A University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents planning committee heard plans and details regarding the Recreational Sports Master Plan at its February meeting Thursday.
According to Rec Sports Director John Horn, who spoke at the Capital Planning and Budget Committee meeting, the current plan calls for renovation and expansion on the Southeast Recreational Facility, the Natatorium and the outdoor fields near the Natatorium.
“Three of our four indoor facilities that we manage were built either in the 1950s or 1960s, when enrollment was about 25,000 students,” Horn said. “Our facilities certainly do not meet the demand of the students at this point.”
The total cost for this project is $223 million, with 57 percent of this cost coming from student-segregated fees.
Students will be able to vote on the referendum March 3-5. Student-segregated fees will increase by $108 per semester, from the current allotment of $36.78 for recreational sports. Horn stressed that this increase in fees would still be keeping UW-Madison below the Big Ten average of segregated-fee cost, which is around $145.
“We have worked with the students to try to assess the tolerance and their priorities for expansion, and that’s reflected within this Master Plan,” Horn said. “We certainly needed to talk to them about funding, as they’re doing the heavy lifting within this Master Plan, should it move forward.”
If the referendum does not pass, Horn said students could see a steep increase in segregated fees for the immediate renovations, without seeing any changes in the space or services available at the recreational locations. If the referendum does pass, however, students will not see an increase in fees until the new facilities open, Horn said.
Regent David Walsh asked Horn about one of the controversial issues regarding the Master Plan, which is that as it stands now, there are no plans to house a competition-sized swimming pool in the Natatorium.
Horn said that because students were not willing to pay the full amount in the building of that pool size, and only half, there is about $13 million left to be funded.
“We simply to do not have the funding at this point to produce that model,” Horn said, though he assured regents that this was not necessarily the end of the line for the competition pool. “Even with the referendum, the competition pool could be reincorporated into this plan, should the funding become apparent before we go to formal design sometime hopefully next year.”
