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Despite facing major financial and institutional setbacks, the University’s branch campuses continue to strive for improvement.
UNM Los Alamos continues to plan how to maintain its campus offerings going into the future after the Los Alamos community rejected on Tuesday a mill levy tax increase that would have supported the branch.
The mill levy tax proposed in Los Alamos would have raised property taxes in the community by 2 percent to help fund UNM’s branch campus. All the money from the tax increase would have gone to UNM-LA.
Cedric Page, executive director of UNM Los Alamos, said that although the branch campus started a campaign to garner support in May, the Los Alamos community decided not to pass the measure. Polls counted votes Tuesday night, Page said.
Page said the tax would have generated about $750,000 in the first year and $1.4 million to $1.5 million additional revenue in the year after. He said the branch recovered some of the money lost from a decrease in government funding, but the branch still needs additional support.
“We’ve lost about 38 percent of state funding because of a number of factors, and we’ve replaced that, to some extent, with grant money,” he said. “But grants end and there’s no guarantee that they’ll be renewed. We really need to ask the local community to step up with their support.”
According to the Our Community, Our College, a website run by UNM-LA, the branch campus has the lowest operational and debt service mill levy tax rates compared to any other two-year institution in the state except for New Mexico State University grants.
Page said UNM-LA would continue to “fulfill our mission” and would review “how to move forward in the next couple years.”
UNM President Robert Frank said he hoped the community would support the tax because the county had bolstered education in the past.
“The community has a strong history of supporting education and that’s part of the additional rationale, that there’s strong community support for education,” he said. “The branch campus believes they can provide more educational programming for the community and that there’s a need for it, but without the additional support that they would get from this bond, they can’t go forward and provide it.”
Frank said the tax would have gone towards expanding the curriculum for the branch campus.
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“It will go towards increasing the types of courses we offer up there,” he said. “They’ve been very innovative increasing some of the courses they offer. Los Alamos is one of our smaller branch campuses, and they believe they can expand the offerings there and offer a few more course offerings that will help people in Los Alamos stay there.”
On the other hand, UNM Gallup works to improve its campus after it almost became a standalone community college earlier this year.
Frank said Gallup continues to improve its curriculum and to reach out to the community after the state Senate rejected House Bill 71, which would have converted the campus into a community college.
Frank said HB 71 was introduced because the main campus thought the Gallup community’s “needs weren’t being met as well as they could be.” He said he thinks steps taken by the university since then have helped the branch with improving its image.
“We brought in, in the last year, (UNM Gallup Executive Director) Dr. Christopher Dyer, and I think Dr. Dyer has done of a good job of being more responsive to some needs in Gallup. He’s a bundle of energy — a very high-energy, dynamic guy,” Frank said. “I think what he’s done in addition to what we did before is that he came and have turned around a lot of the perception of what our campus has done there.”
Dyer said he realized community outreach is “incredibly important.”
“As part of our training, and as part of my activities, I’ve been meeting with all kinds of people, developing collaborative relationships, doing what we call ‘friend raising,’ meeting with individuals who were responsible for this original proposal, listening carefully, doing a lot of active listening and developing programs, curriculum and plans that completely make that whole idea of the proposal obsolete,” he said. “And that’s where we are now.”
Dyer said he thinks a bill similar to H.B. 71 will “absolutely not” be proposed again. He said members of the community are very enthusiastic about the progress of UNM Gallup, and that he hopes to make Gallup a “national model for regional universities.”
