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“The decision was clear that the site itself is not ideal for our students and the physical structure is beyond its lifespan,” she said Thursday.

There is also no money left to deal with maintenance.

Essential maintenance costs have increased by more than 36 per cent over the past five years and by more than 100 per cent in the past 10 years, the university said.

In 2017, maintenance costs reached $2 million, or about 47 per cent of the total expenses incurred. Of the expected 3,000 individual maintenance requests the university is expecting to receive this academic year, about 22 per cent of those will be for Michener Park.

Furthermore, the last $380,000 stored away in reserve funds was exhausted at the end of the last academic year.

Closing Michener Park will also remove about $25 million from the university’s ballooning deferred maintenance bill.

Huising said one of the first questions she was asked when she arrived at the university a year ago centred on the future of the building. She has spent the past 12 months looking into the reality of the space and listening to concerns from the students living there.

She said Michener Park was “not at the standards that we would offer to our students and so that decision had to be made.

“No matter where the consultation lands at the end of this year I am confident we will not be rebuilding at that site,” she said.

What will happen to the building and the land is yet to be decided but one thing is for sure.