SUNY Cortland will see campus renovations and innovations in the coming up years, and a possible relocation of the West Campus Apartments.
According to Mark Yacavone, the Vice President of Finance and Management at SUNY Cortland, the focus of this renovations is to promote the best campus structure and experience for students and Cortland community.
Yacavone and his team have a rollout plan of all the buildings that will possibly go under construction. Starting on January 2026, the next building to be renovated is Corey Union.
Parker Arenas, a Junior student at SUNY Cortland majoring in Criminology with a Minor in Forensic Psychology and Communications, and the newly elected president of SGA, said that although Corey Union is already a great building that offers many different opportunities for students to promote educational and leisure events, there is some aspects of it that are outdated and could use improvements.
Arenas said that some of the changes he’s aware that are in the planning to happen in the building is that the campus activities office will be moved to the lobby floor where the SGA office is currently located.
In addition, the Voice Office will be getting a new room, which will provide more space for club storage. A prayer room is under consideration for the building, evidence of Cortland’s commitment to inclusion.
“One change I’d like, per my own bias, is for the SGA office to be more open,” said Arenas. “Currently you have to walk down a hallway to get to the main office and I feel like it can be daunting to some.”
Yacavone explained that there is a lot of work that needs to be done on the top three floors of Corey Union. Because they have worked on the lower floor of Corey Union a few years back, they will keep that floor open until further notice. However, the lower floor will also have to be shut down eventually, when his team starts working on the heating and electrical system of that area.
“It will be hard,” said Arenas. “Campus will struggle a for a little while under construction, but people will adapt with the change, as us Red Dragons always do. When Corey is finished, it will provide an amazing space for our campus community, new Red Dragons and our ever-growing campus clubs. I’m excited.”
For over a year now, there has been construction happening in the Wing C of the complex of buildings on Middle Campus, the Cornish/Van Hoesen Hall building, where the Communications Studies and Media department is located. After focusing on the renovations of the Corey Union, Yacavone and his team will turn their attention back to the Cornish/Van Hoesen Hall building. This time the renovations will happen on the B Wing, which is the wing that comes off with the one that’s being renovated at the moment, and possibly the AB Wing together.
“There are ideas of what we’re going to do, maybe a part of the AB wing,” said Yacavone. “We’re going to try to do that whole one together. So, there’s discussion of what’s next.”
Another building that is in the plans to be renovated is the Park Center. The building had its outside renovated not long ago, in 2019, but now it needs attention on its inside, since there has been critical maintenance, deterioration of infrastructure, and some operations are failing to function.
The plan, according to Yacavone, is to work on the inside of the building in many phases, but two main ones. First, they will focus on fixing the mechanical, electric, and the heating part of the building, the “behind the scenes” portion of the construction, to which students won’t see anything, but renovations and constructions will be happening.
Next, they will work on renovating the structure and the look of the inside of Park Center, for which they will need to shut down different wings at times so students can still use the rest of the building while one portion is under construction.
As for the residence halls, the budget to renovate the halls comes from both SUNY and an organization within the state of New York called DASNY, the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York, that was responsible for putting the residence halls in place many years ago. The plan for now, according to Yacavone, is to renovate Alger Hall, work on its electrical system, and upgrade the painting of its walls and carpets down on each floor. In addition, they plan on creating a new version of West Campus Apartments on the south part of campus, near Professional Studies.
“As you come in from Tompkins Street, and as you come around in the south entrance of campus, right now all you can see is the student life center and Park Center,” said Yacavone. “It’s a sea of cars, all you see is cars. We want to change that. That’s where the West Campus would be allocated.”
Ana Marija Celic, an international student from Germany majoring in Economics with a concentration in International Studies, who currently lives in one of the apartments at West Campus, said that moving West Campus Apartments to a new location would be a great idea, and would help the many students who are dependent of the school bus, to be closer to their classes, dining halls and the events that happen on campus
Currently, West Campus holds 238 beds in its facility, Yacavone explained that they are trying to plan a complex that would hold the same number of beds and work in the same way as West Campus, where students would have their own apartments, with their own room, shared bathrooms, their own kitchen and living room.
Once the new residence complex is done, and the goal, according to Yacavone, is to have it done by Fall of 2027, they will need to assess what should be done with the place where West Campus Apartments are currently located.
Celic said that if West Campus remains active, it needs renovations, new furniture and a better elaborated schedule for onsite events and bus trips to the main campus.
“Everything seems kind of old and used,” said Celic. “For the price we pay for it, we should be getting more from it.”
Yacavone said that they could possibly renovate West Campus buildings and use them to accommodate students with specific needs, but that nothing has been decided yet and won’t be until the new place is built and they can reassess their needs and priorities.
“We’ve had preliminary conversations, but no sustainable ideas of what we’re looking at,” said Yacavone. “You never know the challenges that we could get with what students’ needs are, so there may be accommodations that we need to make, and maybe West Campus is the only place we can do that.”