Lawmakers receptive to Healey’s pitch for higher ed building boom

The governor’s pitch to leverage the new income surtax to invest $2.5 billion into replacing and repairing buildings on the state’s 29 public colleges and universities was met with enthusiasm on Tuesday from the committee in whose hands the proposal now rests.

Gov. Maura Healey, her Cabinet secretaries, and university and college leaders told the Joint Committee on Higher Education that leveraging state dollars for bonds to pay for campus infrastructure will help keep tuition and fees down for the next generation of students, while bringing construction jobs to the state and making higher education institutions here more competitive and carbon-neutral.

“Much of the core infrastructure at our public institutions of higher ed have reached the end of their functional lifespan, resulting in an estimated 10-year backlog of deferred maintenance,” Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler said. “Many of these buildings were designed and built before colleges even had computers. A decade ago, we weren’t even thinking about building cyber security simulation labs and the like. Today’s needs are different than they were years ago.”

University of Massachusetts President Marty Meehan and the chancellor of every UMass campus came before the committee to show their support for Healey’s so-called BRIGHT Act (“An Act to Build Resilient Infrastructure to Generate Higher Education Transformation”), which the governor says is the largest proposed infrastructure investment in Massachusetts’s public higher education system in decades.

“I’m the longest serving chancellor in the history of the university, now in my 20th year, and I can only remember one other time that all the chancellors came with the president to talk about a piece of legislation, so I can tell you how important this is to our university,” said Michael Collins, chancellor of UMass Chan Medical School.

Committee Co-chairman Rep. Dave Rogers looked at the panel of university leaders, “Thank you all for being here... It’s impressive, and we get the hint.”

Meehan responded, “We thought it was more than a hint,” to laughs.

The governor’s proposal was received with praise from several members of the committee.

“Thank you so much for this idea, this bill that is an investment, a true investment into Massachusetts and to our students and everyone who calls Massachusetts home or will in the future,” Rep. Shirley Arriaga of Chicopee said, calling the infrastructure investments “overdue.”

The bill using $125 million of income surtax revenue per year over ten years to leverage $2.5 billion in new borrowing capacity for campus infrastructure needs, a model based on the Commonwealth Transportation Fund which pays the debt service on bonds issued for transportation projects.

Responding to questions from lawmakers, administrators and higher education officials said the investments would help keep costs down for students.

“We see the BRIGHT Act as a very significant and meaningful piece towards the affordability of higher education,” Administration and Finance Secretary Matthew Gorzkowicz said. “The more we can invest in our campuses, the more we can take that pressure off the campuses, the less they have to do through their own resources, which are typically funded through tuition and fees.”

Healey said construction activity spurred by the spending would create approximately 20,000 jobs. That is a higher estimate than the number the governor’s office put out in January when she filed the bill, when they approximated 15,000 jobs could be created through the investment.

“I see a bunch of folks who are ready to get shovels in the ground,” Healey said Tuesday. “Jobs, jobs, jobs. And also the doing of something that’s needed doing for a long time.”

Gorzkowicz said “as soon” as the bill is signed into law, “we could start projects and put people to work right away, while we continue to discuss how best to finance the higher ed capital program with future Fair Share, surtax revenues.”

Chancellor Mark Fuller from UMass Dartmouth said the university is in the midst of a $100 million renovation of its Liberal Arts and Sciences building, the most heavily used building on campus that was built in the 1970s.

“As you can imagine, buildings built in the 70s were not sustainable,” he said, adding that the renovation includes “geothermal energy, sustainable classrooms, accessible classrooms, and modernizing those facilities in very significant ways... We’re proud of what we’ve done. We’ve dramatically reduced both its deferred maintenance and carbon footprint.”

However, he said, there are more buildings on campus with the same attributes of deferred maintenance, unsustainability and inaccessibility.

“Many projects that are shovel ready,” he added.

At UMass Amherst, deferred maintenance totals $1.8 billion, and accounts for approximately 25% of the fossil fuel consumption of all state buildings in Massachusetts, Chancellor Javier Reyes said.

As they work to expand their universities to include more lab and technology space to compete on a national scale, and do so in compliance with the state’s emissions mandates, the chancellors said they need help from the state.

“Decarbonizing the University of Massachusetts Boston will be a complex undertaking,” said UMass Boston Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco. “It will require re-engineering infrastructure, investment in new technologies and operational planning around the fundamental concept of sustainability. We hope that the passage of the BRIGHT Act will facilitate these endeavors.”