The Daily Toreador - Student Newspaper of Texas Tech

Issue date: 11/16/07 Section: News

Because Texas Tech impacts the entire South Plains economy and the lives of 261,000 county residents, Lubbock also is preparing to welcome and accommodate the 12,000 additional Red Raiders Chancellor Kent Hance is calling for.

Becoming the home of 12,000 more students, many Lubbock officials agree, will be a blessing, but before city officials can unroll the red and black carpet for hordes of new students, Lubbock must plan and prepare.

Lubbock mayor David Miller said the city is working closely with university officials to coordinate and anticipate more students. With the students, however, also come additional faculty members and businesses.

"We're excited that the prospects of growth of the student population at Tech," Miller said. "Kent Hance and I go way back to when we were students at Tech, and I can assure you that we're working together hand-and-glove with the chancellor and his entire administration."

With a population of approximately 212,000, Miller said, the City of Lubbock is emerging as a regional center. Once a city reaches 200,000 residents, it can expect change to occur faster with significant increases in growth rates. Once Tech's goals are added to the mix, the outlook for the city is bright.

"There's some magic to that 200,000 plateau because companies, both in retail as well as in the manufacturing and service sectors, start looking at you when they didn't before," he said. "With the growth that's going to be created in partnership with Tech, you're looking at a real boost for industry as well."

Accompanying the 12,000 students, Miller said, will be more prestige for Tech, which already is a top-notch university. Few universities are capable of educating 40,000 students, and Tech is one of them.

Preparation for the university's plans for 2020 will not happen overnight, and a proactive approach is vital if the city is to oblige Tech's goals, he said. Preliminary plans for the growth already are in the clockwork of municipal administration, but they are just the beginning.

"We've got 12, 13 years between now and 2020, but you don't wait until 2018 for that to happen," said Miller. "You start planning for the incremental increases to start, I think, being put into place here in the next year or two, and then the long-term plans come into place after that."

Officials with the Lubbock Department of Planning know they have their work cut-out for them in the years to come, said Randy Henson, the department's director, but he has every reason to believe the assimilation process will be a smooth process.

Continued...

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