Patient tower, casino and more: What to know about 8 major Centre County projects in 2025
From major highway projects to new schools and a new hospital, a number of major projects in Centre County were started or completed last year, and 2025 shows no signs of slowing down.
While some multi-million projects are underway, others that have been long planned and highly anticipated remain in the works — some after controversies and delays. We’ve rounded up eight of Centre County’s biggest projects to share the latest updates and what to expect this year.
Beaver Stadium
Penn State’s Beaver Stadium, home to the Nittany Lions football team, will continue to see major renovations this year as part of the $700 million renovation project.
Pat Kraft, Penn State’s athletic director, previously said the project will prioritize modern standards in the design, including improving circulation to alleviate congestion, a concourse expansion, improved press box and enable year-round events. There will also be new restrooms, upgraded concession offerings and new premium seating. They’ll also create a 21,000 square-foot welcome center at Beaver Stadium.
Work on the stadium’s West side started after Penn State’s home College Football Playoff game against SMU in late December and will continue through the next two seasons. The demolition and rebuild of the West side will occur in phases. The first phase has already started and will continue in 2025, with hundreds coming out on Saturday to see the demolition of the press box. The second phase is expected to take place in 2026 and the final phase in 2027.
Because the West side will be demolished under the current plan, the athletic department plans to install temporary bleachers for the 2025 and 2026 seasons to maintain the stadium’s seating capacity. Work is expected to wrap up in 2027, before the start of the football season.
Improvements that have already been completed include the addition of new escalators at Gates A and E, upgrades to the Wi-Fi and cellular service, new video boards, restroom upgrades and winterization.
Bellefonte waterfront project
Another year came and went without seeing the proposed Bellefonte Waterfront Project take a significant step forward, but its developers and borough leadership remain confident construction will begin at some point.
Bellefonte Manager Ralph Stewart wrote in a November report the developers did not receive the state funding they applied for and have since been looking at other financial avenues.
Tom Songer, one of the project’s developers, told the Centre Daily Times their goal is to see the project begin in the spring thanks in part to a redesign of the site.
The project has been marketed as a “visionary development” along Spring Creek. Plans include a nationally-branded boutique hotel with 93 rooms, a farm-to-table restaurant, 48 condominium units, a rooftop lounge and a parking garage with about 300 spaces.
There would be 33,000 square feet of commercial space and Songer said developers have letters of intent to lease the commercial space in the parking garage.
But it has been beset by delays for years.
The borough was at one point optimistic the first phase of construction would begin in spring 2019. Then it was 2020, at least until the coronavirus pandemic unfolded. As time marched on, the developers were also hopeful it would begin in summer 2022 or spring 2024.
Now they are hoping to begin in 2025. If that comes to fruition, Songer said the goal is to have the hotel and parking garage completed by fall 2026 and the condos ready to be occupied by late 2026 or the early part of 2027.
“Material prices have stabilized, and interest rates have come down so that makes the project more financially feasible,” Songer wrote in an email to the CDT. “The cost of building the parking garage has been the biggest challenge but we believe the redesign and value engineering that we have done has reduced costs which will enable us to move forward.”
Nittany Mall casino
Plans for Centre County’s only casino first surfaced in September 2020 — and, nearly five years later, the Nittany Mall casino construction project is finally poised to break ground.
According to Eric Pearson, the CEO of SC Gaming, the company responsible for the casino, construction is still expected to start at the former Macy’s location no later than March 31. The casino is then expected to open in the first half of 2026.
The casino’s delay has been well-documented. After a legal and bureaucratic quagmire involving a competing bidder for the mini-casino license, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled over the summer that SC Gaming could move forward with it. Bally’s, a corporation that had agreed to jointly develop and manage the casino, then dropped out of the deal around September 2024 — but SC Gaming owner Ira Lubert said the project would still proceed as planned.
As of late December, that’s still the case, according to both Pearson and College Township officials.
