Booooooooo!:
Despite a plan to transfer University of Iowa costs for using the Macbride Nature Recreation Area from the College of Education to the campus’ general fund, UI administrators in March told the education dean that won’t happen — and the dean passed on the bad news to his staff.
“This is disappointing but understandable given the institutional priorities and limited resources.” UI College of Education Dean Daniel Clay wrote in a March 29 email to the university’s Macbride Nature Recreation Area Land Manager Tamra Elliott.
As a result, he said, the college would explore the possibility of running its popular UI Wild programs — including School of the Wild, Iowa Wildlife Camps and the Iowa Raptor Project — at “alternative locations.”
“I just wanted to give you a heads up,” Clay wrote in the email, provided to The Gazette in response to a public records request.
After subsequent meetings over the coming weeks, Elliott on June 10 told Clay she had heard “the university is notifying the Army Corps at the end of this month that they are not going to continue the lease when it is done in three years. It this true?”
Nine minutes later, Clay responded: “I do not know if a final decision on that has been made by the university or not.”
The current extension of the UI lease for the more than 400-acre area near the Lake Macbride State Park from the Army Corps of Engineers — dating back 65 years to 1959 — runs through 2029. A clause lets UI exit the deal with three years’ notice.
Although the university hasn’t given the Corps notice it plans to do that, Corps spokesman Allen Marshall told The Gazette that UI administrators this month did put the Corps on notice they’re “conducting a ‘standard institutional review’ of MNRA use, long-term needs, and financial viability as a university site.”
Clay on June 19 confirmed for UI Wild staffers and community partners that the university has charged a 10-person committee over the next year to review its use of the area and submit a report to UI President Barbara Wilson by May 1.
In that communication, Clay quoted UI Provost Kevin Kregel as saying, “The university provides excellent conservation education through the UI WILD programs and is committed to continuing this experiential learning for our future teachers and K-12 students in Iowa.”
Although the College of Education in the 2023 budget year reported a deficit related to use of the nature area of $533,840 — with its $1.2 million in expenses well surpassing its $643,216 in revenue — Clay in April told Kregel that land management expenses alone, excluding costs for educational programming, hovered around $250,000 a year.
That doesn’t include one-time capital expenses and unanticipated costs — like when the 2020 derecho devastated the area or the Iowa Raptor Center caught fire in February, killing four birds.
A donation box at the Raptor Center is seen Thursday at the University of Iowa’s Macbride Nature and Recreation Area in Johnson County. (Nick Rohlman/The Gazette)
“Our UI WILD programming does not generate enough revenue to cover any of these expenses, so we are fully subsidizing this from the college’s other funds, which we do not have the ongoing resources to commit to,” Clay wrote to Kregel a month after the UI administration denied the college’s petition for general fund help.
“Dean Clay requested central support through the annual budget process. It was not approved,” UI officials said.
When Clay just weeks ago shared with Elliott the budget information he sent Kregel in April — “at his request” — she wrote back, “Seems like such a little amount for the university to fund. I don't get it.”
A professor about 150 years ago began using the Macbride area — located off Mehaffey Bridge Road near Solon — several decades after the land first was surveyed in 1841, five years before Iowa became a state in 1846 and six years before the UI was established in 1847. A century later and one year after the Army Corps built the Coralville Dam in 1958, the university began leasing the parcel of Corps land, which it named after former UI president and naturalist Thomas Huston Macbride.
In the decades that followed, the UI expanded its use of the land — featuring a diversity of woodlands, insects, birds and other animals.
And in the summer of 1984, UI administrators — eager to continue management of what was then called the Macbride Field Campus — laid out a five-year facility development plan detailing a proposed “orientating program” for “youngsters”; expansion of public boating and parking facilities; and enhanced recreation opportunities.
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“We hope that the Corps of Engineers will recognize these strengths, supported by a substantial commitment of human and financial resources, and approve a renewal of the University of Iowa’s lease of the Macbride Field Campus,” UI Vice President for Academic Affairs Richard Remington wrote at that time.
With that letter was a facilities improvement budget — committing $200,000 over five years. Adjusting for inflation, that amounts to more than $600,000 today.
