WCU’s aging steam plant. Photo by Ruth Dahl.
Story co-written with Nicole Ellison. Story was originally published in The Sylva Herald on Feb. 20, 2020
Western Carolina University’s steam plant upgrade finds itself in hot water, thanks to the budget impasse in Raleigh.
The steam plant is running on long-outdated equipment, with the youngest permanent boiler being 43 years old, officials say. The boilers’ life expectancy of 30 years is long outlived – the two oldest date back to the 1960s. The plant has provided heating and hot water on campus for nearly a century.
According to WCU Chief Communications Officer Bill Studenc, a full renovation of the steam plant would run $33.75 million. In July 2017, the state allocated $750,000 for the plant’s renovation and design.
In May 2018, WCU received $16.5 million, the first of two planned installments, to fund construction and renovation. In total, WCU has received $17.25 million in funding to date.
It is the second installment of $16.5 million that has gotten tied up in the state budget impasse. Unable to compromise, Democrats and Republicans within the North Carolina House of Representatives could not override Governor Roy Cooper’s veto on the state budget bill.
In January, a motion to override Cooper’s veto within the Senate was sent back to committee. Lawmakers will not discuss the budget again until April 28.
The steam plant is living on borrowed time and steam plant updates are at a complete standstill, Studenc said.
“We have completed the planning and design phase of the project, and have progressed as far as we can without that remaining funding,” he said. “We are unable to put the project out for bids without having full funding in hand.”
A plan for the full renovation of the facility incorporating the historic smokestack and modern technology was approved in September 2019 by the WCU Board of Trustees.
According to information from WCU Facility Management, the steam plant supplies 35 buildings on WCU’s campus. On colder winter days, the steam plant runs at full capacity for 24 hours a day, producing around 97,000 pounds of steam per hour.
The steam plant shuts down for maintenance for two weeks early each summer when most students and faculty are off campus. During this time, buildings do not have hot water or heating. In the event the steam plant requires additional maintenance before the budget is approved, everyone who spends time on campus, especially those living in residence halls, would be without hot water and heat.
If this were to happen, the entire campus might need to be shut down. It nearly happened on an especially cold night in the winter of 2016, when the oldest boiler failed, requiring a costly temporary boiler, which was only projected to last 10 years.
“It would actually be a major disaster in terms of (public relations) as well as just in terms of comfort of everybody who lives on campus if we had a major maintenance issue which requires the shutdown of the university,” Faculty Senate Chair Enrique Gomez said.
The steam plant is not the only building project that could be affected by the budget impasse. The Tom Apodaca Science Building is scheduled to open in the fall 2021, but with no additional money in the budget, Gomez says no one could use the new building.
“In the unlikely, but not entirely impossible, scenario that we still don’t have a budget by 2021, we could have a brand-new building but absolutely no money to move anything in,” he said.
A similar situation is happening at the North Carolina School of Science and Math in Morganton, which recently completed construction on a new building, but has received no money to staff and open the building.
Across the 17 campuses that are part of the UNC system, $630 million in capital projects are stalled, Gomez said.
