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Members of the Joint Ways and Means’ capital construction subcommittee are rather like department store Santa Clauses these days.

Rather than holding court in shopping malls, however, they are inviting officials from Oregon’s colleges and universities to visit the capitol in Salem and tell them what they want this year.

The wish lists are fairly massive.

Greg Hamann, president of Linn-Benton Community College, wants an $18 million, 62,000-square-foot health occupations building.

“We and our community are exceptionally excited about moving forward with this project,” he said.

Not so fast. While Gov. John Kitzhaber wants the Legislature to ante up $632 million this year for construction projects at Oregon’s seven public universities and 17 community colleges, leaders from those institutions must convince lawmakers to help bankroll their projects.

Lawmakers say they won’t just give institutions the money. Officials have to work for it – half of it anyway. If institutions can come up with half of the cost of their proposed projects, the Legislature might kick in the other half. First, however, campus officials have to tout their projects – and last week the Ways and Means subcommittee got an earful from anxious community college officials.

Patty Scott, president of Southwestern Oregon Community College in Coos Bay, said her institution has used the same health education facility since the Kennedy administration. Meanwhile, Curry County has one of the state’s highest senior citizen populations, and the demand for local health care services is increasing.

Officials at Bay Area Hospital in Coos Bay have responded to the demand with a $39 million upgrade of their facility. Scott said the hospital is hiring, but her community college is not supplying workers.

“We are currently unable to meet that demand because we don’t have the ability to train that workforce,” she said.

An $8 million, 40,000-square-foot health education building would not only boost health care training, but also help keep local students in Curry County, she added.

“Sometimes it’s hard for kids in rural high schools to see jobs at the end of the tunnel,” Scott said.

Speaking of demand for workers, Dana Young, president of Treasure Valley Community College in Ontario, said the need for construction workers in Eastern Oregon is expected to jump by 21 percent in the next few years. She told the subcommittee that her institution needs a $2.8 million, 20,000-square-foot career training facility to meet the demand.

“With this new building, we will essentially double the number of students planning for careers in vocational fields,” she said.

The No. 1 priority at Klamath Community College is keeping students in school, said Eric Stasak, vice president of administrative services. The institution therefore needs a $15.8 million, 49,000-square-foot student success center, he told subcommittee members.

“This will increase the footprint of the college by 50 percent,” he said.

He added that college officials particularly want to bring the approximately 500 students working on their General Educational Development (GED) certificates to the main campus.

“Our GED students are currently off campus,” he said. “These students are very close to the edge. The students not on our campus are, essentially, on the back of the bus.”

Training students for construction and other skilled vocations is a particularly high priority, Stasak said.

“We feel that kind of training puts boots on the ground,” he said.

Kitzhaber in February released his own list of proposed projects. He recommends that for the University of Oregon, $84.3 million go to expansion and renovation of the Erb Memorial Union, $84.7 million go to new student housing and $50.2 million go to a student recreation center. For Oregon State University, he advocates that $65 million go to new classrooms.

In addition, officials at Oregon State University-Cascades in Bend are looking for $16 million in capital construction funds to expand into a four-year school. Capital construction funds typically are among the last pieces of business addressed during the legislative session. Recommendations from the Ways and Means subcommittee are still forthcoming.