PCC ending some classes at GV campus

With enrollment plunging and costs at about $220,000 a year, Pima Community College’s Green Valley Learning Center is closing down some of its lifestyle classes. This leaves the future of the facility in doubt and worries officials of the adjacent Community Performing Arts Center.

“Services provided by staff at the Learning Center will no longer be available beginning Jan. 4, 2010. We will continue to have a strong presence at the Learning Center,” PCC Chancellor Roy Flores said in an e-mail Tuesday.

He said the Desert Vista Campus will offer credit courses in Green Valley in the spring, and Community Campus, a PCC program, will offer a few non-credit courses at the site.

“Also, the college is looking for partnerships with businesses and area K-12 school districts,” Flores said.

However, the idea of offering credit courses on short notice may not be realistic, said officials of the Learning Center’s only neighbor, Community Performing Arts Center (CPAC) .

“They’ve had four or five years and none of those things have come about,” said Harry Paxton, board chairman of the CPAC Foundation, which manages the performing arts center.

“They have a spring course book out and on the shelf already,” said the CPACF Executive Director James Mack.

The performing arts center shares the 19-acre campus at 1250 W. Continental Road with the Learning Center. The Learning Center and CPAC have been open since February 2004, as a partnership among PCC, Pima County and the private Foundation.

Paxton said he and Mack are meeting Friday with Pima County facilities director Reid H. Spaulding “to find out where we stand.”

Flores acknowledged “the Center has never been self-supporting” and faced operating costs this year of about $220,000.

Staff salaries and benefits are $120,000 a year and the College’s portion of utilities and maintenance at the 4,400 square foot facility is about $100,000 more, Flores said.

The Learning Center includes an art lab, conference room, a large multipurpose room that can be divided into two rooms and two computer labs. The Center offers art, writing and other non-credit courses but has floundered because of competition with Green Valley Recreation, which offers similar classes at numerous locations, and, lately, because of the economy.

“The downturn in the economy has hurt the Green Valley Learning Center’s enrollment because personal-enrichment courses are considered non-essentials by the public and often are the first to go when people begin cutting costs,” Flores said.

Enrollment plunged by two-thirds in two years, going from 1,880 in the 2006-07 school year to 1,543 the following year and 593 last year.

Paxton wants PCC to maintain a strong presence, but said he only learned recently that the Learning Center was going to close.

“It’s all happened very suddenly. We need a little time to digest what we could realistically try to do,” Paxton said.

“If they’re unoccupied I don’t know what we’d do. We don’t want the facilities to crumble around us,” but the CPAC Foundation is barely surviving and cannot afford to maintain the learning center without a subsidy, Paxton said.

He said Pima County last year dropped a $135,000 subsidy at the last minute, which threw the organization into the red.

CPAC’s worst-case scenario would be for the building to be shuttered, because the campus already has become a gathering spot for migrants, and a larger presence would create big problems for CPAC, Paxton said.

Mack said he would like to see the facilities rented to organizations because of “the lack of usable, affordable rental space within the community.”

Mack said the Foundation is open to an agreement to operate the Learning Center with financial assistance from the county or PCC, but “at this time the Foundation does not have the financial resources to cover the operational expenses of the additional space.”

The project developed out of community interest in the 1990s and combined extensive private donations with public funds, starting with $4 million from PCC bonds approved in 1996 and Pima County bonds approved in 1997.

There were nearly 2,000 square feet in the first phase of the CPAC rehearsal space. The newest addition to the Performing Arts Center, Phase II, was completed in January.

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