UMaine-Augusta to lease new residence hall to add 23 dorm beds for students

Cleveland Hall at 9 Coos Lane, which will become a dormitory for students at the University of Maine at Augusta, is seen Thursday in the Stevens Commons complex in Hallowell. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

HALLOWELL — The University of Maine at Augusta plans to open a new dormitory this fall to increase the residence space by up to 23 beds as the university faces a 45-person long waitlist for housing on its Augusta-based campus in the upcoming academic year.

The university has two dorms down the street from the Augusta campus in Hallowell that can house up to 82 students. Meanwhile, the waitlist for the upcoming fall semester is already 130 students deep.

Interim UMA President Joe Szakas said when the university was in the process of gathering information about the residential halls, that the admissions staff said they heard from accepted students that would “look elsewhere” if there was no housing option at the university.

More than 50% of students surveyed by admissions said they would not choose UMA if there were no available housing options.

“What you see is a modest opportunity to address that. Cleveland Hall is on Steven Commons already and a lot of stuff is already there, like food, custodial staff, etc. It would provide us 20 more beds by the fall,” Szakas told members of the trustee’s Finance, Facilities and Technology Committee meeting on May 18.

The new dormitory was then approved as an agenda item at the Monday meeting of the University of Maine System board of trustees.

The Augusta university, which is traditionally known for its distanced-based learning courses, opened its first dorm in 2019 at Steven Commons on Coos Lane in Hallowell. Then, in 2020, UMA opened another dormitory in the same proximity. Together, the dorms can house 82 students, but both of the dorms are at 100% capacity.

While nearly 70% of the 4,446 students at UMA are distance-based learners, the other almost 30% of students are split between the Augusta, Bangor and other UMA campus centers across the state. Around 14% of students are stationed at the Augusta campus, according to UMA, and of the students that live in the dorms, 95% are full-time students and 73% are students that are from Maine.

Students living at the Hallowell dorms can ride a shuttle for free to get to the main Augusta campus under an arrangement with the Kennebec Explorer bus service. The shuttle schedule is determined each semester based on students’ needs.

Buster Neel, interim chief business officer at UMA, said at the May 18 meeting that it was “hard to come up with a scenario that wouldn’t work” in terms of the dorm generating revenue for the university, even with the least number of students in the dorm.

The 10-year lease for Cleveland Hall is estimated to cost a total of $2,421,200. The annual expenses that include the cost of the lease and running the dorm comes to $214,600 and it will cost an estimated $275,000 to renovate the building for the rooms.

“I assure you, before bringing it to you (the committee) we ran many scenarios to see how we can afford it. We took in all the factors — occupancy rate, in-state, out-of-state, and credit hours. We also considered the surveys we received on how many new students would not come otherwise… We built them all into equations and it was hard to find a scenario that wouldn’t work,” Neel said.

Even in its “worst scenario,” if only 17 beds were filled, with the room and board rate, the university would still generate an estimated $103,500. The recommended room and board rate for UMA for 2024-25 is $7,914 for the year, a 3.5% or $268 increase over last year.

Szakas told the committee at the May 18 meeting that having an extra dorm will hopefully increase the number of students that want to attend UMA, especially students from out of state.

The hope is that residence halls will be able to draw students to the university if there is a housing option.

“The breakdown that we are seeing, take architecture for an example, there aren’t too many high school students who want to become an architect from the state of Maine,” Szakas said. “Out-of-state matters and this year, with housing, we have the largest cohort we have seen in five or six years.”