Erie Community College has chosen its North Campus as the site for a new $30 million science, technology, engineering and math building.
$15 million worth of the project will be funded by the state, Erie County has raised nearly $7.5 million over the years for the building, and the rest of the funds come from the community college itself.
Deputy County Executive Richard Tobe said the campus was chosen after a study was conducted by JMZ Architects and Planners, P.C. that concluded it was the best site for the development, considering the many STEM courses already offered at ECC North.
“Virtually all of their major advanced manufacturing and the heart of the science programming is at the North campus and it would be too hard to dislocate it all and put it somewhere else [or] unfair to the students to have them travel from campus to campus as they were taking courses that each support the other,” says Tobe.
Tobe said the center will help foster the growing manufacturing workforce in western New York.
“It should also be mentioned that this announcement was not in isolation. On May 2, New York state announced that they plan to have a companion approach in which they will be constructing a building in the City of Buffalo also to support advanced manufacturing, but training programs that will be of relatively short duration while those at ECC will be of longer duration,” says Tobe.
The building will be the beginning of improvements at all three campuses in Buffalo, Amherst, and Orchard Park. The project is expected to begin in 2014.
