Nearly a year after Kirkwood Community College announced it was closing its 32-year-old Iowa City campus on the southeast side of town, Oral-B Laboratories has agreed to buy the 84,277-square-foot property for $6.4 million — pending 120 days of performing “due diligence” on the deal.
That pending sale, made Aug. 10 for the 6.3 acres at 1816 Lower Muscatine Rd., is about $625,000 under Kirkwood’s asking price of nearly $7 million, according to a Realty.com advertisement promoting the property as a “hard to find” large parcel in “highly-sought after Iowa City.”
“It is situated two miles from the University of Iowa Campus and sits adjacent to Sycamore Mall,” according to the listing that went up nine months ago, in February — just weeks after former Kirkwood President Lori Sundberg announced plans to both close the branch campus and cut Iowa City offerings.
“We face a challenge in figuring out how best to support today's students both inside and outside of the classroom, while also balancing our expenses and revenues,” Sundberg said in a January statement. “This consolidation allows our institution to focus more of our resources on student support.”
Informing Kirkwood’s decision to close its Iowa City branch was an assessment of assets concluding that — if nothing changed over the next 24 years — the college would wind up spending nearly $40 million maintaining the site, encompassing a 69,000-plus primary building and two ancillary buildings offering a combined 14,800 square feet.
That $40 million did not include “potential larger modifications needed for the older facilities,” according to the assessment, predicting Kirkwood would incur “high remodeling expenses” due — in part — to “outdated classroom configurations that will not meet requirements” for evolving course needs.
Kirkwood officials "do not have any specific details“ on how Oral B plans to use the property — should the sale go through Dec. 8. Public relations representatives for Procter & Gamble — which owns Oral B — didn’t respond Wednesday to The Gazette’s questions about its Iowa City plans.
In 2018, Procter & Gamble announced it would move its shampoo, conditioner and body wash product lines out of Iowa City — and eliminate hundreds of local jobs as a result. But then two years later, it said it would keep the product lines here after all. Its oral care lines, including Oral B, were not affected under the plans.
The Iowa City space is zoned for commercial use, but it hasn’t been assessed given the public nature of Kirkwood, which didn’t pay property taxes on the building.
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By selling the branch — built in 1990 and expanded on or renovated in both 1998 and 2015 — Kirkwood expects to save about $400,000 a year.
Given the Iowa City campus had a classroom-use rate of 40 percent or below and saw a 75-percent enrollment slide from 2016 to 2021, Kirkwood decided a better use of its Johnson County resources would be to move most Iowa City functions to its regional center in Coralville.
“The Kirkwood Regional Center at the University of Iowa meets our needs, as it has plenty of space,” Sundberg said in January.
Cedar Rapids-based Kirkwood, which has six regional centers across its seven-county region, as part of its Iowa City changes eyed expanded collaboration with the Iowa City Community School District at the district’s newly-acquired ACT campus facility — given the ever-expanding joint enrollment of high schoolers taking college-credit courses.
And Kirkwood over the summer also announced that — less than a decade into a 50-year, $2 million-plus lease deal with the Grant Wood Area Education Agency for space in the Coralville regional center — it was ending the arrangement early, paying back $1.7 million to Grant Wood to free up space for its own purposes.
“Kirkwood has been working to relocate the Iowa City campus operations to the Kirkwood Regional Center at the University of Iowa,” according to a resolution ending the lease. “The space planning resulted in the need for Kirkwood to own the fifth-floor space, where GWAEA currently leases 7,800 square feet.”
Grant Wood is expected to complete its move out of the regional center in January, according to Kirkwood Media Relations Director Justin Hoehn.
“We do have plans to make some modifications to the regional center, including after Grant Wood has moved out,” he said. “One of those modifications will be adding a parking lot as well to accommodate increased parking needs in the morning.” A new lot, planned south of the existing lot, will add 100 spaces and room for motorcycle training.
Regarding regional center staff, numbers have jumped from 14 last fall to 43 today.
While Kirkwood this fall is reporting increases in both its total enrollment and high school-joint enrollment — from 12,414 to 12,662 and from 4,514 to 4,773, respectively — its Johnson County student count is down from 1,356 in fall 2022 to 1,194 this year.
Its regional center student count, however, nearly tripled from 408 to 1,194.
And, Hoehn said, those numbers — especially with increasing online and hybrid numbers — can be fluid.
“We've always known that students regularly take classes at different locations in addition to different formats (in person, online, hybrid),” he said by email. “These changes can obviously affect enrollment at individual locations. Many students have taken classes at both the main campus and another location within the same time frame. So, whether it's a specific location, or a different format such as online, these numbers tend to fluctuate and are different from year to year (or even semester to semester) depending on individual student needs.”
www.thegazette.com
That pending sale, made Aug. 10 for the 6.3 acres at 1816 Lower Muscatine Rd., is about $625,000 under Kirkwood’s asking price of nearly $7 million, according to a Realty.com advertisement promoting the property as a “hard to find” large parcel in “highly-sought after Iowa City.”
