Saturday, June 10, 2006 | 7:17 a.m.
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You may not recognize Southern Nevada's next big community college campus.
It will have as much community as it has college.
Depending on the final design, there may be classrooms upstairs from boutiques, lecture halls in a hotel, science labs above a bookstore and student meeting rooms inside a public library. Outside, coeds may study for finals at a grassy park where neighborhood children frolic.
The campus would elevate the concept of town-and-gown to its purest form because they would be interwoven as one, experts around the country say.
And the campus might not cost taxpayers a penny because it would be financed with the help of private developers building retail stores, restaurants, convention facilities and professional and medical offices on the hybrid campus.
University system regents are sufficiently intrigued by the idea that on Friday they gave Community College of Southern Nevada President Richard Carpenter their blessing to pursue just that sort of campus in the northwest valley.
The proposed 60-acre campus would be built on Bureau of Land Management land leased by Las Vegas, which is offering its use to CCSN.
The campus, Carpenter said, would reflect a dramatic advance in the evolution of a community college campus in terms of aesthetics, land use and financing.
It would, in other words, bear little resemblance to CCSN's utilitarian main campus on Charleston Boulevard.
"It's a radically different college campus concept," Carpenter said.
The campus would appear as Las Vegas' newest town center, with high-rise buildings along city streets. Pedestrians might be college students - or nearby residents dropping by for a cappuccino while on their way to a doctor's appointment.
The vision of combining commercial and academic ventures to create a new breed of campus is not Carpenter's alone.
Nevada State College at Henderson President Fred Maryanski is eyeing private-public partnerships to develop 550 acres in the outskirts of Henderson, and outgoing UNLV President Carol Harter is leaving her successor with four building projects in the works and a plan to redevelop an area of Maryland Parkway across from the main campus to promote the town-and-gown marriage.
All three presidents consider private-public partnerships - and the financing schemes that they can generate - as the magic elixir in financing new campuses.
It also allows them to help other public interests. Both Nevada State College and UNLV are looking at providing affordable housing for professors and Clark County School District teachers as part of their campuses, and Nevada State College is also studying setting aside land for an elementary school its students could train at. A public library could be part of the CCSN campus.
Officials are considering three funding strategies to pay for the new CCSN campus.
In one scenario, CCSN would offer land to a developer who would build, for instance, a $15 million, 50,000-square-foot building. In exchange for that land, the developer would offer CCSN the use of 6,000 square feet of space - and commercially lease the balance of the building to cover the cost of construction.
In another scenario, CCSN would provide the land and a developer would pay $3 million toward that initial $15 million building. The two entities would split the costs of financing the remaining $12 million, and repay that loan with revenue from building leases. CCSN would end up with 12,000 to 14,000 square feet of academic space.
Under the third scenario, CCSN would borrow the $15 million and repay the loan with building-lease revenue. Under that formula, CCSN would have greater control over the commercial space.
Hybrid campuses reflect the growing trend in new communities to create mixed-use developments, such as the District at Green Valley Ranch. And they would bring even closer the connection of college campuses and abutting commercial neighborhoods that are evident at universities around the country, such as UCLA and neighboring Westwood.
UNLV is working with the Nevada System of Higher Education to gain 2,000 acres from the BLM in North Las Vegas for a new campus and to develop its Shadow Lane campus as part of the statewide efforts to create an academic health science center in Las Vegas.
The university is also seeking partners to develop 115 acres in southwest Las Vegas for the Harry Reid Research and Technology Park and to develop a hospitality campus for the Harrah College of Hotel Administration at the Maryland Parkway campus.
Such partnerships are gaining in popularity across the country because of dwindling state funding, said Benjamin Quillian, senior vice president of business and operations for the American Council on Education.
Already, colleges join with private companies to build residence halls and athletic facilities.
"It's not unusual in higher education, but I don't know of anyone building a whole campus," Quillian said.
CCSN hopes to attract high-end retailers and other companies to the campus because of the attractive demographics of the region, state officials say.
Because of the high value of the land - $1 million an acre - the community college district should be able to command top dollar for leases, enabling it to pay for its academic buildings.
Located immediately west of U.S. 95 and Durango Road in the northwest corner of the valley, the site hugs the highway's on-ramp and is intersected by Durango.
Adjacent on the west is a new shopping center still searching for tenants, and a hospital is being built nearby. All around, thousands of new homes and condominiums have sprung up.
Carpenter calls this the new frontier, a burgeoning region hungry for its own college campus. About 132,000 people reside within three miles of the site, and the number is expected to increase to 242,000 by 2010.
About 3,000 students from the area already attend CCSN, so it is hard not to acknowledge the need there, Carpenter said. The Charleston and Cheyenne campuses are almost landlocked, and the college has a space deficit of 456,000 square feet to meet the needs of its current 35,000 students, according to a recent systemwide study. That's the size of the Charleston campus.
Developers and retailers are champing at the bit to get a piece of the pie, Carpenter said. He is talking with multiple hotel chains interested in positioning themselves near the hospital, as well as multiple bookstores, coffee vendors and other retailers.
Carpenter declined to identify companies but said he is confident he has enough interest to prelease most of the space and begin construction by April.
Regents on Friday praised the innovation inherent in the project but worried about the details, in particular the strict timeline and restrictions on the land by the BLM that could limit Carpenter's private partnerships. Carpenter is expected to come back before the regents when he irons out those specifics.
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