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As the University of Hawaii begins tackling its $487 million repair and maintenance backlog, officials are bracing themselves for the surge in construction work at UH Manoa and what that means for students and faculty who will have to contend with significantly less classroom and office space on a campus that’s already bursting at the seams.

The university’s notorious facilities backlog goes back four decades and was described by UH Regent Benjamin Kudo on Wednesday as the UH’s “ugly duckling.” Clearing the backlog is a top priority both within the UH and among some state lawmakers, who last month gave cautious approval to an ambitious and somewhat unconventional 10-year plan to chip away at it through revenue bonds financed by tuition dollars.

For that solution to go according to plan the Legislature needs to grant the university the $54 million in operational money it’s requesting in its supplemental budget proposal to offset the cost of expenses like salaries and collective bargaining. University officials have already started work on their end, reorganizing administrative offices and updating protocol for planning and implementing facilities projects — an overhaul they promise to complete by late March.

The bulk of the backlog — $407 million — is concentrated at the university’s 100-year-old flagship Manoa campus, which encompasses some 8 million square feet. To eliminate that backlog — while simultaneously modernizing the campus — UH Manoa will have to undergo as much as three times the amount of construction seen on campus today, according to Stephen Meder, an administrator who helped put together the backlog plan and is overseeing its implementation at UH Manoa. That could mean three times the amount of construction noise, barricades, ad-hoc walkways and closed-off spaces for the next 10 years.

As Meder put it to Civil Beat, “buildings don’t get erected by just planting seeds and gently watering them.”

At a meeting with university regents on Wednesday, Meder warned that the campus will be hard-pressed to cope with the construction.

Some regents, including former Hawaii Department of Education school facilities superintendent , expressed concern over how the constant and large-scale construction will affect campus life and academics and how officials plan on minimizing the inconveniences. Enrollment at UH Manoa currently stands at more than 20,400 students and is expected to grow, and the campus has about roughly 4,500 state employees on its payroll.

“We have to stay operational,” Meder said after the meeting, emphasizing the importance of keeping those on campus safe during construction. “We have research that’s going on 24/7. This (UH Manoa) is a small city with a core mission of educating students … This cannot be interrupted.”

“I don’t want it looking like Tiananmen Square.”

According to Meder, the Manoa campus has just 26,000 square feet of what’s known as “swing space” — interim space that’s occupied during construction or renovation.

That’s less than 1 percent of the campus’s total square footage, which includes 6 million square feet of occupied space. That’s also far less than the industry standard for “swing space,” which according to Meder runs between 4 percent and 7 percent of a given area. And that’s before specific needs are taken into account; for example, it’s easier to find an alternative for an office than it is a laboratory.

Absent physical space, officials said they’ll need to get creative as they finalize their repair and maintenance plans.

UH Manoa Chancellor Tom Apple said the campus will likely shift its course scheduling to accommodate the construction, suggesting that the school will likely increase the number of classes offered in the evenings.

Meder stressed that everyone on campus will have to make sacrifices and support the temporary inconveniences with the understanding that they are a means to an end.

“We’ve got to get people to understand that we’re all pieces of the same puzzle,” he told Civil Beat amid a discussion about the financial and practical burdens of construction projects, such as UH Manoa’s overdue student recreation center. “We’ve got to think like a family.”

That means professors might have to double up in offices, teach classes in buildings that don’t belong to their departments and temporarily co-opt conference rooms, for example.

“Hopefully they’ll know that even though they’re sitting next to more filing cabinets for a year and a half of construction … they’ll be coming back to something much improved from what they’ve had before,” Meder said.

But Meder acknowledged limits to any solution: “We’ll always have refugees.”