ORONO – A shortage of subcontractors and design changes have put the $12.5 million expansion and renovation of the Memorial Union at the University of Maine six months behind schedule.

Originally scheduled to be opened in phases starting next month with food service, the project probably won’t be finished until August, UM officials said Monday. Plans to expand and refurbish the 1953 building have moved forward in fits and starts for the past five years.

Robert Duringer, vice president for finance and administration, said that when the original bids on the project were opened in January 1999, they were $2 million to $4 million more than UM had budgeted for the project.

“All the construction estimates showed that it should have come in on budget, but the market was not hooked into our estimates,” he said Monday. “Given where the market was, we had to put more money into the project. Our original budget was $10.5 million.”

The Maine Campus, UM’s student-run newspaper, reported Monday that a shortage of subcontractors caused a delay in general contractor D.L. Poulin’s schedule. Scott Tompkins, spokesman for Associated Contractors, said last May that subcontractors throughout the state were competing in a tight job market for employees.

The start of construction of the Memorial Union addition was delayed another eight or nine months when the university hired a consultant to design a food court similar to those in malls and airports, according to Duringer. The original plan called for a marketplace dining facility, but the university explored the idea of a food court only to find it would push the project over budget by more than $500,000. The food court concept was scrapped and architects reverted to the marketplace design.

“The big difference between the food court and the marketplace,” explained Duringer, “is that the marketplace has a common checkout point. With the food court, diners pay at each individual restaurant. The food court requires each unit to have its own plumbing and cooking setup. That kind of replication becomes more expensive.”

Even though the building won’t be finished until the fall semester, students already have started paying for the expansion. Four-fifths of the funding for the project is being raised by student fees assessed at $3.50 a credit hour.

The university began charging students half that amount this semester on the theory that the union would open midsemester, according to UM spokesman Joe Carr. Students approved this funding method in a referendum during the 1996-97 school year.

MBNA, the credit card company based in Camden, donated $2 million to the project. Additional funding came from alumni, one of whom, Russell Bodwell, was a member of the planning committee for the original union. When it opened in 1953, 4,000 students attended UM. More than 9,900 were enrolled last fall and they expect very different services from what their grandparents had, according to Duringer.

“Students expect and demand different options than they did in 1950,” he said Monday. “They expect a more varied food operation. We can’t feed everybody off of a steam table any more. We will have a career center in the union, bigger and more flexible space for student government, better gathering spaces with couches and chairs. The expansion will make us more responsive to the needs of students in the next century and more competitive with other colleges and universities.”

Other construction in various phases on campus includes a new $8.5 million dormitory designed on the suite model, a $21 million revamp of the chemistry department’s Aubert Hall, an $18 million building for engineering, and an $11.4 million expansion at Hitchner Hall for the biology and food service departments.