LORMAN — Alcorn has secured College Board permission to tear down five dormitories on its main campus, erect a 1,200-bed residential complex and finance the work by borrowing as much as $47 million in bonds through a nonprofit affiliated with the school.

Under a proposal approved on June 18 by the trustees of Mississippi’s Institutions of Higher Learning, the state university — via its nonprofit construction affiliate, the Alcorn State University Educational Building Corporation — would sell the 30-year bonds to Memphis underwriter Duncan-Williams Inc., at a fixed interest rate currently projected to be 4.937 percent.

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood must also sign off on the deal, which remains under review, according to Jan Schaefer, Hood’s spokesman.

Gerald Peoples, Alcorn’s vice president for student affairs, said the school intends to advertise the project for bids immediately after receiving approval from Hood and hopes to begin work on the new residential complex “in September or October.”

Peoples said the complex will feature modern apartment-style dorms arranged in male and female clusters. 

The new facility will be located near the lake in the southwestern part of Alcorn’s campus, he said. 

In connection with the construction of the new residence hall, Alcorn plans to demolish one male residence hall, Demby Hall, and four female dormitories — Thompson Women’s Tower, Robinson Hall, Mabel Thomas Hall and Alice Tanner Hall.  Tanner Hall was built in 1956, Thomas in 1962, Robinson in 1965 and Demby and Thompson in 1972.

Those dorms “are just aging real bad,” Peoples said.  “We kept having to replace roofs, kept having to replace heating and ventilation systems.  There was a need to modernize and give our students access to the kind of facilities that our competitors have.”

The College Board’s approval of the bond issue confirmed a shift in arrangements for financing the work that officials said was prompted by the tightening of private credit markets since Alcorn first began planning the new residence facility.

The board in March 2008 authorized Alcorn to fund the project through the “private development delivery method,” under which a private development company would have obtained its own financing for the work.  The university would then have rented the facility from the developer, which would have used the money to retire its debt and turn a profit.

But worsening economic conditions left Alcorn better positioned to keep project costs down through the “traditional” process of issuing bonds via the nonprofit building corporation affiliated with the school, IHL spokeswoman Jennifer Rogers said.  For that reason, she said, the board in April approved the college’s request to switch financing methods and last month authorized the specific bond issue.

Rogers said the shift in financing methods would pass on “significant savings” to Alcorn students who live in the new residence complex, which is expected to carry a per-bed fee of $2,145 per semester.

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Contact Ben Bryant at bbryant@vicksburgpost.com