UMKC gets financial help with Health Sciences Building

Come fall 2009, more University of Missouri-Kansas City pharmacy and nursing students and faculty should be moving into new space in the Health Sciences Building on Hospital Hill.

And in Columbia, contractors will be ready to start building a new clinical cancer treatment center at the University of Missouri.

Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder on Tuesday signed into law a bill making $46.2 million available for the two projects. About $15 million will go toward the completion of the UMKC building, which opened last fall, and $31.2 million will help build a new Ellis Fischel Cancer Center in Columbia.

The $50 million Kansas City building was started in 2005, but the university only had about $35 million available to pay for it. So, large spaces on three levels of the five-story building were left empty.

"The question was, do we build a smaller building or do we build shell space - just the outer walls - so we will have a building that would suit the future needs of the state?" said Robert Piepho, dean of the pharmacy school.

Money for the Kansas City and Columbia projects comes from the sale of assets from the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, which agreed to transfer $350 million to the state over six years.

In spring 2007, political disputes over whether money from the sale should be used for campus construction resulted in the two projects being pulled off the list of university construction proposals. Gov. Matt Blunt promised to restore funding for the projects.

Blunt was out of state, so Kinder signed the legislation.

The Health Science Building project will help UMKC address a shortage of pharmacists and nurses across the state.

Piepho said the pharmacy school will be able to take in 65 percent more students than it could four years ago. He said that will change predictions that the state will be short about 700 pharmacists by 2012.

For nursing, the new space means the school will be able to accommodate all 80 of the students it is permitted to admit each year, said Lora Lacey-Haun, nursing school dean.

The new money will finish and furnish the empty space with state-of-the-art equipment for classrooms and some research labs. Close to $2 million worth of drug delivery research will move into the new space. A rodent testing lab also will be replaced.

By the time the UMKC space is ready for students, architectural designs will be complete on the new $52 million cancer center in Columbia.

The center will replace the nearly 70-year-old Ellis Fischel building. The proposed 100,000-square-feet cancer center is to be built adjacent to an addition planned for the University of Missouri Hospital.

To reach Mará Rose Williams, call 816-234-4419 or send e-mail to mdwilliams@kcstar.com