Construction resumes on UAF engineering building: facility will help meet demand for engineers in Alaska.

• Author: Strieker, Julie
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Engineering & Architecture

Just more than a year after the Engineering Learning and Innovation Facility was I mothballed due to lack of funding, workers are back at work on the state-of-the-art building on the east side of the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus.

About fifty to fifty-five people are working on the construction, says Cameron Wohlford, UAF Department of Design and Construction senior project manager. "More are coming online," he says.

It's a belated, but very welcome step for the project, and it's only happening because the UA Board of Regents in September 2016 approved $37.5 million in bonds to complete the construction after the Alaska Legislature again failed to fund it.

The facility, UA President Jim Johnsen told regents, is "an opportunity waiting for investment."

"We've got $70 million in that building and are spending money every year to maintain it and nothing is coming back to the university. No teaching is happening in that building, no research is happening in that building," he said at a Regents meeting in June 2016. "It's a huge cost."

Funding Stalled by Legislature

The Fairbanks building was designed as the larger of a pair of engineering facilities under the UA Statewide Engineering Expansion Initiative spurred by the Legislature to help meet growing demand for engineers in Alaska. The second facility, in Anchorage, was funded, designed, and completed as planned. Meanwhile, legislative appropriations for the Fairbanks facility came only sporadically, and finally not all, despite a well-documented need for engineers in Alaska.

According to UAF, Alaska business and industry require nearly two hundred engineers and engineering technicians annually, and those businesses prefer to hire Alaska-trained workers. The university estimates seventy percent of its bachelor's degree level engineering graduates find jobs within the state, with average salaries of $100,000.

While the University of Alaska Anchorage campus offers related engineering degrees, options for students to specialize in mining, geological, and petroleum engineering are only available on the Fairbanks campus. Engineering enrollment has doubled in the last decade. In Fairbanks, the engineering programs are crammed into the Duckering Building, which was constructed in the 1950s and lacks the space and technology needed for today's engineers, according to UAF spokeswoman Marmian Grimes.

The Alaska Legislature decided new, updated facilities were needed on both campuses.

Designed...