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Space and Facilities Allocation Policy

1.1 General Guidelines

All indoor and outdoor space that is owned or controlled by the College is considered College space and is subject to assignment for a specified use by a designated College department or unit. In turn, departments or units are responsible for effective use of all space assigned to them and must submit requests for changes, including physical alterations and relocations, change in space capacities, room function changes, and accountability changes, in accordance with the procedure outlined in this document.

All space must be formally assigned by the College Infrastructure Committee (CIC). Requests for changes in space utilization must be made through the appropriate administrative structure and forwarded to the appropriate Vice President for review and approval before submitting to the CIC for review.

The CIC is the final arbiter of all space assignments. Every effort will be made to avoid the reassignment of space unless it is the active desire of the responsible Vice President, or if relocation is necessary to meet the College's strategic initiatives.

1.2 Operating Principles for Strategic Space Requests

1.2.1 Faculty, staff, and students must be afforded sufficient interior space to support the College's teaching, research, and service missions.

1.2.2 Space allocations should be made consistent with the College's strategic plan so that the physical resource of space is made available in response to programmatic commitments and priorities of the institution in relation to strategic planning and research.

1.2.3 Space allocations should be made within the framework outlined by the College Master Plan with respect to concepts such as campus neighborhoods, places for communication, activity spaces, and circulation spaces.

1.2.4 Space should be allocated efficiently, and review of space assignments will include analysis of cost and cost benefits.

1.2.5 Space must be suited to its intended purpose, whether classroom, lab, office, or other uses.

1.2.6 Space must be maintainable, including cleaning, repairing, and refurbishing.

1.2.7 Safety and accessibility must be an inherent part of space allocation and design.

1.2.8 All full-time faculty should be assigned an office. Private office space and lab space are not normally provided to emeritus faculty or part-time faculty unless space is available.

1.2.9 Adjuncts and emeritus faculty are not provided with private offices unless special circumstances exist.

1.3 Space Actions Requiring Review and Approval

1.3.1 Research Support: Grant submissions that increase staff, and that require College space to support the grant must be submitted to the CIC for review and inclusion in college space planning priorities prior to grant submission.

1.3.2 Change of function: Classrooms and academic support space can not be taken off line or have a substantial change of use without approval of the CIC. (A substantial change would include converting the space to non-instructional, reducing the seating capacity of a classroom or lab, significantly altering or restricting the type of instruction possible in the room, removing or modifying a classroom in the college scheduling process, restricting what classes/units may use it, or otherwise altering the availability or functionality of the space.)

1.3.3 Reallocation or re-assignment: Reallocation or re-assignment between two departments or units must go through their respective Dean(s) and Vice President(s) for review and approval then forwarded to the CIC for final review and approval. If a mutually accepted recommendation for use can not be reconciled between the two departments or units then a decision based on a recommendation from the respective Vice President(s) will be forwarded to the CIC for final re-assignment.

NOTE:
Internal re-assignments: Internal re-assignments within Vice Presidential area or department do not need to go through the CIC.

1.4 Request for Funds

1.4.1 If the department has adequate funds to support the renovation, requests should be forwarded to CIC for approval then forwarded to the Facilities Management. If there is a change of function as noted in Section 1.3 #2, the CIC must also review and approve.

1.4.2 If funds are being requested from the CIC the Space and Facilities Review Process will be used as described in 1.5.

1.5 Review Process

In the needs analysis for any space assignment, the CIC will consider the College's Strategic Plan and Master Plan as well as academic program size and growth, cost analysis, feasibility, scheduling, budgets and funding, and space availability.

Requests should come through the appropriate Vice President for approval and prioritization. An initial request should address as many of the needs analysis issues as possible; however, initial requests should be submitted using the Strategic Space Request Form.

Priority requests will be reviewed and incorporated into the master project list one fiscal year out in conjunction with the College budget cycle (ex: FY 23 submission would be approved for the FY 24 budget). Critical dates are as follows:

    • March 1 proposals submitted to appropriate VP.

    • March 31 deadline for VP's to forward their priority listing to CIC.

**Requests that are considered critical to programming or that are health and safety related will be accepted out of cycle. If one of these types of project is approved it will alter the priority listing and may cause an approved project to go to the top of the list in the next budget cycle.

**Requests for Classroom modifications that are approved will be forwarded to the Registrars Office.

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Policy Maintained by: Finance & Administration, Associate Vice President for Facilities Management and Campus Planning
Last Reviewed: October 25, 2022