For the second budget year in a row, Central has won Washington State legislators’ favor. The university has been awarded a staggeringly large capital budget fund of more than $95.2 million dollars according to a memo released by George Clark, vice president for business and financial affairs.

Large amounts of the budget will be going to the math and science departments for renovation and new construction which students have mixed feelings about.

Clark’s memo names 9 specific, construction focused, projects that the new budget will be aimed towards completing:

1.Bouillon is getting a $4.99 million dollar renovation.

2. $8 million for upgrading underground infrastructure (electrical, fiber wiring.)

3. Lind Hall will be seeing a $5 million dollar renovation to house the ROTC program.

4. “Paint, patch and fix” projects account for $5.93 million.

5. Modernizing facilities to meet program needs will take up $3.77 million.

6. $4.3 million dollars has been awarded to Health Sciences for the designing of new building that will replace Hertz and round out the “science neighborhood” part of campus near the Science Phase II building on south campus.

7. $4.9 million for the replacement of the south part of “Old Heat”, the universities steam plan.

8.Preventative maintenance, aimed at keeping Central’s facilities in working order, takes up $2.4 million.

9. The remaining $56.04 million dollars, the lion’s share of the budget, will be used to renovate the northern part of Samuelson while tearing down and rebuilding its southern portion so the building can house the ITAM, math, computer science, multimodal learning and university data departments.

“In general the new state budgets are encouraging and represent significant improvements over those of the previous five years. Staff are continuing to analyze legislative budget documents—which are still emerging from the third special session of the legislature,” Clark’s memo said.

These budget announcements and allocations, mainly benefiting STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) departments comes shortly after the failure of a proposed student arts fee in spring quarter which would have helped support the music and arts programs.

Students from the STEM programs, and the arts program have different opinions on the new announcements.

Bobby Odle, a percussion performance and music education major, thinks that if students and staff on campus understood how successful Central’s music program has been over the last few years at a variety of different conventions and competitions, the arts would have no problem getting funded.

“It is hard to see my program succeed as greatly as it does on so little, and know how much better we would serve the school and how much more we would thrive on just a bit more funding,” Odle said.

On the other side of the coin, Meredith Lanthorn a biology major said that she’s happy to see new facilities being built for her program because she’ll actually use them but that she sympathizes with the art students.

“It’s exciting to see the amount of effort and money put towards the major I’ll be in. It’s nice to see a project that is being so heavily funded by the school be something I will actually use and benefit from,” Lanthorn said. “I can’t imagine art students were very happy when their fee failed yet they pass science building construction people daily.”

Clark’s memo makes it clear that Central’s staff is still working on understanding what they can do with the new budget money, as the bill is over 500 pages, and says that more announcements will be coming in the future.

“It would be nice to be represented,” Odle said.

 
Central’s budget team were not available for comment.