Capital Programs
California Community Colleges - Office of the ChancellorFacilities Planning and Space Management
One of the units within the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s office is the
Facilities Planning Unit, which assists and supports the California Community Colleges’ 73 districts
in matters related to infrastructure and capital outlay. In short, capital outlay is
money dedicated to acquiring, maintaining, building, repairing or upgrading fixed assets such as land,
facilities, machinery and the like. As part of the facilities planning, this unit maintains a Space Inventory Handbook. Within this handbook is outlined the way in which space utilization is tracked
and measured, which in turn affects the eligibility of individual district’s access to
state bond funding for new or remodeling of facilities.
The College is in the process of designing and building a world-class Palm Springs
Campus that is truly going to be "Like No Place Else." The new campus will serve
as a regional workforce innovation center, where students can learn and train for
jobs and careers in the areas of digital arts, media and film, hospitality and culinary
arts, health care, as well as architecture and sustainability.
Work is also underway to expand the Indio Educational Center, which will include additional
classrooms, labs, student collaboration spaces and an Early Childhood Education Center.
The new spaces are designed to accommodate an additional 5,000 students and improve
access for students in the eastern Coachella Valley.
Students in Cathedral City will soon gain access to a 30,000 square-foot Transportation
Technologies Facility that will increase learning opportunities beyond auto repair
to include new technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells, electric engines, biodiesel
systems and hybrids. When it opens, the state-of-the-art program will answer employers'
calls for highly skilled experts in the field. The quality of College of the Desert's
programs and facilities is no secret, as evidence by the fact that prior to 2020 the
enrollment had increased annually for the previous six years.
The Five-Year Construction Plan (also known as the Capital Improvement Program) includes
a priority list of proposed major capital improvement projects approved by the Board
of Trustees annually. The List of Priority Projects included in each Plan includes
information on proposed timing, total project cost and funding.
