http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/met....44309f6a.html
Web Posted: 02/02/2007 12:42 PM CST
Melissa Ludwig
Express-News
Regents for the Texas A&M University System on Friday announced they will likely build a new South Side A&M campus on 550 acres a half-mile south of Loop 410, a chunk of land donated by a group of Las Vegas investors hoping to profit from a planned community around the campus.
Regents voted to begin negotiations with Triple L Management and the city to obtain the site in what Chairman John White called “another giant leap forward in making Texas A&M University-San Antonio a reality.”
Triple L, which includes Las Vegas casino owners and executives, has offered to donate 400 acres for a campus and another 150 acres for an irrigation technology center. Triple L owns a total of 1,700 acres in the north of the Toyota manufacturing plant, and will use that acreage to build Verano at City South, a housing, entertainment and retail development.
Other offers, including one by Sugar Land-based development company Terramark Communities, would have required the city to buy land and donate it back to A&M. One option had the city spending $15 million to buy out about 100 landowners and clean up environmental messes.
Among the discarded offers, the big loser was Terramark, which was hoping to build a planned community called Espada around an 800-acre campus and irrigation technology center that would border the San Antonio River and neighbor Mission Espada and the Mission Trail.
Terramark offered to donate 400 acres of land between U.S. 281 and the San Antonio River for the campus, with the city buying another 400 acres adjacent to the donated plot, including 265 acres from Terramark.
Other sites in the running included a 400-acre parcel at the intersection of Loop 410 and U.S. 281 that would have required the city to spend at least $15 million to buy out around 100 landowners and clean up any environmental messes before donating it to A&M.
The last option, a 1,000-acre site south of the Toyota plant and off Loop 1604, was widely considered too far away.
A&M officials hope to open the campus in 2009 and expect it to draw 25,000 students within 25 years.