The school board of trustees has recently approved the purchase of 100 acres of property located between Center Street and 1600 N. on Geneva Road in Orem to serve as intramural fields.
“We are just waiting on approval from the board of regents and other state entities,” said Chris Taylor, associate vice president of marketing and communications.
According to Taylor, the value of this property is $20 million with Geneva property owners donating $10 million and Vineyard Redevelopment Agency donating another $5 million.
“The school only needs to come up with $5 million to acquire this valuable property,” Taylor said.
Taylor also mentioned that tuition will not go up because of this purchase. The money to pay for this land will be coming from the sale of the property recently sold to UTA across campus by the Mountainland Applied Technology College and possibly a loan from the UVU Foundation.
Taylor is very enthusiastic about this project and believes that it will benefit the school tremendously. He also said that if the proposal is approved, the fields will be ready for student use as early as fall of 2011.
“There is a lot of speculation about this land and its use, but it’s all premature,” Taylor said. “There are no hard plans other than our short term goal to build intramural fields, which are much-needed since we lost our fields to the new student track being built right now.“
Associate Director of Athletics D.J. Smith said that this purchase has little to do with the Athletic department, “except for the fact that we are helping with some of the money still needed after all the other donations.”
The department will be contributing $1 million, and the funds will be used to either purchase or develop the land.
Smith did, however, express excitement about the property because, according to him, it will help tremendously with the intramural sports activities that students involved in intramurals need. As it stands right now, these students have very little space compared to other schools with the same number of students.
“As for now, [the land] has been designated just for intramural fields to enhance the students’ life experience in our university,” Smith said.
