COLUMBIA Mun Choi, the UM System president, was authorized Friday to send in a state funding request for educational buildings at each campus.

The Board of Curators met Friday morning in Ellis library's teleconference room, and they voted unanimously for Choi to send in the request. The request is for fiscal year 2019, which will begin on July 1, 2018, so the talks revolved around potential funding after that date.

The request listed priority projects for each of the four UM system campuses. The main item of discussion, and the most expensive of the projects, was MU's planned Translational Precision Medicine Complex.

Translational medicine focuses on research to discover new ways of diagnosing or treating health problems and also instituting those new techniques on actual patients.

With the recent big cuts made to the Missouri higher education budget, the curators said it is unlikely that these projects will be immediately funded, but they believe it is important for their request to be officially made nonetheless.

MU's translational medicine complex is expected to cost about $250 million, $100 million coming from the school and $150 million asked for from the state. It is estimated to generate over $500 million in economic impact and create 3,860 jobs, according to the appropriations request.

MU has taken preliminary steps for the new translational medicine complex to be built on the site of the former International Institute of Nano and Molecular Medicine,which was closed at the end of June.

MU is one of the 62 members of the Association of American Universities. This means it is considered a leading research institution across the U.S. and Canada. The other three UM System campuses benefit from MU's status as an AAU university, so investing in a new research facility at MU helps the whole system indirectly, curators said. For this reason, the translational medicine complex is the top capital funding priority for the system, they said.

Several times throughout the meeting the curators referenced their July 18 and 19 retreat in Columbia, which Maurice Graham, the chair of the board of curators, described as one of the most constructive curator meetings he has ever participated in. At Friday's meeting, Graham emphasized the need for the capital appropriations request to include projects from all four campuses in order to continue the spirit of intra-system cooperation that was a focus of that retreat.

All four campuses are represented in the appropriations request. The Kansas City campus and Missouri University of Science and Technology are each requesting funds for renovations of their chemistry and biological sciences buildings, and the St. Louis campus is requesting funds for "space consolidation and infrastructure."

Ryan Wrapp, the system's chief financial officer, emphasized the need for the system to move away from a reliance on state funding for school buildings. In the past, the state would fund new buildings entirely, he said, but now they need to move toward targeted fundraising, partnerships with private businesses, or fund-matching with the state.

Curator Jeffrey Layman pointed out the possibility of a future federal infrastructure bill that could provide additional funding for public universities. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for such a bill, though lately Congress has been mainly focused on health care, and the president has not unveiled any major infrastructure bill.

Choi described the request to the state as the first step in a dialogue and as a "give and take." With the four campuses' top priorities formally submitted to the state, when there is money to spend the state will know exactly what the campuses hope to use it for, he said.

It was pointed out that, historically, funding has come to the system often when it is not expected, so the process of requesting the funding is still important even if it feels extremely unlikely.

Supervising editor is Sky Chadde.

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UM Board of Curators asks state for $150 million for MU project ... - Columbia Missourian