Southwestern Michigan College’s mission to improve the quality of healthcare education in the region has taken its next major step forward.

The community college’s board of trustees approved a contractor for its planned renovation and expansion of its Nursing and Health Education Building Friday, during a special meeting on the Dowagiac campus. The board awarded a contract for construction work to Grand Rapid’s Rockford Construction Co., in the amount of $7,042,435.

Rockford submitted the lowest estimate of the seven companies that submitted bids to the college, which the board unsealed in June, said SMC President David Mathews.

With a contractor now in place, construction on the $9.6-million expansion to the nursing building, located south of the David C. Briegel Building on the Dowagiac campus, is expected to begin in the coming weeks, Mathews said.

“We are really, really excited to get this project underway,” Mathews said. “We have been planning for this project for so long.”

The expansion will more than double the footprint of the existing facility, which was constructed in 1970. In addition to building additional classrooms, the new building will include four state-of-the-art nursing simulation labs and two eight-bed skills labs, and will allow the college to nearly the double the number of applicants it may allow into its nursing program every semester.

While the board originally planned to select a  contractor in July, leaders made several minor modifications to the project scope in order to keep it under budget, Mathews said. These tweaks included replacing several planned glass fixtures with bricks, lowering the roofline in certain parts of the building, etc. However, the number of labs and instruction areas will remain the same, Mathews said.

The college has also pushed back its timetable for opening the building for instruction. While leaders hoped to begin teaching inside the facility by fall 2018, they now are aiming to open for winter 2019.

“It is our ‘Plan B,’ not our ‘Plan A,’ but the important thing is to get the best building built as we can, under budget,” Mathews said. “We are not disappointed.”

The college will contract out bidders for the new technology and furnishings for the facility at a later date, Mathews said.

The project will be funded through a combination of state dollars, allocated money from the college’s budget and money raised through contributions from regional businesses and private donors. So far, several major donors, including Borgess and Lakeland hospitals, have provided dollars for the project.

“For them [Borgess and Lakeland] to come forward and donate just shows us that everyone is excited about this project,” Mathews said. “They could be pouring money into their own projects but they chose to help us. They recognize the need for a skilled workforce that we can provide with our new facility.”

The college will host a ceremony celebrating the construction from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 6, at the Charles O. Zollar Building on the Dowagiac campus. The ceremony will be free and open to the public, and will include remarks by former nursing students, college leaders and Michigan Budget Director Al Pscholka, who was instrumental in securing funding for the project, Mathews said.