The LSU Health Sciences Center is turning to unorthodox housing accommodations to keep classes running for LSU’s nursing, medical and dental schools.
The LSU System plans to put up to 400 mobile homes on its River Road property. A passenger ferry on the Mississippi will also temporarily house medical personnel and students in an effort to keep grant money and researchers from going to other research institutions, said Charles Zewe, system spokesman.
Construction workers have started to lay the concrete foundation for the mobile homes. Classes will begin Monday and will be held at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, movie theaters and other available space in Baton Rouge.
The system also is renting Finnjet, a passenger ferry with a carrying capacity of just under 1,800 that will dock near the U.S.S. Kidd battleship. The ferry set out from Rostock, Germany for Baton Rouge on Tuesday and will arrive on Oct. 2, according to Helsingin Sanomat, a newspaper in Helsinki, Finland.
The system is leasing two- and three-bedroom mobile homes for $65,000 a year per home, and the Finnjet cruise ship will cost the system $75,000 a day. Zewe said the Federal Emergency Management Agency will reimburse the LSU System for renting the mobile homes and the ship, but in the meantime, the system will take the funds from its annual budget, which is approximately $3.5 billion, Zewe said. Slightly more than 50 percent of the office’s budget comes from state funding and the rest is from student tuition and other revenue.
Zewe said the cruise ship was the system’s only quick solution for large amounts of housing.
“We didn’t have enough time to bring in enough modular housing,” he said. “Our only other option was to shut down for a year – an unacceptable option.”
Zewe said people who live in the ship and in mobile homes will be assessed a “minimal” charge, which has not been decided.
Zewe said the system had to act fast to find temporary homes for students and faculty from the medical school, which includes the dental and nursing schools, the schools of public health, allied health and researchers in the LSU Health Sciences Center and New Orleans’ public hospitals, Zewe said.
Zewe said the housing strategy is designed to save the school, since some other research institutions have expressed interest in LSU’s researchers and their projects.
“One of the biggest problems is that there has been a literal assault by research institutions around the country to steal away key researchers,” Zewe said.
Zewe said four or five researchers have already left the University for other institutions, and researchers hold about $65 million in grants for the medical center. Temporary housing will hold the displaced until the end of the year so medical facilities in New Orleans can be fixed.
“If we lose our people, we lose our school,” Zewe said.
Contact Leslie Ziober at [email protected]