Students studying at the University of Hawaii at Manoa over the next decade could be attending their classes at the nearby YMCA and other venues as aging buildings on the 101-year-old campus undergo major renovations and the university tries to rein in a repair backlog nearing a half-billion dollars.

Students and staff already complain of the noise and inconvenience caused by the $50 million in annual repair and maintenance the Manoa campus handles now. One Manoa official recently described the campus as a "war zone," with ongoing renovations and repairs happening alongside new construction projects.

Construction would increase threefold under a plan to fast-track about $430 million worth of deferred maintenance projects.

With more than 80 percent of the buildings on campus — or 209 buildings — needing everything from electrical and plumbing upgrades to new elevators, UH officials are preparing for the logistics of such a massive undertaking.

That includes figuring out where to put displaced instructors and students in the meantime.

UH expects to complete in six months a plan that lays out how to best stage the needed projects in a way that contains costs and minimizes impacts on campus activities.

"We’re looking at the protocol to addressing the deferred maintenance with modernization of the buildings to be able to bring the campus into the 21st century and support the missions of this campus," Stephen Meder, Manoa’s assistant vice chancellor for physical, environmental and long-range planning, told a Board of Regents committee this week.

Meder said everyone needs to be willing to make temporary sacrifices.

"I really think this is a turning point. We are on the threshold of change," Meder said.

He said that less than 1 percent of Manoa’s 6 million square feet of occupied space is available for so-called "swing space," or temporary areas that can be used as offices and classrooms during renovations.

The YMCA, Japanese Cultural Center, East-West Center and Gold Bond Building in Kakaako were cited as possible sites for "refugee" professors and students at Wednesday’s meeting of the regents’ Planning and Facilities Committee.

Some operations, such as climate-controlled science labs that operate 24 hours, couldn’t be relocated as easily.

UH-Manoa Chancellor Tom Apple said the campus is also looking at the possibility of offering more evening and online classes to help ease the expected space crunch during construction.

Apple has said some of the older, run-down buildings on campus act as a deterrent to potential students at a time when Manoa seeks to boost enrollment.

The ambitious plan to wipe out the university’s long-standing backlog — which Regent Benjamin Kudo repeatedly referred to as the "ugly ducking" of UH — is contingent on funding being approved in the upcoming legislative session.

The university’s budget request to the governor and lawmakers seeks authority to issue $487 million in revenue bonds to tackle systemwide deferred maintenance over a period of six years, beginning in July. UH proposes repaying the bond debt with tuition over the next 30 years.

Under UH’s six-year revenue bond plan, the university would float about $200 million in bonds in the first year, with about $120 million going to Manoa, where the bulk of the work is needed.

Gov. Neil Abercrombie included $198 million in revenue bonds for UH’s proposal as part of his executive budget for next fiscal year.

But at a budget briefing last month, state Rep. Isaac Choy and state Sen. Brian Taniguchi, chairmen of the House and Senate higher education committees, said while they want to address the backlog, they don’t want current and future students to foot the bill.

They said they would not support the proposal and instead plan to ask their colleagues to consider eliminating the backlog using money from the state’s general fund or state-backed bond financing (general obligation bonds), instead of tuition revenue.

Meanwhile, the Board of Regents late last year unanimously approved a moratorium on new building projects across the UH system for three years to help redirect resources toward the maintenance backlog.

The construction freeze includes several exemption criteria that regents want to apply to 13 projects in the works statewide.

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Star-Advertiser reporter Ferd Lewis contributed to this report.