UNC Asheville students cleared to move into dorms after agencies settle safety dispute

More than 270 students will be allowed to move into new residence halls at University of North Carolina Asheville after the university and the State Construction Office reached an agreement late Friday with the Department of Insurance over safety concerns in the buildings.

Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey barred students from moving into five new dorms late Thursday, the day before the bulk of university students were set to begin moving in. A spokesman cited conditions that could be fire hazards, including the use of wood in walls in the stairwells and elevator shafts and the location of water pipes in the stairwells that could make it difficult to get out during a fire.

“As Insurance Commissioner, safety is my top priority,” Causey said in a statement Thursday evening. “I will not allow anyone to live in a building that may pose a threat to their life or well-being.”

The State Construction Office, which supervised construction of the buildings, had said Wednesday that they were safe to occupy. On Friday, officials from the construction office and the university conferred with Insurance Department officials in hopes of reaching an agreement that would allow students to move in while the university worked on fixing the issues Causey cited.

UNC Asheville Chancellor Nancy Cable announced the agreement in an email to the campus community at about 10:30 p.m.

“Our students are able to move into their new homes immediately,” Cable wrote. “We have been working judiciously with all parties involved to address and comply with the demands of the Department of Insurance, even though we have already received a certificate of occupancy from the State Construction Office.”

Details of the agreement were not released. Cable’s email included a statement from the Insurance Department that said it was “satisfied that its concerns are being addressed” and that the dorms “may be safely occupied” starting Friday if the terms of the agreement are followed.

Some students began moving in Friday night, while others had already checked in to hotels.

The five new dorms, called The Woods, offer apartment-style housing for sophomores, juniors and seniors. The buildings are four stories each, with a capacity of 294 students. The university says 272 students will live in the dorms for the fall semester, which begins Monday. About 60 of those students who were on campus early because they are athletes or have university jobs moved in Thursday but had to move back out and stay in hotels Thursday night after Causey declared the buildings unsafe.

University officials said they were not happy with the way Causey handled the situation. In a message to the campus community late Thursday, Cable said she received an email from Causey at 5 that evening saying that he was prohibiting use of the buildings, at about the same time his office sent out a press release describing them as unsafe.

Harry Smith, the head of the UNC system Board of Governors, called the press release “grandstanding” and unfair to university administrators who had done everything they were supposed to do to get the buildings ready for students.

“To say that we were trying to move students into an unsafe environment is absolutely incorrect,” Smith said in an interview Friday.

Smith said the State Construction Office, which oversaw construction of the five dorms, apparently disagreed with the Insurance Department over the safety of the buildings when it declared them ready for occupancy.

“I can’t imaging that the State Construction Office is going to sign off on something that’s unsafe,” Smith said.

But Insurance Department spokesman Barry Smith said the department raised concerns about the buildings in May and urged the State Construction Office to make fixes. In a letter to UNC Asheville dated Aug. 3, department officials said the stairwell and elevator shaft walls failed to meet building code specifications for fire safety and that the location of standpipes in the stairwells meant that fire hoses might partially block the exits in case of a fire.

“They were not blind-sided on anything,” Barry Smith said. “This has been going on for months. They knew that we did not feel that the dorms are safe.”

In addition to the students who had tried to move in to The Woods on Thursday, another 60 were scheduled to arrive Friday. The remaining 150 students are scheduled to move in over the weekend.

This is the first week on the job for Cable at UNC Asheville, a liberal arts school with about 3,900 undergraduate students.

This story was originally published August 17, 2018 at 9:12 PM.