 "Photo:")
Because Texas Tech impacts the entire South Plains economy and the lives of 261,000 county residents, Lubbock also is preparing to welcome and accommodate the 12,000 additional Red Raiders Chancellor Kent Hance is calling for.
Becoming the home of 12,000 more students, many Lubbock officials agree, will be a blessing, but before city officials can unroll the red and black carpet for hordes of new students, Lubbock must plan and prepare.
Lubbock mayor David Miller said the city is working closely with university officials to coordinate and anticipate more students. With the students, however, also come additional faculty members and businesses.
"We're excited that the prospects of growth of the student population at Tech," Miller said. "Kent Hance and I go way back to when we were students at Tech, and I can assure you that we're working together hand-and-glove with the chancellor and his entire administration."
With a population of approximately 212,000, Miller said, the City of Lubbock is emerging as a regional center. Once a city reaches 200,000 residents, it can expect change to occur faster with significant increases in growth rates. Once Tech's goals are added to the mix, the outlook for the city is bright.
"There's some magic to that 200,000 plateau because companies, both in retail as well as in the manufacturing and service sectors, start looking at you when they didn't before," he said. "With the growth that's going to be created in partnership with Tech, you're looking at a real boost for industry as well."
Accompanying the 12,000 students, Miller said, will be more prestige for Tech, which already is a top-notch university. Few universities are capable of educating 40,000 students, and Tech is one of them.
Preparation for the university's plans for 2020 will not happen overnight, and a proactive approach is vital if the city is to oblige Tech's goals, he said. Preliminary plans for the growth already are in the clockwork of municipal administration, but they are just the beginning.
"We've got 12, 13 years between now and 2020, but you don't wait until 2018 for that to happen," said Miller. "You start planning for the incremental increases to start, I think, being put into place here in the next year or two, and then the long-term plans come into place after that."
Officials with the Lubbock Department of Planning know they have their work cut-out for them in the years to come, said Randy Henson, the department's director, but he has every reason to believe the assimilation process will be a smooth process.
In terms of overall population, he said, 12,000 students won't significantly impact Lubbock on a large scale. There is plenty of space into which new students can move. Housing in the city is plentiful and grows more so each year.
In 2004, according to an economic-indicator study compiled by the planning department, 2,082 new apartments were built in the city, nearly a 100 percent increase from the 1,091 new apartments built in 2003, and a 467 percent increase from the 445 new apartments built in 2002.
"The natural growth of the community is going to far exceed that growth of 12,000, as well as any new industries located here, so that would just be an added bonus of the number of bodies who are bringing mommy-and-daddy's money," Henson said.
Dave Buckberry, a demographer within the city's planning department, said Lubbock presently is experiencing a growth rate of approximately .8 percent, which is indicative of a healthy city.
Once students start arriving en masse, however, that growth rate will rise each year, possibly reaching rates as high as 1.5 percent, he said. At that 1.5-percent growth rate, he said, Lubbock's population will double in approximately 50 years.
"There would be some things that would get a little out of whack," said Buckberry. "By and large, Lubbock is a city that has the capacity to handle that growth because we don't have any environmental constraint. We have plenty of land."
Reaching 40,000 students by 2020 is a tall order, he said, because the university has not seen a boost in enrollment on that scale since Congress enacted the GI Bill after World War II.
Regardless, Buckberry said he wholeheartedly supports the university's goals, even if they are unrealistic.
"In a 12-year time period, that's quite a bit of growth out there," he said. "You're talking about, essentially, increasing it by a third in 12 years, so that's where I have a question in terms of how realistic it is."
Tech already is one of the region's largest employers, said Eddie McBride, president of the Lubbock Chamber of Commerce, so the 2020 goals will only further cement its tremendous economic role in Lubbock and the South Plains.
Planning, he said, is vital.
"There is nothing more important in Lubbock, Texas, than the town-and-gown relationship," McBride said. "We really appreciate the fact that we get a chance to work together, and that's a tremendous opportunity for us."
Lubbock will need to offer the growing student body more retail- and service-industry options, he said, if it is to be capable of catering to college students' needs. Much of the needed industry will come on its own because there will be a gap in the expanding Lubbock market, a gap that outside companies will be eager to fill.
"We'll do everything we can on our end to attract those retail and service industries to make sure that they can support the growth of students, but those usually take care of themselves," McBride said. "Additional planning is needed because we don't want to be bursting at the seams all of the sudden without having a future vision."
In terms of economic growth, Hayden Blackburn, project specialist at the Lubbock Economic Development Alliance and Tech graduate, said the growth presents a different challenge altogether.
