NORFOLK — Tidewater Community College is still in the middle of fundraising for its newest project, the TCC Perry Center for Visual & Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management, and is slated to open in August 2021.
Steven Jones, executive director of the Tidewater Community College Educational Foundation said the college is just $4.5 million shy of its $17.5 million goal for the project.
“We’re still fundraising and plan on releasing a website for the public to view our timeline and donor information in the next few months,” he said.
The college is still set to take over the Greyhound bus station even though it is still delivering bus loads of people every day.
“It didn’t make sense to take over the building only to have it sit empty while we prepared,” Jones said.
The city will be signing over the lease to the Greyhound station in the coming months but in the meantime, the station will still be operational, he noted.
The expansion into the NEON District will not only bring an educational center but more jobs and economic infrastructure to host the students, Jones added.
When the city and the college were working on the project initially they estimated the new structure would bring in roughly 2,000 more people a week to the NEON District once opened.
Once construction does begin, in early 2020, residents from the St. Paul’s Area will have priority for hiring the construction workers, Jones said.
That coupled with the scholarships the college is planning on disbursing to Norfolk students once the program is up and running are ways the college is keeping the city at the forefront of its planning, he said.
For now the Greyhound station site may look pretty busy but with about a year of construction and a few more months of donations to go, the new center will be up and running for the 2021 fall semester.
Greyhound representatives were not immediately available for comment.
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