One down...

Our first of several important milestones was achieved today. A Conditional Certificate of Occupancy was received for the west wing of Regents Hall. This means that the faculty and staff can start unpacking their boxes and establishing their offices, the stockrooms, and labs. Because it is conditional, folks can't really start doing their daily work in offices, but at least the faculty, who are chomping at the bit to get in those boxes so they can have some sort of head start on preparations for the start of a new academic year, can start digging around to find stuff.

Dave Van Wylen and assistant director of facilities Bill Nelson have been coordinating moves, and Custodial Supervisor Gary Hall and his group have been cleaning to try to stay ahead of the faculty.

Over all of our big projects we've built post-construction cleaning into our budgets, but for a variety of reasons it hasn't worked all that well. The goal has been to relieve the load on our folks so that they can get their regular assignments in shape, but in most cases we have had to go in to finish things as well as we hope for. Gary and Bill got together and propose d that we do the cleaning with St. Olaf people so that it happens the way we want up front, and it has gone really well. It is just different when there's a commitment to the college instead of a contractor.

The next big date comes a in a week when we hope to get the same sort of permit for the east wing