LEDA has begun a campaign to encourage Tech graduates to remain in Lubbock, he said, because Tech graduates who stay in the area further enrich the community. Unfortunately, many do not, but more students mean more graduates, and more graduates means more potential for retaining educated Lubbockites.
The alliance actively is seeking more companies to come to Lubbock, said Blackburn, because graduates need jobs. The other, brighter side of the coin, however, is that companies are drawn to cities like Lubbock with high numbers of degree-bearing workers.
"I think it's a great opportunity," he said. "I think there are pros and cons to everything that you do. With an increase in population of students, it helps the labor force. It helps attract more business. Tech, itself, is a great entity in Lubbock."
Travis Turner, manager of the electrical engineering department at Lubbock Power and Light, said his department is ready to charge 12,000 additional laptops, both on and off campus.
Texas Tech University, he said, at this point in time, receives its power from the LP&L city grid. Presently, Tech has the capacity to more than double it's current consumption of electricity. If the university doubled its number of students tomorrow, there would still be plenty of electricity to go around.
The excess capacity came after a reconfiguration of Tech's power system in the 1980s, Turner said. In a sense, LP&L long ago anticipated growth at the university.
"It was great as far as that was concerned when you're talking about increasing 12,000 students," he said. "That's a significant increase, but the way it was designed a long time ago, that was taken into consideration."
With 12,000 additional students, each using approximately 135 gallons each month, said Aubrey Spear, assistant water utilities director for Lubbock. With 12,000 more students, the increase in Lubbock's water usage will be approximately 1.62 million gallons each month.
Considering Lubbock's total current water usage each month, which he said is approximately 350 million gallons, 12,000 additional students will increase Lubbock's water consumption by half a percent.
The half-percent increase probably is generous, Spear said, because college students often use less water than other residents, primarily because students require less irrigation water.
"Those (students) won't be the major culprits we're after," Spear said. "What we're trying to do is get the conservation of water - those who are using it for irrigation."
After taking into account the expected non-student-population increase resulting from the influx of students - peripheral population growth, which Buckberry estimated to be approximately 3,000 - the demand for water will not increase significantly, Spear said.
The water utilities department is planning the construction of a $260 million canal connecting Lubbock to Lake Alan Henry, he said, which will increase local water supplies. Planners expect the canal's completion in 2012, which will have long-been operational by the time the bulk of the student increase arrives in 2015 or 2020.
Water rates may increase, Spear said, but the rising prices will result more from the costly canal, not additional students.
"Our opportunity in what we do is to balance the water supply with the water needs and create a sustainable growth pattern," he said. "Growth is good. We don't have a problem with that right now. We have plenty of water to take care of us."
Growth at Tech will not impact the response time or efficiency of emergency services, said Chief Rhea Cooper of the Lubbock Fire Department, and Lubbock's firemen will be more than capable of handling the influx of students at Tech.
Currently, there are four fire stations near Tech's campus, he said - one at 35th Street and Indiana Avenue, another at Fourth Street and Cornell Street, a third at 18th Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard and a fourth at Second Street and Slide Road.
"We kind of have the Tech campus surrounded there," he said. "If we get an emergency call to the campus, if it's a fire, and there is actual smoke showing, all those units will respond."
In the event of a fire on campus, Cooper said, some buildings, such as the high-occupancy residence halls, require more emergency personnel to respond, but response time will remain optimal, regardless, at approximately four-and-a-half minutes.
Cooper said he expects a large proportion of the student influx to settle in the Overton area east of campus, most of which currently is vacant after a recent redevelopment project. Once the additional 12,000 students begin settling in, he expects the area to return to its previous population-density levels.
"It's swayed back and forth, but we have still maintained those stations to get the response time," he said. "That's why I say, 'Even though you're going to increase the numbers, I can see a lot of those numbers populating that area, where it has been populated before, so we'll give them the same amount of service that we always have.'"
Few students require welfare health services because of Tech's independent healthcare system, said Mike Sullivan, chief executive officer of the Community Health Center of Lubbock.
Even accounting for the more general population increases intertwined with more students, he said, the growth will not be too much for the department to handle.
"There certainly will be more needs," he said. "I think that by 2020, if the city grows appropriately, it should be able to meet most of those needs."
Growth will be good for Lubbock and Tech, Blackburn said. A ripple effect will follow the students: More students at Tech will bring more graduates to Lubbock, more money to West Texas and more national recognition to both.
"Most people know Texas Tech, but don't always associate that with Lubbock," he said, "and that's something that we try to work toward having, that mindset of 'TTU equals Lubbock.'"
Be the first to comment on this article!