Prairie a center of industry

KTEC may soon have a prairie home companion.

After years of study, expense and no small measure of anxiety, North Idaho College has decided to build its Career Technical Education Building on 40 acres it already owns near the Kootenai Technical Education Campus along Lancaster Road. Out there on the Rathdrum Prairie, KTEC serves high school students seeking hands-on training for a number of technical jobs. CTEB will be home to the next steps on those career-driven paths.

According to NIC Trustee Ron Nilson, the college has spent several years and some $300,000 on five consultants trying to figure out the best place and size for CTEB. When trustees voted Monday night for the prairie site and a cap of $15 million for the project, there were those among us who wanted to offer a standing ovation just for making the decision - any decision.

As Board Chairman Ken Howard said several times, there was no bad choice among the four final options. The prairie site certainly makes sense from a number of perspectives, not the least of which is that the college had already purchased property for that specific purpose.

Readers might appreciate how far this discussion has traveled, only to arrive back somewhere near its point of origin. According to a story published in The Press on Dec. 27, 2010:

"North Idaho College is planning to build its own $35.4 million professional technical facility in two phases on property it owns adjacent to the high school site.

"The first $20.5 million phase has been submitted to Idaho's Department of Public Works as a capital budget request for 2013, and is No. 2 on NIC's building priority list behind the joint use building planned on the education corridor adjacent to the Coeur d'Alene campus.

"The second phase is on the college's capital request list for 2017, although the first phase will be fully operational without the second phase."

Next on the agenda is figuring out precisely how to pay for CTEB. State funding is out of the question, but the college has been saving money for something like this; a combination of using some of those savings and getting voter approval for the remainder appears possible, if not likely. The board of trustees intends to figure that out by August.

In the meantime, administrative and elected leaders of our community college deserve credit for graduating from years of talk to the more revered plane of taking action. NIC can serve no greater purpose than providing training for the jobs that are here now, that will be here tomorrow and even those nobody has conceived of yet. Please keep that third group in mind as CTEB finally begins to take shape.