The 24/7 nonsmoking mini-casino will have have up to 750 slot machines, 30 table games, a sports betting area, a restaurant and a bar. Officials previously told the CDT the host municipality receives 2% of gross revenue from slot machines and 1% of table games. (The same goes for the county.) And, according to a consultant, College Township would likely stand to receive about $1.6 million during the casino’s first year of operation.
Supporters hope it will stabilize the mall, revitalize the area and create hundreds of jobs. Opponents have raised concerns about gambling addictions and placing a potential strain on first responders.
Benner Township warehouse
While a possible fulfillment center warehouse could be coming to Benner Township in the coming years, it’s unknown if it will be built in 2025.
According to Sharon Royer, Benner Township’s secretary, the SunCap Property Group remains interested in developing a 125,000-square-foot fulfillment center warehouse on a 46-acre lot in the Benner Commerce Park.
When plans were first submitted in 2022, the warehouse was proposed to be over one million square feet on a 101-acre parcel in the park made by combining three separate lots. However, as plans were withdrawn and resubmitted, the size of the potential warehouse decreased drastically as part of a “reduced building footprint,” per Chris Schnure, Centre County’s subdivision and land development planner.
The warehouse’s development process has been shrouded in mystery and controversy so far, as SunCap has refused to share who the end user of the warehouse will be, citing nondisclosure agreements. Last March, Centre County Commissioner Mark Higgins speculated Amazon to be the end user.
Plans for the warehouse have been submitted three times, with the first plans submitted in April 2022 before being withdrawn later that month. Nearly identical plans were submitted again in August 2022, but were withdrawn last February. The third set of plans were submitted last March.
No timeline has been provided for the project.
New high-rises
It’s unlikely that any new State College high-rise buildings will be fully completed in 2025 but some site work may still be done in the next year.
Landmark Properties, an off-campus housing developer headquartered in Athens, Georgia, that owns five other student apartment complexes in State College, submitted plans for a 12-story building, The Mark, at the corner of East College Avenue and Sowers Street in 2022. The 155-foot building will be mixed use, as a multi-family residential apartment building with commercial and retail space. The Mark is planned for a site that currently includes the Keystone Building, the former McDonald’s and the Armenara Office Building.
The developer recently acquired the McDonald’s site at 444 E. College Ave., State College, which closed in November. Other businesses in the lot, including the longtime downtown State College staple Are U Hungry, closed as well. In a social media post, The Artemis Massage Studio, located on the fourth floor of the Armenara Office Building, said it is moving to a new location in February.
A lot consolidation plan is part of the final land development plan, according to plan documents. Commercial and retail space will be on the first and second floors, and the conceptual designs show McDonald’s on the first floor of The Mark.
Ed LeClear, director of planning and community development for the State College borough, previously said he anticipated the developers coming in for a final plan approval sometime in early 2025. In a phone interview in December, he said he expects some demolition on the three buildings in 2025 as well.
In January 2024, plans were submitted for a proposed mixed-use building with commercial space and a 72-unit condominium hotel at the former Biolife Plasma Services at 321 W. Beaver Avenue, State College. LeClear anticipates some site work for the condo hotel, Nittany Residence Club, will begin in 2025 as well.
Whitehall Road Regional Park
After suffering a slew of setbacks in 2024, the Whitehall Road Regional Park is expected to finally open this year after decades in the works.
Centre Region Parks and Rec director Kristy Owens told the Centre Daily Times in June that she hoped the park would open before fall. With the playground installed, the opening date had already been pushed back due to inclement weather causing landscaping problems.
At a September Centre Region Council of Governments General Forum meeting though, Owens revealed that the park would remain closed due to “mistakes that have been made through (parks and recreation’s) engineering service.”
COG’s executive director, Benjamin Etsell, said those mistakes related to the lack of proper stormwater documentation, more formally known as stormwater as-builts.
