Associated Students of Madison held a town hall meeting Tuesday to allow student input on the currently developing Campus Master Plan.
UW-Madison graduate student Gwen Drury presented the tentative Master Plan to the students and emphasized looking comprehensively at the buildings, open space, transportation and utilities of the UW-Madison campus.
\We are looking at the future, and students who aren't here to speak for themselves,"" she said. ""The best people who can speak for the students right now are current students.""
According to UW-Madison Director of Landscape Architecture Gary Brown, ""There are projects in the works right now, in design, in planning and even projects under construction.""
One of these is the hiring of a campus architect, Drury said, which should take place in the next week or so.
Brown said the new University Square is still in the planning stages and will probably be finalized sometime this summer or fall.
""We will be finding out if they are included in the governor's budget when that is approved. Probably in July we will be finding out,"" Brown said.
The Master Plan provides for tearing down several structurally unsound buildings constructed hastily in the '60s and '70s to respond to a boom in enrollment.
According to Brown, the first to fall will probably be the Peterson Building as soon as 2007, followed by Ogg Hall in approximately 2008, or once the residence hall projects on Park Street are completed.
As soon as this summer, Observatory Drive will undergo extreme overhauls in order to be finished by next fall semester, Brown said.
""Observatory Drive will be reconstructed [this] summer as part of a utility extension project tied to bringing in utilities from the new cogeneration plant ... into the center part of campus,"" Brown said.
Tied to improving the transit system, the Master Plan looks to convert more surface parking to structure parking, keeping about the same number of 12,000 to 13,000 spaces available.
""It's expensive for us to buy new land on campus, so we want to reuse those spaces we have,"" Brown said.
UW-Madison junior and ASM secretary Adam Schlicht was encouraged by the students' incentive to be involved and said he hopes to keep their attention.
""When they [the planning committee] come with more tangible plans in late summer or early fall, then students ... will have a really direct effect on what is and isn't chosen to be finalized,"" Schlicht said.
