Wanted: Something on a 60-acre college campus
Santa Fe city government’s experiment with for-profit education apparently is ending as Laureate International Universities or LEI Holdings (it’s been confusing to keep up with the proper name for the entity that owns and/ or runs the Santa Fe University of Art and Design) announced this week that the school will close at the end of the 2017-18 school year.
Of course, this is bad news, most of all for students and faculty at the university. It’s heartbreaking to hear from young people who made a commitment of time and money to attend SFUAD and now have to redo their higher education plans. Teachers and other staffers will be out of jobs pending the outcome of what the school describes as efforts to “continue to seek solutions that focus in particular on the continuation of its (the school’s) mission and the campus facilities for the arts and educational purposes.”
Beyond the university community, every taxpayer in Santa Fe has a stake in the demise of SFUAD and what happens next to the 60-acre campus.
As the old College of Santa Fe was collapsing in 2009, the City Council purchased the campus and facilities for $19.5 million, with plans to spend millions more on upgrades. At the time, the total spending package called for issuing up to $30 million in bonds, with another $11 million from the state.
Karen Heldmeyer, a city councilor at the time, estimated then that the city’s total cost for bond financing, including interest over the life of the borrowed money, would be about $60 million.
Laureate, based in Baltimore, leased the campus, originally for 27 years with annual rent of $2.35 million, an amount that was supposed to cover the city’s financing payments.
And on Wednesday, SFUAD’s president said it won’t be on the hook for the lease once the school shuts down.
Mayor Gonzales seems to see opportunity in SFUAD’s demise. When the university’s future became questionable after a deal to sell it to an Asian education company fell through last month, Gonzales said, “We have a wealth of good options and we have time to explore them, so we’re going to be aggressive and proactive in moving forward to minimize financial risk for the taxpayers by optimizing the property’s opportunities for the community.
“We are already working to identify potential partners who can help enhance education, the arts, the economy and housing,” the mayor said.
From the start, the idea of for-profit education where the College of Santa Fe used to be produced queasiness among Santa Feans. But SFUAD quickly won accreditation and, at least from the outside, seemed to be making a go of it. There were students (SFUAD said recently it has about 700), the campus hadn’t become a dead zone on St. Mike’s and its public offerings (student-acted plays, The Screen art cinema, an annual video arts fest and other public events) remained attractive. SFUAD enticed filmmaker Chris Eyre of “Smoke Signals” fame to the faculty.
But down in the business office, things apparently haven’t been going well for a long time. When it looked like Singapore-based Raffles Education Inc. would buy the university last year, a related public disclosure document said SFUAD had a “net loss” of $7.57 million as of June 2015.
There are various murmurs about and suggestions for potential future use of the campus — SFUAD somehow continuing separate from Laureate, a new school moving in, turning the campus into the kind of affordable, millennial-friendly apartments or other housing that Mayor Gonzales has championed. The best-case scenario might be attraction of a proven tech or film-oriented company to the site (it includes a genuine, long-established movie studio) that could provide both good jobs and housing.
There’s a lot going on at City Hall these days, with the proposed tax on sugary drinks sucking up most of the attention. But city officials have to make plans for the SFUAD property a priority.
The millions committed to buying the campus would, for instance, have paid for several years of the pre-kindergarten services that the soda tax would finance, or many years worth of parks, streets or infrastructure improvements for Santa Fe.