Deleted from a five-year renewal of the lease — from 1984 to 1989 — was a clause that would let the UI relinquish the lease “at any time by giving … at least 30 days notice in writing.”
In 1986, the university updated the lease to cut the acreage from 620 to 415, and reported discovering that “additional staff would be needed to accomplish its objectives” on the land, even as UI was facing “some difficult budget constraints.”
“These constraints may cause staff reductions in many areas of the university,” according to the lease.
But future plans — like a desire to elevate graduate assistants to full-time staffers and add a climbing wall, ice rink, and better bathrooms, roads, and an observation platform — remained in limbo.
“It is anticipated that financing will remain at least at its present level of support,” according to the lease — reporting the $200,000 over five years for capital improvements and $20,000 a year for operations “despite the financial problems.”
When the lease again was renewed in 1989 — this time for 25 years through 2014 — it incorporated historic preservation and soil and water conservation clauses, along with a mandate requiring the UI, upon vacating the premises, to remove property and restore the land to a “satisfactory” condition, or to cover the cost of having that done.
Before the lease expired — in June 2005, three years before 2008 flooding inundated the land — the UI extended it again through 2029.
Fifteen years after the extension — in August 2020 — a devastating derecho wrecked the woodland, costing the university $96,718 to restore. The pandemic also deprived the university of revenue from the nature area’s programs — due to canceled camp opportunities.
And in 2021, the UI WILD programs offered on the Macbride property transferred from Recreational Services in the Division of Student Life to the College of Education — along with the funding responsibility.
The most recent 2023 plan for the area reported, “Funding for the land management positions, budget, and other funding needs of MNRA will be covered by the UI College of Education with the goal of having funding responsibilities taken over by the University of Iowa’s general fund in coming years.
“As of the transfer, Recreational Services will no longer fund or oversee the management of MNRA,” according to the plan.
www.thegazette.com
Despite a plan to transfer University of Iowa costs for using the Macbride Nature Recreation Area from the College of Education to the campus’ general fund, UI administrators in March told the education dean that won’t happen — and the dean passed on the bad news to his staff.
“This is disappointing but understandable given the institutional priorities and limited resources.” UI College of Education Dean Daniel Clay wrote in a March 29 email to the university’s Macbride Nature Recreation Area Land Manager Tamra Elliott.
As a result, he said, the college would explore the possibility of running its popular UI Wild programs — including School of the Wild, Iowa Wildlife Camps and the Iowa Raptor Project — at “alternative locations.”
“I just wanted to give you a heads up,” Clay wrote in the email, provided to The Gazette in response to a public records request.
After subsequent meetings over the coming weeks, Elliott on June 10 told Clay she had heard “the university is notifying the Army Corps at the end of this month that they are not going to continue the lease when it is done in three years. It this true?”
Nine minutes later, Clay responded: “I do not know if a final decision on that has been made by the university or not.”
‘It was not approved’
The current extension of the UI lease for the more than 400-acre area near the Lake Macbride State Park from the Army Corps of Engineers — dating back 65 years to 1959 — runs through 2029. A clause lets UI exit the deal with three years’ notice.
Although the university hasn’t given the Corps notice it plans to do that, Corps spokesman Allen Marshall told The Gazette that UI administrators this month did put the Corps on notice they’re “conducting a ‘standard institutional review’ of MNRA use, long-term needs, and financial viability as a university site.”
Clay on June 19 confirmed for UI Wild staffers and community partners that the university has charged a 10-person committee over the next year to review its use of the area and submit a report to UI President Barbara Wilson by May 1.
In that communication, Clay quoted UI Provost Kevin Kregel as saying, “The university provides excellent conservation education through the UI WILD programs and is committed to continuing this experiential learning for our future teachers and K-12 students in Iowa.”
Although the College of Education in the 2023 budget year reported a deficit related to use of the nature area of $533,840 — with its $1.2 million in expenses well surpassing its $643,216 in revenue — Clay in April told Kregel that land management expenses alone, excluding costs for educational programming, hovered around $250,000 a year.
