UA Regents green-light theater

PALMER — It’s all systems go for a $20 million theater that will be constructed on the Mat-Su College campus.

The project was one of a raft of requests Alaska voters approved in a package of bonds last year. On Wednesday, the University of Alaska Board of Regents gave the nod to go ahead with the project, set for completion in the fall of 2014.

“The new building will provide a music classroom, a drama lab, instrument storage, display areas, study areas and a theater large enough for 500 people,” a University of Alaska press release says. “Mat-Su College enrollment has grown considerably in recent years, as has the population of the Mat-Su Borough, but the college can only house about 120 people in one venue — the cafeteria.”

College director Talis Colberg revised that seating capacity figure slightly, saying preliminary drawings taking into account funding and all the other rooms that need to go into the building show there is room for 508 seats in the theater without going over budget.

“I think it’s going to be an exciting thing for students for a long time to come,” he said.

Now, Colberg said, the college can’t really bring large groups of students together at once.

“When we do freshman orientation, we have to break them into three groups and have everyone say the same thing three times,” he said.

The campus also lacks a space big enough to hold guest lectures or other large gatherings. The theater will open up those kinds of opportunities, Colberg said.

But Colberg said that more than just a place for students to gather for events, the theater also will be available for community events.

The borough has similarly sized spaces — Raven Hall on the state fairgrounds and the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center, to name two — but all are set up as big, open spaces. Colberg used the phrase “warehouse configuration.” There isn’t this kind of space to handle large theatrical performances.

“This is something that will bring the community to the campus for reasons other than (a class),” Colberg said.

This is probably why the Mat-Su Borough Assembly chose to endorse the idea the week before it went before the board of regents. Colberg said having that resolution in hand when he went to make the college’s case was helpful. It also helped that the regents happened to visit the college last spring.

“They could see that we had no big room even for them to meet in,” Colberg said. “They were in our biggest room when they came to visit.”

But even with the money in-hand and endorsements from voters and the assembly, it still needed the regents OK to move forward.

“The board of regents has to approve any kind of project like that and they theoretically could have said no and, in fact, they had not forwarded it yet, whereas other projects had,” Colberg said.

Another Mat-Su College project had already been approved — $2.5 million that came in the same bond proposition — and is set to fund an expansion of one of the college’s buildings to make more room for nursing and emergency medical services students. Ground will break for that one next spring

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.