Lincoln University had about 650 new students when classes began nearly three weeks ago, and still has 65 students living in hotel rooms rather than residence halls.
"We hope to get them back to campus as quickly as possible," Jerome Offord, LU's new dean of Administration and Student Affairs, told curators Thursday.
And LU President Kevin Rome apologized during his Opening Convocation address Thursday morning to those students who "have been inconvenienced by our growth. Your inconvenience will allow better conditions for those who come after you."
One solution, Rome said, came during the curators closed session Thursday morning, when they voted to remodel Martin Hall and have it ready for next year.
The older residence hall has been closed for some time, and renovating it will add 130 beds in on-campus housing, Rome told the News Tribune after his speech.
"It will be mostly cosmetic - it will make it livable, so that we will have space for the students that we would have to put in a hotel," he explained.
In the long run, Lincoln administrators still want to build a new residence hall near the corner of Locust and Atchison streets, south of the Scruggs Residence Hall, then remove the Dawson Hall "high rise" building as having outlived its usefulness. There's no firm timeline for the idea, Rome said.
"We're still using it because that's what universities do," he said. "Ideally, that's not somewhere where we want to place students."
During his convocation address, Rome told LU students the university cannot build new housing until it demonstrates there's not enough spaces to accommodate current students.
"Unfortunately, the saying, "Build them and they will come' does not work when financing residence halls - banks respond to, "We need more spaces because we have a trend of not being able to house all of our current students'," he said.
Rome said the board authorized his administration to negotiate a contract for the Martin Hall renovations - no other details were announced Thursday.
During the board's open session, curators also approved a new contract for construction of a "Small Ruminant Building" at the Busby Farm, 5124 Goller Road. Jefferson City-based Verslues Construction Co. will be paid $636,732 for the work.
Verslues was the second-lowest bidder last February when the board authorized a $613,100 contract with Dan Bax Construction Co., Jefferson City, to build a 4,000-square-foot metal building to house sheep and goats.
But, Facilities and Design and Construction Director Sheila Gassner said Bax withdrew from the project because the bids only were valid for 120 days. "USDA had not approved the project and, to this date, we still don't have their approval," she said. "It's been a frustrating experience. The money's there - but it's just been back-and-forth" with the USDA.
Gassner said Verslues was willing to honor its bid from the beginning of the year, and understood there still might be a delay.
"They're aware they might not even start until the winter," she said.
Chief Financial Officer Sandy Koetting said part of the problem involved USDA officials trying to match the numbers in two separate funds "that will never match. They're not supposed to match ... until the end of a project."
Koetting and Gassner said the federal agency has started accepting financial reports, so they hope the delays will end soon.