before it starts to fail” and upgrade capacity in anticipation of further decarbonization efforts.
Schumacher Hall, the Chase Physical Education building and Hodgdon Instructional Resources Center will be renovated as well, Squair said.
The projects are part of a broader campus facilities master plan for 2023 to 2033.
“It integrates many existing parallel planning efforts: space utilization, parking, campus accessibility, clean energy implementation, academic development, safety and security, student affairs, technology and many others,” according to its page on the university website.
“Basically,” Squair said, “that’s driven by academic programmatic need as well as building conditions.”