As new millennium began, plans for Merced College Los Banos campus took shape
This is the third in a series about the Los Banos Campus of Merced College, which will celebrate its golden anniversary with a campus celebration on Nov. 5, 2021, from 4 to 6 p.m., to which the entire community is invited. This article narrates the campus’s third decade, from 1991 to 2001.
The big news near the opening of the third decade of the Los Banos Campus of Merced College was the opening in 1992 of a new childcare center in a new modular building.
The center also served as a laboratory for the campus’s child development program, directed by new full-time instructor Barbara Penney. For the first time, students and others in the community could bring their young children to the campus for state-of-the-art childcare.
In 1992 John Spevak, who had been the campus dean for seven years, moved to the Merced campus to assume the role of acting vice president of instruction after the previous vice president had to leave the position because of medical challenges.
Bob Edminster, who had been a full-time faculty member in natural and physical sciences, assumed the role of acting dean. Under his leadership, the campus kept moving forward with an expanded class schedule. Merced County’s ROP program, under Evelyn Eagleton, brought another modular building onto the campus to provide a closer link between ROP and college students.
In 1994, Spevak was named ongoing vice president, and Edminster was happy to return to teaching, especially to his favorite class, botany. Soon, after a nationwide search, college president Jan Keough named Dr. Anne Newins as the new campus dean.
Newins had worked in the student services area of Merced College and had also served as an intern dean of instruction. She moved into the deanship at the Los Banos campus with enthusiasm. She and her husband Jack moved from Merced into a Los Banos home and became actively involved in the community.
The campus continued to thrive. Soon Newins and college officials, energized by Gene Vierra, the college trustee representing the Westside of Merced County, began to think big.
They worked on plans to have a campus in Los Banos bigger than modular buildings on 10 acres of land. They started to dream of a brick-and-mortar campus on 100 acres of land.
Vierra would regularly bring up the issue of a permanent campus at board meetings. He would frequently say, “I intend to hold my breath until we get a permanent campus!”
Los Banos grew in the 1990s, as more homes were built and more families from the Gilroy-San Jose area moved into the city. It was clear that the campus needed a larger, permanent facility.
Near the end of the decade, the college began to aggressively work on this plan. College President Ben Duran met with Larry Anderson of Anderson Homes, who was building houses on the west side of Los Banos. Anderson agreed to donate 125 acres of land to be used as the site of the college campus, just west of the city limits on Highway 152.
The college began thinking of putting forward a local bond measure for the first time since Merced College began in 1962. College officials and board members decided it would be wise to put separate bond measures on the ballot, one for the Merced area and one for the west side of Merced County, encompassing the Los Banos and Dos Palos school districts.
By 2001, the college had decided to put both the Merced-area and Westside measures on the November 2002 ballot. For the first time, Westside voters would have their chance to support the Los Banos Campus with a bond, specifically for a permanent campus on 125 acres of donated land.
There was also the question, however, of whether Westside residents would actually vote to add to their property taxes by the passage of a bond. But there was also a great deal of hope as the third decade of campus closed at the beginning of a new millennium.