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Utah Valley University is one step closer to becoming the first player to buy into a massive Geneva Steel redevelopment project that promises to transform the small town of Vineyard into a mixed-use haven on the shores of Utah Lake.
Utah Regents on Friday approved UVU's proposed acquisition of 100 acres of cleaned-up Geneva land, just two miles to the north beside the site of a future FrontRunner stop, where university officials hope to build intramural fields and other student-life facilities to relieve space constraints on the 228-acre main campus.
"We are growing like gangbusters. We are doing creative things with hybrid online instruction that is doubling our bricks-and-mortar capacity," UVU President Matthew Holland told the regents at their meeting in Cedar City.
UVU has gained 6,000 students over the past three years, creating a dire shortage of classroom space, parking and places for students to study and recreate. Wait lists for required classes, tough schedules and eight years to graduation are now common for students.
Inflamed by a weak job market, enrollment growth is a statewide phenomenon and Utah's big open-admission schools — UVU, Weber State University, Dixie State College and Salt Lake Community College — are absorbing most of it. With 160,000 now enrolled at Utah's public schools, the boom has reached a point where campuses are turning away students, presidents told the regents.
"We could have added 300 or 400 [more] students this fall but we don't have the classes or instructors to do that," Dixie President Stephen Nadauld said.
At Snow College, a small but growing community college in Ephraim, space is so tight that students study in a room where cadavers are stored.
"For a school with a terrific reputation for pre-med and pre-engineering, this is embarrassing," Snow President Scott Wyatt said.
But no campus needs space as badly as UVU, whose enrollment is projected to exceed 40,000 by 2020. So when developer Gerald Anderson approached the school with a deal to sell 100 acres of Geneva land, officials grabbed it. Under Anderson's proposal, UVU would pay $5 million, while Vineyard would kick in a matching sum for the parcel that Anderson claims is worth $20 million. UVU officials plan to seek an independent appraisal.
The university will cover its share with a $3 million loan from the UVU Foundation — a nonprofit supporting university fundraising — and another $2 million from institutional funds. The loan is to be paid back over 20 years at 6 percent interest.
On paper, the deal looks like a winner for UVU, but its success will likely rise or fall on the fortunes of the much larger Geneva urban-renewal project, which calls for 7,600 housing units and 1.1 million square feet of commercial space.
The southern half of the Geneva site has been cleaned up, but the northern portion remains contaminated by 60 years of industrial activity. Estimates for cleaning it range from $100 million to $300 million, a cost that would be covered by property tax revenues coming from the industrial site's reclamation and development. This arrangement, known as "tax-increment financing," must be approved by the Alpine School District and other taxing entities with much at stake.
UVU's 100-acre slice would provide a safety valve for the commuter campus, which has almost no room left for facilities supporting the nonacademic functions that most agree are key to student persistence and success.
Ground was recently broken on a 60,000-square-foot addition to UVU's science building and officials hope to consolidate surface parking into six structures. UVU's revised master plan, also approved Friday, envisions a new performing arts building, an athletic fieldhouse and a 160,000-square-foot student life and wellness center.
In other business, the regents swore in student Regent David Smith, a 2009 UVU a graduate and currently a master's student in the University of Utah business school studying econometrics. He is the third regent appointed since 2009 with UVU ties, joining trustee Daniel Campbell and benefactor Brent Brown on the 17-member body that sets higher education policy and oversees Utah's eight-institution system.