Tuesday, June 29, 2004 | 11 a.m.
University regents grudgingly passed a construction priority list Monday to send to the 2005 Legislature that included a controversial $9 million request for a Nevada State College liberal arts building.
Regents praised the state college in Henderson for meeting the needs of the state's explosive growth, but they had nothing but criticism for the Henderson politicians and businessmen who regents said reneged on their promise to raise the money for the first building privately.
Several regents said the only reason they approved starting the state college and building it in Henderson was because local residents had promised to donate as much as $50 million in private money.
The state Legislature similarly set aside $13 million for the college's first building with the condition that $10 million be raised privately. Only $1 million is in the bank, and none of that money came from the people who made promises, Regent Steve Sisolak said.
Regent Jack Lund Schofield singled out Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson, Assemblyman Richard Perkins, D-Henderson, and the Henderson Chamber of Commerce as being guilty of breaking that promise.
"We need to go back to these people who made these commitments and hold their feet to the fire," Schofield said.
Regents Steve Sisolak, Tom Kirkpatrick and Mark Alden joined in on Schofield's chorus, and Interim Chancellor Jim Rogers agreed that pressure needed to be placed on those Henderson residents to fulfill their promises.
"The grumbling is legitimate and I have no problem with it," Rogers said after the meeting, noting that he will require private entities to sign binding contracts promising money before the Board of Regents agrees to match funds again.
"We will hold those people accountable," Rogers said.
Perkins said he has been accountable and that he met his responsibility of getting the state Legislature to approve the college's development and its original state budget allocation.
"I don't think it was ever my responsibility to raise private money," Perkins said, adding that he had only told regents that there was a lot of excitement in the Henderson community, including among potential donors, for a state college.
Perkins said he still thinks there is a possibility to raise at least part of the money privately, but that donors have been scared off by fear that the college did not have the support of the Board of Regents and state lawmakers.
Perkins said that naysayers "left some doubt in those contributors' minds that the state college would even survive to become what it is today, so with that doubt they were reluctant to contribute to the project."
No one from the Henderson Chamber of Commerce was available to comment and Gibson was not immediately reachable this morning.
Despite his call for accountability, Rogers stressed the need for Nevada lawmakers to allocate the remaining money to get the first building up because of the college's importance to the overall health of the state's higher education system.
If Nevada's two universities are going to become true research universities, then they need to be able to become more selective and cap enrollment growth, Rogers said. That can only happen with a state college to absorb the students no longer able to attend the flagship research schools. The state needs an institution to provide bachelor's degrees at a lower cost to the state, he added.
The $9 million in that way supports the entire University and Community College System of Nevada, Rogers said.
"The money is better spent supporting Nevada State College, even though you and I and all of us have trouble gagging down what was done to us," Rogers told the regents.
Only about 10 projects on the trimmed-down, 16-item list will receive funding from the state, and Kirkpatrick and several others expressed concern that some much-needed facilities and repairs had been bumped down the list.
In addition to the Nevada State College building, other controversial placements on the list included the Community College of Southern Nevada automotive technology center, the CCSN learning center and classroom building, planning money for the Academic Medical Center, the University of Nevada, Reno science and math building, the CCSN Pahrump education complex and the system-wide health safety and code repairs.
Most of those projects are so far down the priority list that they probably won't receive funding, Rogers said.
Next to the debate on the state college, the buildings for the community college were the most debated in the brief regents' meeting. Kirkpatrick and Regent Doug Hill said that the $30 million classroom building, while not feasible to fund in the 2005 legislative session, deserved to be higher than the automotive technology building.
"I know that the real need at CCSN is another classroom," Kirkpatrick said.
The automotive technology center, however, was placed higher on the list because its $18 million could be easily broken into phases and is being matched by private money, Rogers said.
Several other regents also praised the automotive program for training students who move immediately into the workforce.
Kirkpatrick and other regents also expressed concern that the $20 million fixes for health, safety and code violations were now No. 13 on the list, meaning they probably would not be funded.
"I don't know how we cannot continue to support those items that we may need for the health and safety of the students," Kirkpatrick said.
Rogers prepared the list after several weeks of discussion with institutional presidents and the state Public Works Board, which bumped up the cost on several buildings due to rising steel costs. Rogers said the system would have had another $25 million to work with if steel costs had not jumped so high.
Almost all of the items on the list are either enrollment driven or driven by matching private funds, such as the $40 million Greenspun College of Urban Affairs. The Greenspun family, which owns the Las Vegas Sun, has donated $16 million for the Urban Affairs building and has committed an additional $9 million to fund programs at the college, Rogers said.
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