UW Board Chooses Contractor for Indoor Golf Facility

July 26, 2013

A Wyoming firm has been chosen to build a new Indoor Golf Practice Facility at the University of Wyoming.

The UW Board of Trustees today (Friday) voted to award the $850,000 contract to Spiegelberg Lumber and Building Co. of Laramie from among five bidders for the project at Jacoby Golf Course. Construction is scheduled to begin in August and be completed by the end of November.

The overall $1.2 million project is completely funded through private donations.

The 3,064-square-foot facility, to be located next to the existing chipping and putting greens and the driving range tees, will be used by UW’s intercollegiate golf teams for practice and training. It also will be a revenue-generating facility to augment the golf course’s operations, as memberships for its use will be available to members of the public.

The building will be centered on a large multipurpose practice space that includes four hitting bays that can function as either indoor netted bays or driving range tees. Next to the hitting bays will be an indoor synthetic putting green surface. Also included will be a single-bay golf simulator, along with a team room with locker storage, restrooms and ball cleaning/dispensing equipment.

In other action today, the Board of Trustees authorized the purchase of 23 acres at $14,000 per acre in the city of Laramie’s new Cirrus Sky Technology Park to serve as a home for high-tech firms that spring out of the university’s business development efforts. The board last year had conditionally committed to the purchase while the city and the Laramie Economic Development Corp. were seeking state grant funding for the project.

The Cirrus Sky Technology Park will take advantage of the regional synergy which has developed among Laramie’s burgeoning technology cluster, UW academic research, and the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center and Microsoft data center in Cheyenne. Cirrus Sky is designed to serve as an expansion area for existing, established tech firms as well as prospective data centers and tech businesses relocating to southeastern Wyoming.

The Board of Trustees also authorized the purchase of what is now a residential property at 465 11th Street in Laramie for $203,000. The purchase is the latest in a series of acquisitions to allow expansion of the UW campus north of Lewis Street.

And in preparation for a major reconstruction of Grand Avenue south of the UW campus by the Wyoming Department of Transportation, the trustees approved the transfer of an approximately 8-foot corridor of UW property -- amounting to a total of .43 of an acre -- to WYDOT for widening of the roadway right of way. In return, UW will receive a damages payment of $210,500 for a temporary construction easement and $90,315 for remediation of any project damages from WYDOT.

The Grand Avenue project is expected to take place in the spring and summer of 2014.

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