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UTEP student building to be demolished, rebuilt with fee increase [1]

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Date: 2025-05-30

The State Senate this week passed House Bill 2853 that will allow the University of Texas at El Paso to demolish and rebuild Student Union West, refurbish parts of Union East and raise student fees to help pay for the planned actions.

Now the legislation, approved Tuesday after it passed in the House of Representatives on May 1, will return to the House where its author, El Paso state Rep. Vince Perez, will review any changes.

One change is that the University of Texas System Board of Regents may increase the Student Union Fee by no more than 10% of the amount from the preceding year. The money must go toward payments for the construction, operation, maintenance and improvements of the union. However, students may vote to exceed that cap.

Perez’s office said the representative plans to concur with the changes. Once approved, the bill will be sent to Gov. Greg Abbott. The Legislature’s 2025 session ends Monday. The act would take effect Sept. 1, and would apply to spring 2026 fees.

The news was hailed as a positive step forward by Perez, Sen. César Blanco, the bill’s Senate sponsor, UTEP President Heather Wilson and Student Government Association President Edgar Loya.

Wilson and Loya praised Blanco and Perez for their efforts, and said the new facilities will offer improved resources that will support students and their education.

“This bill will deliver the modern, state-of-the-art facility our students need and deserve,” Perez said in a statement.

Vincent Perez

PJ Vierra, historian of Texas higher education and a member of the UTEP Heritage Commission, said the Senate’s decision disappointed him. He said Blanco and the Senate Education Committee did not respond to the detailed information he sent about the building’s historical significance.

The building, which opened in 1949, was designed by architect Percy McGhee in the campus’ Bhutanese style. University leaders said that the building is in poor shape and that it would be less expensive to tear it down and rebuild it than to renovate it. UTEP did not provide any cost estimates for the project.

Vierra, who earned his Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition in 2016 from UTEP, said the structure was “over engineered” so the inside could have been renovated while leaving the exterior intact. He admitted that the building needed work, but blamed years of deferred maintenance for its condition.

“This is not simply about updating facilities — it is about permanently erasing part of the oldest extant university campus in Texas, built between 1917 and 1951,” Vierra said in a statement. He later added, “Once demolished, this piece of Texas architectural heritage can never be recovered.”

Vierra also questioned the process that led to this legislation. Only 9% of the institution’s 25,039 students participated in the referendum in late September 2024. The final tally from electronic voting was 1,171 (51.6%) for and 1,098 (48.4%) against.

Union West is the home of the UTEP Dinner Theatre, Sept. 12, 2024. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)

The current building houses the UTEP Dinner Theatre, Dean of Students Office, Information Resources, University Career Center, Student Support Services Program, the Student Engagement & Leadership Center, and Counseling and Psychological Services.

There are no announced plans to include space for the dinner theatre, which in September was restructured to be less reliant on student fees, in the proposed union building. The plans do include a proposed ballroom that could accommodate 600-800 people. The dinner theatre was launched in 1983 in a ballroom.

The dinner theatre’s interim director Jaime Barba had no comment for this story.

Carol Viescas, a veteran performer of many dinner theatre productions the past 40 years, said a ballroom is not the right venue for dinner theatre productions.

“It just won’t work,” she said.

State Sen. César Blanco

The university said that the new facility could include collaborative spaces, entertainment areas to include pool, pingpong and esports, healthy dining options, a large ballroom, a shaded outdoor plaza and state-of-the-art technology.

“This new Union will be a hub for connection and Miner pride for years to come,” Blanco, a UTEP alumnus, said in a statement.

As for the fee increase, students had paid $30 per semester for a Student Union Fee since 1988. According to the Senate edit, the fee should increase with the spring 2026 semester, which the referendum posted as $70. Students who register for summer sessions would pay half that amount.

If Perez accepts the Senate change, as is expected, the UT System Board of Regents could raise the fee by up to $15 in fall 2028 and at most an additional 10% each subsequent year.

The future of two other pieces of UTEP-related legislation submitted by Perez have not progressed as much.

The bill to advance a public law school in El Paso County was passed by the House and sent to the Senate on May 15. A Perez spokesman said the bill is not expected to advance, but that the representative was pleased that the legislation made it out of the House with a good amount of bipartisan support.

HB 2855 would allow the UT System Board of Regents to issue up to $100 million in revenue bonds for a student success building and related infrastructure. It was referred to the House Higher Education Committee on May 19, but is not expected to move any further this session, the spokesman said.The Legislature did approve $20 million for UTEP’s planned restart of its Mining Engineering Program. The university, which phased out the program in the mid-1960s, hopes to launch the new degree plan in 2027. In September 2024, the UT System promised to invest $20 million in the program. On May 6, Freeport-McMoRan mining company announced a $7 million gift for the program.

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[1] Url: https://elpasomatters.org/2025/05/30/utep-student-union-demolition-texas-legislature-votes/

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