According to Etsell, the as-builts were supposed to be taken care of during the park’s construction phase, but weren’t due to an oversight from the contractor.
Etsell wrote in an email to the CDT last month that the stormwater as-built documents, reports and project photographs were sent to Ferguson Township for approval, with the township also providing COG and the CRPR with a memo of outstanding items for the park that were in need of updating.
The CRPR has since responded to the items on the memo with “a variety of updates.”
Now, according to Etsell, CRPR is waiting for the township to finish a review of the park, but he said any additional work needing to be done will be “minor, at this point.”
The multi-million dollar park also includes five fields and a gravel walking trail. Before the project broke ground, the regional park faced numerous delays with permitting, unexpected rock excavation and site utility work, and funding disputes.
While no opening date was provided for the park, updates can be found on the CRPR’s website.
State College Area Connector project
Three routes remain on the table for a major highway construction project through the U.S. Route 322 corridor in rural Centre County.
Engineering and environmental studies that will play a significant role in determining which proposed route is selected are ongoing. Centre County residents, as well as state and federal agencies, provided feedback earlier this year and Pennsylvania’s highway agency said it has since refined the proposed routes.
A state Department of Transportation spokesman said the revised routes are expected to be presented publicly by spring. The process, PennDOT said, requires a “great deal of coordination.”
Estimated costs in 2021 ranged from $432 million to $517 million. No matter which route is selected, the project would cut through hundreds of acres of family farmland.
Studies are on track to be completed by the middle of 2026. The final engineering design is expected to then take an additional 3 1/2 years. No properties have yet been identified for acquisition; that’s slated to begin in 2029. Construction would begin in 2030 and take about five years to complete.
“The property owners within the boundaries of the proposed alternatives have been living with the uncertainty of how this project is going to affect them for nearly five years, and we can’t thank them enough for being so exemplary in their patience with this process,” PennDOT wrote in a statement. “We want to assure all the stakeholders that PennDOT and (the Federal Highway Administration) are appreciative of that patience and striving arrive at a selected alternative, so they aren’t living with that uncertainty any longer than necessary.”
Mount Nittany patient tower
Mount Nittany Health’s massive $350 million patient tower — which will span 10 floors and 300,000 square feet — remains on schedule to open in two phases: The ground floor and first floor will debut around April 2026, with the rest of the tower opening a few months later.
Construction broke ground in August 2023 at the medical center, and it hasn’t taken much of a break since. Sometimes, during high wind days, workers will steer clear of the 250-foot-tall crane. But the winters (so far) have remained mild enough not to negatively impact the overall timetable.
When it’s finished, the patient tower will serve as the hospital’s main entrance. It will include 168 private rooms along with outpatient clinics, a modernized data center, enhanced dining/food prep, an outdoor space, a parking deck and a walkway. The hospital’s bed count will not increase — some rooms that are currently shared will also become singles — to better treat patients, and due to lessons learned from the pandemic.
Feedback from several hundred physicians and nurses was invited to fine-tune those patient rooms, with details such as power-outlet placement being tweaked from those suggestions. Officials have also designed the rooms in such a way that they’ll be able to accommodate technological upgrades decades into the future, and engineers have designed the acoustics so patients should notice how quieter the new rooms are.
Currently, as patients’ conditions change in the hospital, they might also have to move to different floors or areas for different treatment. But, when the new patient tower opens, that should no longer be the case.
“We’ve designed these rooms to be able to care for the patient through their journey so they won’t have to be relocated,” Bob Donahue, chief facilities officer, told the CDT on Dec. 31.
He added: “We are really excited about the opening of this building, and I’ve been a part of health care construction projects for almost 33 years — and I’ve done a lot of projects — and I can’t think of one that will have as much of an impact on our care in the community as this project. I can’t wait for this to open; people are going to be really impressed.”
This story was originally published January 6, 2025 at 6:08 AM.