FRCC looks to legislature for help

FORT COLLINS – Jim Butzek, Front Range Community College’s Larimer campus vice president, is feeling closed in upon.

The landlocked campus has only one small building site left, and cars back up as they negotiate exiting onto busy Shields Street on the campus’s west side.

“We’re cramped and we continue to grow every semester,” Butzek said.

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The Larimer campus, with just under 6,000 students at any given moment, is the campus with the largest population in the four-school FRCC system. “If we start approaching 6,000 or more, I don’t know where they’re going to park.”

FRCC also has locations in Boulder, Westminster and Brighton.

Butzek said the Larimer campus is already about 40,000 square feet short of its classroom and laboratory needs and will need about 90,000 square feet by 2010 if nothing happens to relieve the crunch.

Butzek said Front Range is already turning away students from classes because of lack of space to teach them. And that’s going to continue to get worse unless money can be found to build more facilities or lease space in satellite locations.

“We need to start looking in Loveland to take up some of the overflow up here,” he said, noting that FRCC officials have been talking to Loveland area landlords.

One potential landlord is McWhinney, developer of the Centerra mixed-use project in east Loveland. Centerra’s location at the nexus of Interstate 25 and U.S. Highway 34 would be ideal for picking up south Larimer and southwest Weld area students, he notes.

But Centerra’s location makes it a highly competitive area for others wanting the high visibility and easy access the project provides.

“Our funding is such that we don’t have much wiggle room,” Butzek said. “If I have to come up with a lot of money to rent space, I don’t have it. We’re trying to find someone to work with us on a reasonable rent or something long-term.”

Centerra open to education

Rocky Scott, Centerra president, said providing space for education is “part of the overall Centerra package that’s being created for a lifelong learning environment.

“Part of Centerra’s focus is to have a very high emphasis on learning,” he said. “We think as a master-planned community we should have learning as an embedded part of the Centerra living experience.”

One example of that is High Plains Environmental Center, where visitors and local residents can learn about the development’s 275 acres of wetlands, open space and trails, he said.

Scott said Centerra officials have been “talking to a number of higher education institutions to establish a presence at Centerra” and that bringing learning sites into Centerra could include Front Range.

Initially, Scott said learning opportunities would likely take place “in buildings designed for employment but that have learning experiences within them.” But a “learning campus” would “most likely” also be part of Centerra at full implementation, he added.

That’s the kind of thing Butzek likes to hear, because he said FRCC has its sights set on leasing a satellite location in the I-25/U.S. 34 area by the fall of 2008 to help better accommodate the 25 percent of its students who come from Loveland and points south.

But opening a satellite location is only part of the answer for FRCC. A bigger mission is to obtain state funding for a $15 million, 22,000-square-foot planned expansion of Challenger Point, FRCC’s science facility.

But adding a two-story wing to the building on the last small plot of developable space on the Fort Collins campus seems an almost insurmountable goal, given the state’s tight resources and huge demands upon them.

In the latest funding request cycle, FRCC’s $15 million request received a staff recommendation from the Colorado Commission on Higher Education but the project ultimately did not make the cut of those sent to the Governor’s office for further review.

Butzek will get one more chance to make FRCC’s case to the Legislature’s Capital Development Committee on Jan. 8 along with other community college officials.

New money source needed

With Colorado steadily falling farther behind other states in education funding, new sources of revenue are being discussed. One possible source is the growing amount of state severance taxes and royalties from drilling on state and federal lands, now raising more than $350 million annually and expected to climb dramatically over the next few years.

Rep. Randy Fischer, D-Fort Collins, said that pot of money is being eyed for a number of state improvements, including roads, K-12 education and higher education. Currently, severance taxes are distributed to the Department of Natural Resources and local governments. Federal mineral leasing revenue is allocated to the state’s Public School Fund, Colorado Water Conservation Board Construction Fund and to local governments.

Local city and county governments have become reliant on the funds and would be against any proposal to diminish their share, said Kevin Bommer, legislative and policy advocate for the Colorado Municipal League.

“The Municipal League opposes any reduction in severance tax and the federal mineral lease revenue to counties and municipalities,” Bommer said, adding that sentiment is shared by Colorado Counties Inc., which represents the state’s 64 county governments.

Fischer said he believes a compromise could be worked out. “The issue is to keep them whole but also to create a new funding stream for higher education,” he said.

Fischer said discussions and negotiations on the royalties have been going on for the last several months to craft something for the Legislature to consider when it reconvenes on Jan. 8. But it won’t be an easy fight, he admits.

“I’m only partially optimistic that we’ll be seeing something along those lines,” he said. “The local governments are probably the most against it, and they carry a lot of weight with the Legislature.”

But Fischer said the issue needs to be aired because the state’s education system will continue to fall behind if more funding cannot be found.

And the idea is finding some strong supporters like David Skaggs, a former legislator who is now the director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education. Skaggs said the notion of using gas, oil and other royalties to help fund higher education is generally endorsed by many.

“There’s broad agreement in concept,” he said. “It’s getting agreement on the details that’s a death-defying act.”

Skaggs said with the state’s education system already hurting, waiting much longer to do something bold to help it get better makes no financial sense.

“The longer we put off taking care of the buildings we have, the more expensive it’s going to be,” he said. “And the longer we put off building new facilities, the more expensive it’s going to be. It could end up saving us millions of dollars by not nibbling away at it year by year with existing revenue sources.”