The Durham Technical Community College campus in Orange County will soon see some changes, as plans for an expansion likely will have funding from the local government.
While expansion to the single-building campus at 525 College Park Road in Hillsborough has been discussed before, recent changes to the Orange County Capital Investment Plan have accelerated the timeline. At the Board of County Commissioners’ last meeting, the group voted 5-2 in favor of a funding plan for expansion in the next five years instead of ten.
Orange County Commissioner and chair of the board Penny Rich spoke with 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck about the change. She said fellow commissioner Mark Dorosin has been an advocate for prioritizing creating more room on the Orange County campus, bringing up the project this summer during the annual discussion of the Capital Investment Plan, or CIP. Doing so allows for the community college to begin planning and design an expansion to the 20-acre campus.
“We’ve been talking about it for years, but we never found the money for it given the needs of everything in the county,” Rich said. “[Dorosin] pushed for it and we had a couple of meetings about this and moved some of the Capital Investment Plan around and pushed some of it out into the six-through-ten year [portion].”
The end result of the approved CIP for fiscal years 2020-2025 for Orange County has $1 million in funding set aside for the Durham Tech expansion. Funding will rise to $14 million in year two as construction begins, with $11.5 million planned to supplement Durham Tech over years three through five.
Rich said she believes this is a “step in the right direction” for Orange County, since the current Durham Tech campus already provides several residents the ability to earn low-cost education and workforce training. She also said the coronavirus pandemic potentially altering how high school students will seek a college education in the future could lead to even more demand for community college space.
“We know we’re going to have more and more students looking for an opportunity to go to college,” Rich said. “Because of the predicament we’re in now, we have high school students that are all online and there’s that lack of counseling. We know that we’re going to need more space at Durham Tech, so I’m really excited about this.”
Rich said early estimates for a Durham Tech expansion project in Hillsborough would be for a ground-breaking to begin in 2022 with construction taking place until 2023 or 2024. The Board of Orange County Commissioners did not vote on where the CIP funding for the project will be allocated from, instead approving the future plan for total amount of funding to award.
More information about the Orange County campus can be found on Durham Technical Community College’s website.
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