The long history of attempts to bring the proposed University Family Housing Community Center to fruition may finally be coming to a close. Thomas Hill, vice president for student affairs, announced Wednesday that, after meeting with Vice President for Business and Finance Warren Madden and ISU President Gregory Geoffroy, the university had decided to move forward once again with plans to build the center.

The facility will be built with money from the Department of Residence, as well as $500,000 from Iowa State. The bidding process for the construction of the community center is tentatively scheduled to begin in November.

The decision came, Hill said, as a result of urging from family housing tenants and the university’s desire to fulfill a promise it had made in 2002, when those residents allowed the school to renovate their current community center and make it into a daycare. The school, working with the Department of Residence, promised to pay for the construction of a new community center.

But residents were outraged after the school defaulted on the promise, pointing to economic problems as the reason.

Now, with both Hill and Geoffroy pledging to move the process forward, UFH Council Mayor Natalie Steffen is cautiously optimistic about the future of the community center.

“It seems like at this point that it’s probably going to be able to go forward,” she said.

Since the renovation of the community center, Steffen said, family housing residents have been forced to make do with what was left for them. Where before there had been offices and computer labs, there is now only a converted old apartment.

“We meet in an old kitchen for our council meetings,” Steffen said.

“We have things like movie nights for the children, and we have to either have it outside or in the Laundromat. We have potlucks that we have to have in the Laundromat, because we don’t have anywhere else to have it, and it’s really not fun sitting on washers and dryers to eat your food. And so we really need this to become a reality.”

However, the university’s last attempt to build the center in 2003 were stymied when bids for the project went over the $1.3 million budgeted by the Board of Regents.

“What has happened is, from the decision of student affairs and from the institution, we felt that the promise had been made, and we needed to follow through on that commitment,” Hill said.

“The thing that made it difficult was the economy, the occupancy rates and the financial issues that we’ve faced in the Department of Residence.”