In about a year, City of Phoenix voters could have a chance to determine part of the plan for a proposed ASU campus in downtown Phoenix.
A bond election likely to occur in 2006 will ask citizens to provide some of the funding for an ASU campus in downtown Phoenix, according to ASU and Phoenix officials.
Greg Stanton, Phoenix councilman for District 6, said the ASU campus can go forward even if the bond issue fails, but finding funding will be more difficult. Phoenix officials are trying to acquire and provide the land on which the proposed campus will sit, Stanton said.
The bond issue would fund technical infrastructure to support construction of new facilities for the campus. Stanton said he is confident the campus will succeed.
"Both Phoenix and ASU are partners in this project," Stanton said. "We're going to be successful."
Phoenix officials want to hold a bond election to provide funding for infrastructure in the entire city every five years, and the last election occurred in 2001, Stanton said. The exact date of the future bond election hasn't yet been determined, Stanton added.
The planned transition of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism to becoming an independent unit at the downtown campus in fall 2006 would be hit particularly hard by a failure of the bond election, said Steve Doig, the school's interim director.
KAET, the public television station currently housed at the main ASU campus, would need to have specialized facilities, Doig said. The school needs a good deal of new construction, Doig said.
"Some of the programs that are aimed at going down there don't require facilities that are any more elaborate than office buildings," Doig said. "For us to go down there with our significant need for student space and computer labs, the new buildings that will need to be constructed will be expensive to build."
Mernoy Harrison, ASU's interim chief financial officer and provost of the downtown campus, said the role of the city in the campus is still unknown, and that ASU and Phoenix officials have not yet determined specifically what money would be necessary.
"Phoenix voters have been very supportive," Harrison said. "We would only request them to support [the bond] if we felt it would benefit them."
Reach the editor at nicole.saidi@asu.edu.
