WSU buys land in downtown Spokane
SEATTLE – By selling and buying land, Washington State University has managed to circumvent the state funding process to procure $5.2 million in property in downtown Spokane.
In its meeting Friday, WSU’s Board of Regents unanimously approved using a pool of money in campus coffers to purchase three parcels at the edges of the university’s Riverpoint Campus next to the Spokane River.
The property had been purchased in 2000 and 2001 by WSU’s private nonprofit fund-raising arm, the WSU Foundation. The idea was that the university would buy it within a year at cost plus net carrying costs.
“We’ve been trying to figure out how to get this money from the Legislature for the last three biennia,” said Greg Royer, WSU’s vice president for business affairs. But while capital funding came through for building projects on the site, it was never allocated for the three parcels of Spokane land, he said.
About two years ago, Royer’s office started culling through the university’s vast regional property holdings to determine if the school was hanging on to land not essential to the core mission. Once those properties were identified, they were brought before the regents for approval for sale.
Over the past few years, the regents have approved the sales of a number of properties around the state. The money from those sales went into a pool fund now being tapped to purchase and improve other properties.
At their meeting Friday, the regents approved the sale of two farms in Fife, about 60 acres of land, which will garner WSU $11 million. They also approved the sale of Camp Roger Larson on Lake Coeur d’Alene, which will fetch $1.4 million in cash and $1 million for Native American education from the Coeur d’Alene tribe.
“It has been a long, torturous process for us,” WSU’s President V. Lane Rawlins said of the Camp Larson sale, noting that the property was a big piece of the university’s history. But having the tribe take it over will allow children to use the site, as its founders would have wanted, he said.
Revenue from those sales and others has enabled WSU to purchase and develop properties that haven’t been covered by state funding, in effect avoiding the lengthy process of courting legislative approval for some big projects. This year WSU plans to invest $6 million in improvements to the school’s research station in Mount Vernon, Wash., and to buy the parcels at WSU’s campus in Spokane. One of those Spokane parcels is a parking lot and the other two already hold buildings used by WSU and Eastern Washington University.