On Thursday, officials at OTECH broke ground on the Wasatch Peaks Pathway Building.

OTECH President James Taggart acknowledged ahead of the day’s groundbreaking that dirt work has been well underway for some time.

“For those of you that entered the campus off of Washington Boulevard or have driven by in the last couple of weeks, you will notice that the ground has been broken,” he said. “When we say this is the groundbreaking, it’s been done — a lot of ground has been moved.”

But he said that work hasn’t begun a moment too soon.

Rob Nielsen, Standard-Examiner

“This building is an incredible need,” he said. “We have students waiting to use this building and we didn’t want to wait.”

Taggart said the name and its placement at the entrance to the campus are both very deliberate.

“For four decades, this beautiful campus has been hidden from the main thoroughfare along Washington,” he said. “This new building is being intentionally placed out front to let our community know that Ogden-Weber Technical College is their pathway to a better career and a better future. It is a pathway whether you are a high school student, or you’re an adult who needs a career change, or you’re an adult who needs to learn new skills to advance in their current career. This is your pathway.”

Maria Milligan, associate vice president for college advancement at OTECH, told the Standard-Examiner that the $84 million, 106,000-square-foot development will provide a huge boost to student capacity at OTECH.

“The biggest thing this building is going to do is give us the opportunity to serve 2,000 more students per year, which we desperately need,” she said. “We’ve grown a lot in recent years and we’re just out of space to keep growing. This new building will give us that chance.”

Rob Nielsen, Standard-Examiner

She said several programs and student services will be making their way into the new building.

“We are moving our business, IT, cybersecurity, real estate, web graphic and digital design and our apprenticeship classrooms — that’s going to be our electrical apprentices and plumbing apprentices,” she said. “The biggest thing this is going to do is expand the space for our apprentices. The other programs are in a building that’s over 70 years old and has serious deferred maintenance problems. We’re going to be able to reconfigure the rest of campus to better serve, not just the programs that are moving into this building, but all of them will be able to expand and move.”

The school’s culinary arts program will also be moving into the Wasatch Peaks Pathway Building along with student services offices that are currently spread over multiple campus buildings. The building is expected to be completed in late-2027 or early-2028.

Taggart told the Standard-Examiner that this is a very necessary addition to the campus, even if it took some time to get there.

“This has actually been something we’ve been working on for the past five-, six-plus years,” he said. “We knew that the college was continuing to grow. We’ve almost doubled our enrollment in the last five years, but we were already starting to have really big stressors on some of our buildings. We don’t like having waitlists. If individuals want to access technical education, we don’t want lack of space to be the barrier.”

Image supplied, Ogden-Weber Technical College

Milligan said it’s a great feeling to be moving forward with the project.

“It’s really exciting to see so much progress,” she said. “It feels like this has been in the works for a lot of years between planning, seeking funding, designing the building and figuring out what our biggest need was. Now we’re finally in a place where it’s different every day, and that’s really exciting.”