Associated Student Government (ASG) passed a joint resolution to increase student fees by $5 per credit hour on April 22. This fee will finance the construction of a new parking garage on the Dominguez Hall parking lot, also known as CP9.
The resolution was originally proposed at the April 15 Senate meeting after it passed the House the Monday prior. Senate members received the resolution less than 24 hours before they were scheduled to vote on it. Given the short notice, they voted to table the resolution until the following meeting on April 22.
“It’s not like this is a midterm paper; this is $25 million, and this is affecting students for 30 years, so I feel like we’re all in agreement we should push this at least a couple of weeks,” computer science and mechanical engineering senator Raven Kopko said.
Senior Vice President for Student Services Dr. Roberto Montoya gave a presentation about the parking structure at the April 15 meeting.
“Students are like ‘I can’t find parking, I can’t get to class.’ And it’s not just students, it’s our faculty,” Montoya said.
According to Montoya, the garage will contain approximately 500 spaces.
“Any engineer will tell you, do not put a parking garage in the middle of your campus. They will tell you that over and over again. We disagree,” Montoya said.
Montoya said student concerns over UC parking spaces prioritized for community member use for external events influenced conversations around the new parking structure. Montoya said CMU administration is working on ways to balance the needs of both groups.
President John Marshall estimated the project will be finished by spring 2027. Marshall indicated that CMU will soon begin conversations with architects and would like to break ground this summer. He also said this is not the only parking added to campus recently.
Montoya justified the choice of location on the basis that a parking garage in the center of campus will expedite access to academic buildings and residence halls. Montoya said that the engineering obstacles are related to aesthetics rather than structural challenges.
CMU is considering different options to ensure an adequate number of spaces while leaving the on-campus view of the Colorado National Monument unobstructed according to Marshall and Montoya.
“We’ve got four and five-story dorms. But they’re kind of spread out, and we don’t want to create these urban canyons,” Marshall said.
CMU identifies as a Human Scale University. The website defines part of that as “not dwarfed by high-rise residence halls.” Marshall was asked if CMU is considering an underground option for the parking garage, but said anything more than a half level it is too expensive.
An open-air parking garage with approximately half a level underground could solve this issue, allowing for a wide, two- to three-story structure.
“We gotta find the middle ground between functionality and price,” Marshall said.
The total cost is estimated to be slightly more than $27 million and would be paid over a 30 year period.
According to Budget Director Spencer Rockwell, CMU will take out a bond to pay for the parking garage. The new student fee would cover some of CMU’s annual payments on the bond.
“What we’re here, before you, asking for is an income source, a student fee increase that raises roughly half that annual cost of $1.7-1.8 million in debt service payments,” Rockwell said.
CMU requested capital funds for a parking garage through the state over five consecutive years before looking at increasing student fees. The parking garage is considered an auxiliary project and the State of Colorado does not provide capital funding for auxiliary projects.
Marshall said the school justified this decision by referencing a project he thought was for an auxiliary gymnasium built at Fort Lewis College (FLC) that received capital funding.
According to Colorado Capital Development Committee (CDC) staffers, this is the reason for the discrepancy between CMU and FLC’s requests:
“In reviewing the original request documents for the Whalen Gymnasium Expansion and Renovation, Exercise Science, South project, [Fort Lewis Gymnasium Project] we believe the term “auxiliary” was used in the layman’s sense of the word, in that the proposed building was a smaller secondary detached gymnasium separate from the primary FLC gymnasium, rather than as a designation as an auxiliary facility as defined in statute. The Colorado Mesa University Student Parking Garage project was submitted as a state-funded request five times, between FY 2019-20 and FY 2022-23. Each of those times, CMU ranked the project as its last or second-to-last priority out of the 4 to 6 projects it submitted.”
Montoya and Rockwell said funding must be secured to break ground this summer and that waiting on a decision would increase costs. Some senators argued it would be unacceptable to wait on voting for the student fee increase until next semester’s biennial. When the Senate voted to pass the funding increase during the April 22 meeting, three votes were cast in opposition.
Senators who cast their votes in opposition cited complaints from upperclassmen about fee increases that do not benefit them. They were overruled by the majority vote, and senators in favor commented on the parking strain caused by the continued growth of campus.
