UMUC Snares Site in Largo For Classes, Office Space

Sale Will Help College Consolidate Operations

A massive office building in the heart of Prince George's County that has sat empty for almost a year will soon have a new occupant: the rapidly growing University of Maryland University College.

College officials announced last month that the state's Board of Public Works has signed off on the college's $38 million purchase of the Largo office building that was once the headquarters of Hechinger and more recently housed Raytheon offices. The 236,000-square-foot glassy building is just off the Capital Beltway near FedEx Field.

The purchase concludes the college's five-year search for space. The building will house classrooms, as well as offices for professors, financial aid officers and support staff members.

Offices and classrooms that have been spread across 100,000 square feet of leased space throughout the region will be consolidated at the new facility, said UMUC President Susan C. Aldridge.

"It will allow our academic teams to have much better interchange with one another and do a lot less driving between buildings," she said.

UMUC is one of 11 degree-granting schools in the University System of Maryland. It caters to working professionals and students who do coursework online. The Largo building will offer a central location for meetings with professors and advisers.

The school has 92,000 students in 24 countries and has been growing by the thousands, with enrollment up 20 percent in the past decade.

Aldridge said school officials looked at 40 to 50 locations before settling on the Largo building. She said the facility will allow UMUC to grow. The 20-acre site has plenty of parking for students and space for another building. The site is also close to the Largo Town Center Metro station, and the school will run a shuttle, Aldridge said.

University officials will upgrade the building's heating, cooling and hot water systems and the site's landscaping. The work will bring the total investment in the structure to about $60 million. The changes will bring certification as a "green" building through the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design of the U.S. Green Building Council and save money on utility bills.

Aldridge said that a UMUC-owned hotel was the first hotel in the country to achieve LEED certification in 2005.

"We have a history of being committed to LEED certification, and this really just follows the course we've set over a number of years," she said.

The building, surrounded by office parks and county government buildings, has been vacant since December, when Raytheon left after about 10 years. In 2006, knowing that the company's lease was nearing its end, the Prince George's Board of Education considered leasing it for the school system's headquarters. The board dropped that idea after County Executive Jack B. Johnson (D) said it would be too expensive.

Instead, the board agreed this year in a contentious 6 to 4 vote to buy a building near Andrews Air Force Base for $36 million.

The UMUC building, often still called the Hechinger or Raytheon building, has an advocate in state Sen. Ulysses Currie (D-Prince George's).

Ben Birge, associate vice president for government relations at UMUC, said Currie had encouraged the university to explore buying the building. The college had been looking at it at the time, Birge said.

Currie said the building would have good visibility near major thoroughfares and would provide an "educational anchor" for the central part of the county, Birge said. "We liked that idea."