McGill’s renovations project at the University Centre continues to move slowly. We remain hopeful that we will resume operations for the 2019-2020 academic year. The building closure poses significant challenges to the quality of service we offer students. It also has considerable financial implications: renting downtown Montreal real estate is quite costly, and the added time has only increased these expenses.
When we first updated you about the delayed timeline in August, we committed to working hard with the Deputy Provost, Building Directors, faculty associations, and our current temporary locations in order to secure appropriate alternative permanent and bookable space to mitigate impacts on service and financial costs. Working hard and collaboratively, we succeeded at securing space and support from McGill at 680 Sherbrooke as well as a range of free bookable space on campus (over 200 rooms booked through McGill classrooms). This along with your patience has allowed us to keep up a relatively high level of service, holding, for example, an extremely well-organized and well-attended fall Activities Night in a new location (and so you won’t want to miss out on next semester’s edition, winter #AN2019).
Yet, despite these efforts and results, some impacts on service and financial costs remained, unfortunately, unavoidable. Having recently received additional information from McGill about some of the project delays, we have decided to move most services out of 2075 Robert-Bourassa in order to more effectively manage costs; we will be ensuring that all those affected by the move are set up in another location. Further, we’ll be collaborating and working with services throughout the move to ensure as smooth a transition as possible. Once services are moved in January, we will update this page with information about the new locations of all those affected. We will continue accepting space requests from clubs and services through our online form and will be working with McGill in order to meet requests as quickly as possible.
We hope that you can appreciate our efforts throughout this past semester to keep services running as best we can amidst a challenging set of circumstances. We also want to thank you for your patience, support, and collaboration. As always, we welcome all members’ questions, thoughts, and concerns related to our space plan for winter 2019. Like you, we are looking forward to a full resumption of services in the University Centre next academic year and will update you again by the end of next semester.
