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UTSA is getting very close to a foorball team.
UTSA about to get room to grow
Web Posted: 11/16/2006 11:46 PM CST
Melissa Ludwig
Express-News Staff Writer
The University of Texas at San Antonio is poised to expand farther west after University of Texas System regents voted Thursday to allow the purchase of a 125-acre parcel of land near the Loop 1604 campus.
And, in a rare move, regents agreed to kick in three-quarters of the estimated $20 million cost because UTSA's rapid growth hasn't allowed it to stow away much money.
UTSA President Ricardo Romo said the university likely would use the tract for athletics, intramural fields, parking and housing, which will free up space on the main campus for academic buildings.
The new parcel, about half a mile west of the main campus, near West Hausman Road, would add about 20 percent more space to the university's 600-acre campus.
This fall, the university enrolled 28,000 students, an increase of more than 50 percent since 1999.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of deal," Romo said Thursday. "If we don't make this happen, we don't know if there will be any more opportunities for large tracts of land here."
Though the deal is yet to be negotiated, UTSA plans to contribute $5.5 million, and $14.5 million will come from the Permanent University Fund, which supports schools in the UT and Texas A&M systems through oil and gas royalties.
Regent Cyndi Taylor Krier of San Antonio said regents typically guard PUF money carefully, but UTSA presented a compelling need.
"Because UTSA has been growing so rapidly, it has been paying its local funds just to keep up," Krier said. "The opportunity to buy this came up so quickly and would have passed so quickly that (regents) went forward and supported it."
In the past year, regents have allocated at least $39 million to UTSA to help build a new engineering building, renovate existing science buildings and expand its university center.
Romo said the deal popped up three months ago, when the landowner, Patricia Shield Ayres, offered UTSA the opportunity to buy the land at its appraised value. Ayres' husband, Robert Ayres, is the former vice chancellor of Sewanee: The University of the South in Tennessee.
Robert Ayres "said, 'I could sell this property to developers, but I would much rather you guys look at it,'" Romo said.
Before that, Romo had been searching for more land for about two years, after master plans revealed the university eventually would come up 60 or 70 acres short of what it needed to expand.
Romo also said he's still wooing city and county officials to help fund a $55 million, joint-use athletics complex that ideally would be located on the new land.
Because it's not adjacent to the main campus, spectators could flood in for sporting events without disturbing classes or hogging parking, and students could easily get back to the main campus via a five or 10 minute shuttle ride, he said.
The added space will give the 1604 campus plenty of breathing room, Romo said, but the quest for land goes on.
"The big news right now is downtown," Romo said. "That's where we need more land."
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/met...D.309649c.html
UTSA is getting very close to a foorball team.
I hope so
i hope my old school grows ridiculously, i will be there for the very first football game, doesnt matter where i am in the world, i will be there
Suprisingly, the AD is pushing very hard for it. Which I was glad to hear.I hope so
need. bigger. parking. garage.
apparently the reason that the garage isn't bigger is that it blocked the view of the hills for one of the higher ups... wtf?
All I know is that they are doing WAY more at/for UTSA than they ever, ever, everrrrrrr did when I went there. I think they only built the student center between my freshman year and graduation
during my 4 year (and a summer) i stayed at utsa they built:
rec center
new dorms
bio science engineering
revamped the uc dining area
and a whole lot of other stuff
i hope they continue this growth, its going to be crazy in like 10 years over there
As others said, that school is growing so fast. Pretty hard to believe they STILL do not have a football program yet.
Enrollment of 28,000? Wow, isn't that equal to Texas Tech? I think a year or 2 ago, I remember hearing that TTech had 28,000 and UTSA was fastly catching them. Could they be equal or near now? Me and my fiance attended UTSA from 2002-2004, right at the time when this speratic growth started.
The statement about blocking the view isn't true. I do some subcontracting work with the parking department at UTSA and know for a fact that it was a money issue. Or rather a lack of money issue.
The enrollment numbers at SAC are pretty staggering too.
Good luck with that. The housing market down there is WAY underbuilt, and WAY more lucrative. They're going to have to pay thru the ing nose for anything down there."The big news right now is downtown," Romo said. "That's where we need more land."
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