SEMO PLANS TO COST NEARLY $64 MILLION

Over the next three years, Southeast Missouri State University hopes to raise nearly $64 million to fund four major projects:

$35.6 million to build a School of Visual and Performing Arts at the River Campus planned for the recently purchased St. Vincent Seminary site; $13.1 million to renovate Academic Hall; $13.1 million to upgrade the science complex; and $1.9 million to renovate the Grauel Building.

A good portion of this funding, of course, will be sought from the Missouri Legislature, and university officials already have reviewed their plans with Gov. Mel Carnahan.

The top priority for the university is the River Campus. The old seminary was purchased thanks to a generous gift from B.W. Harrison, and plans have been developed for the School of Visual and Performing Arts. In addition to making use of the existing seminary buildings, a large, three-pronged addition facing the Mississippi River is planned for a museum, a music wing and a theater.

Of the $35.6 million to be spent on the River Campus, the university expects to raise half in local funding. This would come from private and corporate gifts through a major fund-raising campaign to mark the schools 125th anniversary. But the university also has factored in funding through the city and county. Recently, Don Dickerson, president of the Board of Regents, suggested this could be accomplished through the city's hotel-motel-restaurant tax and a countywide sales tax. These are merely suggestions at this point. Neither city nor county officials have had any official request from the university to pursue these taxes, although a vote on either possibility this year would require official action before the end of August.

At this point, the question isn't whether voters are likely to approve any such taxing plans to help pay for the university's bold capital-improvements program. The question is when the university will start sharing details of what it intends to do with more than $35 million at the old seminary site.

Officials have put together an outline that includes the museum-music wing-theater concept, but many of the finer points are still to be resolved. Many city and county residents, however, aren't waiting for details to form their own opinions.

For example, there already have been questions about why residents of Cape Girardeau County should bear the tax burden for a university that serves more than 20 counties in Southeast Missouri.

And there have been questions about the emphasis being placed on visual and performing arts, particularly on the heels of a major master-plan effort that identified technical training as the school's mission. Will the university expand its mission to include the arts, which no other state institution of higher education currently emphasizes?

The university, under the leadership of Dr. Dale Nitzschke, is confident it can accomplish all of this -- and also confident that such major innovations are needed to reach another key master-plan goal: a significant enrollment increase.