The Board of Regents plans to double the capacity of the University's child care facilities by adding 250 spaces to the Children's Campus.
More than 500 families are on a waiting list to get into the child care program.
Regent Mel Eaves said 250 spaces is likely the maximum number of spaces the University can fund right now.
"There is concern that if we build too large a facility, we might overbuild it," he said. "We also have to be sure the price charged is something that people can afford. So, economically we may not be able to do much more right now."
Walter Miller, associate vice president of Student Life, is part of the Child Care Task Force at UNM. He said UNM's program currently doesn't have enough room or resources to accept any children on the waiting list.
Changing that is a priority for the regents and President David Schmidly, Miller said.
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"The task force is driven to identify how we meet the needs for the hospital and the Health Sciences Center and how we provide other avenues to child care throughout the campus," Miller said.
UNM will partner with the Sandia Foundation to expedite the project, he said. The Sandia Foundation is a nonprofit corporation that aids educational, scientific, benevolent, religious and charitable institutions.
The foundation will help fund, construct and plan the new contract, said Eaves, who also serves on the foundation's board.
"It's a really faster way to do this than issuing bonds and going to the Legislature," Eaves said.
The cost for the initial stage of the expansion is $150,000, according to the Capital Projects executive summary report. Steve Beffort, vice president for institutional support services, presented the report to the regents at their Oct. 14 meeting.
At this stage, the task force is consulting with architects to look at the needs of the program and how to expand it most efficiently, Miller said.
"When we say expand, we are going to be building almost $4 million worth of facilities," Miller said.
GPSA president Chris Ramirez said the high cost of expanding the child care facilities could cause the University to raise the cost of services at the Children's Campus. The regents acknowledged that the price of child care would need to be re-evaluated.
"The big issue becomes, How do we know that the people who are on the waiting list will actually pay for it once we expand it?" Ramirez said.
Ramirez said the task force wants to get a profile of families on the waiting list to see if they are students, faculty or staff in order to understand their needs.
Miller said the waiting list needs to be examined because the families likely need varying hours of child care.
"We don't have a final thought on the need at the hospital - it's a very different need because it is 24/7," Miller said.
Miller said the regents might consider planning a separate day care center for the Health Sciences Center.
Ramirez said UNM has a unique student body that requires more child care than other schools.
"We probably have a much larger number of people who are parents than at a university such as ASU," he said. "It really does make child care big priority, and not just for students - for everybody."
