A loop road that will encompass the campus is set for construction sometime next summer, Vice President for Finance and Administration Jose Garcia said.
Plans to construct the loop road were authorized after the university received $37.5 million in Tuition Revenue Bond in July. The money provided the authority to fund two other projects: a Student Success Center and the completion of a theatre in the Center for the Fine and Performing Arts.
Garcia is not yet certain what the road will encompass as they are still in the “initial phases” of development, but according to the Master Plan, the road will not wrap around the complete perimeter of the land owned by the university.
“The road basically will take the two existing east and west roads. Then it will loop around the back of the campus, come back around to the east road, and complete the loop, so you can drive around the campus,” Garcia said.
Architects are drafting the initial plans for the road under the “program of requirements.”
“We had a meeting last week with the architect for the [A&M] system who is doing the program of requirements. The architect is working with the users as to what offices are going into the building, and of course we looked at where the road would tentatively go,” Garcia explained.
The loop road and Student Success Center projects will work in conjunction, Garcia said. The location of the center will roughly determine where the road will run through.
The Student Success building will serve as a welcome center for first-time visitors to the campus
“The Student Success Center will be a one-stop shop [for students]. A student will come to enroll in this center where you will have the admissions office, the registrar, counseling center, financial aid, and a bursar, so that you can accomplish everything in that one center and hopefully have some places where you can do a lot of self-service,” Garcia said.
According to Garcia, plans for the loop road and the Student Success Center should be finalized at the end of spring. As for the date of completion, he suspects construction should take no more than a year.
“I would expect that it would be done within a year, so the [current] juniors would be seniors. Obviously, it’s all contingent upon when we start.”
Ariel Sauceda, English senior, feels the project will help the university especially because of the growth it has experienced.
“Anything that helps the traffic flow is probably as beneficial as it can be for TAMIU. If the university decides to expand and hold more events particularly on campus it would probably make it easier for not only students and faculty but for the general public to attend. It can get fairly crowded when it comes to events like that, so it’s all about the expansion,” Sauceda said.