That doesn’t include one-time capital expenses and unanticipated costs — like when the 2020 derecho devastated the area or the Iowa Raptor Center caught fire in February, killing four birds.
A donation box at the Raptor Center is seen Thursday at the University of Iowa’s Macbride Nature and Recreation Area in Johnson County. (Nick Rohlman/The Gazette)
“Our UI WILD programming does not generate enough revenue to cover any of these expenses, so we are fully subsidizing this from the college’s other funds, which we do not have the ongoing resources to commit to,” Clay wrote to Kregel a month after the UI administration denied the college’s petition for general fund help.
“Dean Clay requested central support through the annual budget process. It was not approved,” UI officials said.
When Clay just weeks ago shared with Elliott the budget information he sent Kregel in April — “at his request” — she wrote back, “Seems like such a little amount for the university to fund. I don't get it.”
‘Approve a renewal’
A professor about 150 years ago began using the Macbride area — located off Mehaffey Bridge Road near Solon — several decades after the land first was surveyed in 1841, five years before Iowa became a state in 1846 and six years before the UI was established in 1847. A century later and one year after the Army Corps built the Coralville Dam in 1958, the university began leasing the parcel of Corps land, which it named after former UI president and naturalist Thomas Huston Macbride.
In the decades that followed, the UI expanded its use of the land — featuring a diversity of woodlands, insects, birds and other animals.
And in the summer of 1984, UI administrators — eager to continue management of what was then called the Macbride Field Campus — laid out a five-year facility development plan detailing a proposed “orientating program” for “youngsters”; expansion of public boating and parking facilities; and enhanced recreation opportunities.
ADVERTISING
“We hope that the Corps of Engineers will recognize these strengths, supported by a substantial commitment of human and financial resources, and approve a renewal of the University of Iowa’s lease of the Macbride Field Campus,” UI Vice President for Academic Affairs Richard Remington wrote at that time.
With that letter was a facilities improvement budget — committing $200,000 over five years. Adjusting for inflation, that amounts to more than $600,000 today.
Deleted from a five-year renewal of the lease — from 1984 to 1989 — was a clause that would let the UI relinquish the lease “at any time by giving … at least 30 days notice in writing.”
In 1986, the university updated the lease to cut the acreage from 620 to 415, and reported discovering that “additional staff would be needed to accomplish its objectives” on the land, even as UI was facing “some difficult budget constraints.”
“These constraints may cause staff reductions in many areas of the university,” according to the lease.
But future plans — like a desire to elevate graduate assistants to full-time staffers and add a climbing wall, ice rink, and better bathrooms, roads, and an observation platform — remained in limbo.
“It is anticipated that financing will remain at least at its present level of support,” according to the lease — reporting the $200,000 over five years for capital improvements and $20,000 a year for operations “despite the financial problems.”
‘Will no longer fund’
When the lease again was renewed in 1989 — this time for 25 years through 2014 — it incorporated historic preservation and soil and water conservation clauses, along with a mandate requiring the UI, upon vacating the premises, to remove property and restore the land to a “satisfactory” condition, or to cover the cost of having that done.
Before the lease expired — in June 2005, three years before 2008 flooding inundated the land — the UI extended it again through 2029.
Fifteen years after the extension — in August 2020 — a devastating derecho wrecked the woodland, costing the university $96,718 to restore. The pandemic also deprived the university of revenue from the nature area’s programs — due to canceled camp opportunities.
And in 2021, the UI WILD programs offered on the Macbride property transferred from Recreational Services in the Division of Student Life to the College of Education — along with the funding responsibility.
The most recent 2023 plan for the area reported, “Funding for the land management positions, budget, and other funding needs of MNRA will be covered by the UI College of Education with the goal of having funding responsibilities taken over by the University of Iowa’s general fund in coming years.
“As of the transfer, Recreational Services will no longer fund or oversee the management of MNRA,” according to the plan.
UI denied college funding help for Macbride Nature Recreation Area
Despite a plan to transfer University of Iowa costs for use of the Macbride Nature Recreation Area from the College of Education to the campus’ general fund, UI administrators in March told the education dean that won’t be happening – and the dean then passed on the bad news to his staff.
www.thegazette.com
