BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) – A $53 million housing complex under construction at the University of Vermont is running $7.5 million over budget.

The project’s financial situation worries UVM trustees who on Friday approved the additional spending and tentatively agreed to $36 million in additional projects associated with the university’s 10-year capital plan.

UVM broke ground on the 800-bed Student Residential Learning Complex during the summer. Half of it was scheduled for completion in September, but increases in the cost of construction materials have delayed its opening until January 2006 and jacked up the project costs to $60.6 million.

UVM administrators on Friday broke the news to UVM trustees.

“I think the administration did everything it could in regards to the residential learning complex, but I would request in the future that this committee be told in a more timely fashion when there are problems,” trustee Robert Young said. “Unless I’ve been entirely asleep, I don’t think we were informed until six, seven or eight months later.”

Administrators said they began to run into trouble last summer. They did what they could to counter the “tremendous surge” in costs, particularly those associated with mechanical and electrical systems, but re-bidding components of the project and cutting costs weren’t enough.

It was either increase the budget or change the scope of the project, and the latter idea was not an option, said Michael Gower, UVM’s vice president for finance and administration.

“We’ve designed the project down to its absolute base of quality we’ll accept for a long-lasting building,” Gower said.

Robert Vaughan, UVM’s director of planning and management, said quality has not been compromised in the planning or construction of the project.

Young asked what administrators have learned from the experience. “We need assurance that we have our arms around the whole construction process and the supervision around that,” he said.

From now on, Gower said, project managers will be assigned to all the university’s major capital projects. He added that financial contract managers will be hired to keep track of budgets and bills. Construction audits will be conducted for each project, he said.