“It is situated two miles from the University of Iowa Campus and sits adjacent to Sycamore Mall,” according to the listing that went up nine months ago, in February — just weeks after former Kirkwood President Lori Sundberg announced plans to both close the branch campus and cut Iowa City offerings.
“We face a challenge in figuring out how best to support today's students both inside and outside of the classroom, while also balancing our expenses and revenues,” Sundberg said in a January statement. “This consolidation allows our institution to focus more of our resources on student support.”
Informing Kirkwood’s decision to close its Iowa City branch was an assessment of assets concluding that — if nothing changed over the next 24 years — the college would wind up spending nearly $40 million maintaining the site, encompassing a 69,000-plus primary building and two ancillary buildings offering a combined 14,800 square feet.
That $40 million did not include “potential larger modifications needed for the older facilities,” according to the assessment, predicting Kirkwood would incur “high remodeling expenses” due — in part — to “outdated classroom configurations that will not meet requirements” for evolving course needs.
Kirkwood officials "do not have any specific details“ on how Oral B plans to use the property — should the sale go through Dec. 8. Public relations representatives for Procter & Gamble — which owns Oral B — didn’t respond Wednesday to The Gazette’s questions about its Iowa City plans.
In 2018, Procter & Gamble announced it would move its shampoo, conditioner and body wash product lines out of Iowa City — and eliminate hundreds of local jobs as a result. But then two years later, it said it would keep the product lines here after all. Its oral care lines, including Oral B, were not affected under the plans.
The Iowa City space is zoned for commercial use, but it hasn’t been assessed given the public nature of Kirkwood, which didn’t pay property taxes on the building.
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By selling the branch — built in 1990 and expanded on or renovated in both 1998 and 2015 — Kirkwood expects to save about $400,000 a year.
Given the Iowa City campus had a classroom-use rate of 40 percent or below and saw a 75-percent enrollment slide from 2016 to 2021, Kirkwood decided a better use of its Johnson County resources would be to move most Iowa City functions to its regional center in Coralville.
“The Kirkwood Regional Center at the University of Iowa meets our needs, as it has plenty of space,” Sundberg said in January.
Cedar Rapids-based Kirkwood, which has six regional centers across its seven-county region, as part of its Iowa City changes eyed expanded collaboration with the Iowa City Community School District at the district’s newly-acquired ACT campus facility — given the ever-expanding joint enrollment of high schoolers taking college-credit courses.
And Kirkwood over the summer also announced that — less than a decade into a 50-year, $2 million-plus lease deal with the Grant Wood Area Education Agency for space in the Coralville regional center — it was ending the arrangement early, paying back $1.7 million to Grant Wood to free up space for its own purposes.
“Kirkwood has been working to relocate the Iowa City campus operations to the Kirkwood Regional Center at the University of Iowa,” according to a resolution ending the lease. “The space planning resulted in the need for Kirkwood to own the fifth-floor space, where GWAEA currently leases 7,800 square feet.”
Grant Wood is expected to complete its move out of the regional center in January, according to Kirkwood Media Relations Director Justin Hoehn.
“We do have plans to make some modifications to the regional center, including after Grant Wood has moved out,” he said. “One of those modifications will be adding a parking lot as well to accommodate increased parking needs in the morning.” A new lot, planned south of the existing lot, will add 100 spaces and room for motorcycle training.
Regarding regional center staff, numbers have jumped from 14 last fall to 43 today.
While Kirkwood this fall is reporting increases in both its total enrollment and high school-joint enrollment — from 12,414 to 12,662 and from 4,514 to 4,773, respectively — its Johnson County student count is down from 1,356 in fall 2022 to 1,194 this year.
Its regional center student count, however, nearly tripled from 408 to 1,194.
And, Hoehn said, those numbers — especially with increasing online and hybrid numbers — can be fluid.
“We've always known that students regularly take classes at different locations in addition to different formats (in person, online, hybrid),” he said by email. “These changes can obviously affect enrollment at individual locations. Many students have taken classes at both the main campus and another location within the same time frame. So, whether it's a specific location, or a different format such as online, these numbers tend to fluctuate and are different from year to year (or even semester to semester) depending on individual student needs.”
Kirkwood Community College selling Iowa City campus to Oral-B
Nearly a year after Kirkwood Community College announced the closure of its 32-year-old Iowa City campus on the southeast side of town, Oral-B Laboratories has agreed to buy the 84,277-square-foot property for $6.4 million – pending 120 days of “due diligence.”
www.thegazette.com
