IRVINE : Construction Boom Underway at College

Seeking to keep up with a fast-growing student population, Irvine Valley College is in the midst of an unprecedented building boom, with work planned on a new campus gymnasium and a child care center.

“Things keep changing from day to day,” said Robert D. Loeffler, the college’s vice president of business services. “All of a sudden, it’s really taken off.”

Construction crews have already laid the foundation for the new $2-million, 10,000-square-foot child care center, which will serve at least 47 children of students and residents when it opens in the fall of 1993. The center will also serve as a lab for students in the college’s child development department.

In recent years, IVC has managed a community child care center owned by the city of Irvine at Heritage Park.

On the other side of the campus, crews are expected to begin work in October on the $4-million gymnasium, which will finally give the school’s basketball and volleyball teams a permanent home. Until now, the teams have been playing at Laguna Hills High School or Christ College in Irvine.

There will also be classrooms, offices and a dance studio inside the 27,000-square-foot gym.

Next to the gym site, work is nearly done on a locker-room facility complete with aerobics and weight-lifting studios, a 454-space parking lot, several new outdoor basketball, volleyball and tennis courts, and a baseball diamond.

College spokesman George McCrory said the campus has been waiting for years to secure state funding for the projects, which are part of a five-year growth plan. Last year, a new student center opened.

“This has all been planned for several years,” McCrory said. “Really, it is a separate thing from the current situation on the state budget.”

Construction is scheduled to continue beyond the projects already underway. Only 30 acres of the 100-acre campus--which hit an enrollment peak of about 10,000 students last year--are developed.

Officials hope to have a new humanities and performing arts center built by the end of the decade and recently received $329,000 in state funding to draw up plans for a new library.

The new library is expected to hold 75,000 volumes, compared to the 25,000-volume capacity of the existing campus library, McCrory said.