Everett Community College aiming for 2028 opening of new Baker Hall

Published 8:27 am Saturday, April 25, 2026

EVERETT — Everett Community College plans to break ground on an expanded Baker Hall beginning this fall, college staff said Friday.

The Baker Hall replacement will add a new cosmetology wing and an expanded theater to the Everett Community College, along with creating green spaces at its campus east of Broadway. It will replace an aging building built in 1962 that hasn’t been used by students in about two years.

Construction plans shared with The Daily Herald show a 32,000-square-foot complex with a brand new space for the college’s cosmetology students — a program that currently operates out of a leased location in Marysville. The new building will include a salon along with classrooms, meeting spaces and offices for the cosmetology department.

It will also add a 250-seat theater complete with dressing rooms, a shop for preparing sets, costume storage and additional classroom spaces. The college’s previous theater in Baker Hall had 100 seats.

Everett Community College currently doesn’t have a theater program, said Chris Carson, the associate vice president of campus operations at the college, but it is exploring starting it back up once the building is replaced at the new site.

Initial plans for the building were more ambitious, calling for a 42,000-square-foot facility with two floors and 16 classroom spaces. As design moved along, the project was scaled back, Carson said.

“What we found was that money doesn’t go as far as it used to,” he said in an interview Friday.

The college received about $38 million for the project from the state in the 2023-25 biennium.

The timeline for the Baker Hall replacement has also been pushed back. A state document showed that the construction of the new building was expected to begin in April or May of 2026, with the building opening to students around the fall of 2027, Carson said. Now, that opening date is expected in early 2028.

The Puget Sound Business Journal first reported on the scaling back of the Baker Hall replacement project and its recent delay.

Baker Hall, located on the far west side of Everett Community College’s campus, is in dire need of replacement, a 2022 report from the college read. A survey of building conditions found its classrooms were far too small, the building was “downright difficult” to navigate for students or educators with mobility issues, and it received “the worst possible condition scores” for its HVAC system, the report read. In 2024, the college stopped using it altogether, except as storage, Carson said.

The new building will be part of the community college’s expansion to east of Broadway, which includes its 65,000-square-foot learning center, complete with a library, art gallery and study spaces, that opened in 2023. The Baker Hall replacement will be built on top of a parking lot and the site of a former shopping center. A pedestrian bridge will eventually connect the two sections of campus across the busy arterial road.

The college hopes to make the new Baker Hall more accessible and sustainable than the previous location.

“The new building will service the campus in this day and age much more effectively than the old Baker did,” Carson said.

Demolition of Baker Hall is expected to begin this summer, Carson said. (The college may even work with the local fire department to use it for training purposes before it is destroyed, he added). Once it is removed, the college plans to convert the area into green space.

The new Baker Hall location could open to students as soon as winter quarter in early 2028, but it depends on the exact timing construction ends, Carson said. The college hopes to prevent impacts to students mid-term by waiting until classes have halted before moving the cosmetology classrooms into the new buildings, he said.

Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.