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Measure C
-By JoAnn Lomo
Voters in the 2004 election passed a general obligation bond, known as Measure C. This is a ten-year project line up that will improve and expand Copper Mountain College (CMC).
�I lived and breathed it for a whole six months,� said CMC Chief Business Officer Kindred Murillo, in regards to working with an architect and dealing with the state in order to fund the project.
Under Proposition 39, the college, and other schools, are allowed to put forth a ballot, which requires 55 percent of the voters to approve. Measure C passed by 71.67 percent! Amazingly, people voted on �taxing themselves up to 25-dollars per 100-dollars of assessed value,� said Murillo. The assessed value is based on property tax. The state of California will fund 50 percent of the project and the remaining 50 percent will be funded by grants and other funds. This bond will allow the school to: remodel a nursing lab, in which to start a registered nursing (RN) program; furnish brand new computers for the student areas of the campus; install a new student information system; remodel the science labs; expand the library; expand student service facilities; and build a vocational building for job training. �It allows us to do things like safety measures,� said Murillo, such as making the school a safer place for disabled students to navigate and to install a traffic signal on highway 62. A full service bookstore will be constructed that will be open not only to the students, but also the public. Solar Fields will be implemented in order to cut down on the cost of energy used by the college. This will all be accomplished in the next two years. In the next five to ten years, CMC is looking at new vocational classrooms, a new child development center, and a desert studies center that includes an indoor and outdoor amphitheater.
The college cannot build any building it wants. There is a list of twenty-one specific college facilities that can be covered by the bond. These facilities are based on an Educational Master Plan by CMC that describes what the school needs for it�s educational purposes. There is a citizen oversight committee to make sure that CMC is covering only what is allowed by the voters in the bond.
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