CSU to break ground Thursday on expanded veterinary school

FORT COLLINS — A groundbreaking ceremony for Colorado State University’s new $230 million Veterinary Health and Education Complex will be held Thursday on the Fort Collins campus.
CSU hopes the project will position it as a leader in veterinary-medicine education, research and animal care for the next several decades.

The ceremony will be held from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at the building’s future site at 2450 Gillette Drive. Signs at Lot 725 will direct attendees to the site. Speakers will include Gov. Jared Polis, who on Wednesday signed House Bill 24-1231 into law to appropriate $50 million to help the new facility incorporate more modern equipment and updated teaching methods.

Other scheduled speakers who will deliver brief prepared remarks are first gentleman Marlon Reis, CSU president Amy Parsons, veterinary student Eddie Valdez and Sue VandeWoude, dean of CSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

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CSU retained Omaha, Nebraska-based Tetrad Real Estate as the project’s master developer. The company has been a building partner on such CSU projects as the C. Wayne McIlwraith Translational Medicine Institute and the Center for Vector-Borne Infectious Disease, and also has coordinated projects on the University of Nebraska’s flagship campus in Lincoln, as well as its medical center in Omaha.

Slated for completion in fall 2026, the CSU project will include a new primary-care center, a teaching hospital for routine and urgent care. It also will have reimagined classrooms with interactive workstations and a $13 million Livestock Veterinary Hospital, adjoining the existing, 46-year-old Johnson Family Equine Hospital. The livestock hospital, planned to open early next year, will be equipped with medical, surgical and ambulatory facilities built to meet current and future demands for the care of large animals.

The existing James L. Voss Veterinary Teaching Hospital was constructed in 1978. 

The new complex, approved by the land-grant university’s Board of Governors in October 2022, will nearly double the size of the teaching hospital and allow CSU to admit 30 new students to its veterinary medicine program each year, growing the first incoming class after the complex’s opening from 138 to 168 students. CSU wants to grow the full program by around 20%, from 600 to 720 students. This will also open space for more than 275 undergraduate biomedical sciences and other students on CSU’s main campus.

When the facility opens, it will allow students across all four years of the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine program to be located on the same part of campus for the first time. Currently, first- and second-year students take classes on CSU’s main campus and then transition to the veterinary facilities along West Drake Road during their third and fourth years.

“We want to continue our tradition as a cutting-edge academic veterinary medical center that pushes boundaries in education and medicine,” VandeWoude said in a prepared statement. “This project gives us the opportunity to better educate and support our students and meet societal needs into the foreseeable future. We’re really going to be setting up our graduates for success — with their practices, with their well-being; it’s exciting for our campus and for our profession.”

More than half of HB 24-1231’s $247 million appropriation will help the University of Northern Colorado construct a building for a new College of Osteopathic Medicine in its Greeley campus, while the rest will go toward the CSU veterinary school and two other projects. The bipartisan bill, sponsored by Reps. Mary Young, D-Greeley, and Lindsey Daugherty, D-Arvada, and Sens. Barbara Kirkmeyer, R-Brighton, and Kyle Mullica, D-Thornton, also will fund construction of a Health Institute Tower at Metropolitan State University in Denver and renovation of the Valley Campus main building at Trinidad State College.

Sent to Polis’ desk last Friday, the bill had advanced through the House Health and Human Services Committee on a 12-1 vote, with only Rep. Ron Weinberg, R-Loveland, dissenting. The full House approved it 52-7, with Weinberg among the seven Republicans voting in opposition. It sailed through the Senate Finance Committee on a 6-1 vote and the full Senate with approval on a 33-1 tally, with only Sen. Kevin Van Winkle, R-Highlands Ranch, opposing it in both votes.