Calif. Cash Crisis Halts 2 Construction Projects on Irvine Campus

More bad news from California’s budget crunch. The University of California at Irvine has stopped work for three months on a $42-million arts building, and it will soon suspend construction of a $40.5-million building in the medical-school complex as well, according to an article in New University, a campus publication. Three months is the longest delay permitted by the university’s contracts with the construction firms hired to erect the buildings.

The 59,000-square-foot New Media Arts Building and Gallery, which is to be part of the university’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts, is just over a third complete. It was to open in 2010. Construction of the 65,000-square-foot Telemedicine/Medical Education Building will be about 40 percent finished when it is halted in February.

Both projects are victims of California’s cash-flow crisis, which forced the board that oversees state spending to freeze payouts for some 2,000 capital projects. Four other building projects on the Irvine campus are partly financed by the state but have enough private support to allow construction to go forward for the time being, New University said. But only one of the four, an engineering building, could be completed without state money.

Richard Lynch, the university’s associate vice chancellor for budgeting, said that if the flow of state money is not restored soon, the results could be “financially catastrophic.” He said he didn’t know how the university would handle the legal and safety issues involved in having to put partially completed buildings on hold for any length of time.

“This is so unprecedented,” he said. “I can’t tell you how the administrative process or decision-making process would work. We’d just have to address it the best we could.”