Lincoln Hall will need to be vacated for at least three years should the Illinois General Assembly approve Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s plan to give the University $55.1 million to renovate the building.

University officials welcomed the proposed funding to repair the dilapidated building, made public in Blagojevich’s capital budget released March 7. Lincoln Hall has been a priority on University’s capital budget requests since Fiscal Year 2000.

But the building will be unusable for three academic years because of the types of repairs needed, said Matthew Tomaszewski, assistant dean of College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for facilities and services.

“The plan is to shut down the building so that the renovation can start in entirety,” Tomaszewski said. “It’s quite a big project.”

Tomaszewski said the building needs improvements on the infrastructure as well as renovations of the theater, upgrading the heating, ventilating and air conditioning system (Lincoln Hall does not have air conditioning), upgrading the fire safety system and making the building more accessible to those with disabilities. Students in wheelchairs must come through the stage area of the theater, for example.

The exact timeline for the renovations and the move-out have not yet been set, Tomaszewski said, due to complications over when the state releases money to the University and how quickly the University will be able to sort out where classes that would be held in Lincoln Hall will move to and when the planning and preparation for actual construction work will be complete. Tomaszewski said Lincoln Hall would be vacated in the summer of 2008 if everything goes right.

Reconstruction work would begin in the fall semester of 2008 and will not end until the fall semester of 2011.

Carrie West, capital planning specialist for the University’s Facilities and Services unit, stated in an e-mail that the Liberal Arts and Sciences College will be relocated to the Computing Applications Building, 605 E. Springfield Ave., while Lincoln Hall is closed for repair. The building has been used since 2004 to accommodate University units whose main buildings are under repair because the National Center for Supercomputing Applications moved to its new facilities at 1205 W. Clark St.

Currently, the college of LAS employs 3,348 staff members, including professors and other academic professionals, and has almost 43 percent students on campus assigned to it. Lincoln Hall also supplies more than 12 percent of the net-square feet the college has under its disposal for office space.

“It takes some finesse to work with the space,” Tomaszewski said in reference to the Computing Science Building.