It’s been nearly a year since Madison Area Technical College got approval for its ambitious facilities master plan, but before any of its multimillion dollar projects can become reality, voters will have to approve a referendum giving MATC the green light to increase the amount it collects in property taxes.

Considering the college hasn’t used a referendum since November 1974, perhaps such a proposal would be a relatively easy sell during more typical times. But trying to pass a referendum during one of the worst economies since the Great Depression — coupled with signs that MATC’s Part Time Teachers’ Union will speak out against the expansion plans — means the school may be facing an uphill battle.

“The economy could be a major issue,” says John Matthews, the executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., who has backed numerous referendums funding K-12 education in Madison over the decades. “The key is you have to get people to understand why they have to pay more taxes and the value of that. You really have to get people to buy into it because you’re asking them to put an ‘X’ in the box that says you are willing to pay more taxes as an investment in the community. You have to convince people it’s an investment that’s going to improve the future for their family.”

It’s not clear yet if a referendum will be coming forward as soon as this fall or what the effect would be on the average homeowner’s tax bill. It’s not even clear how much MATC officials will ask for, given the entire master plan would cost an estimated $350 million.

What college leaders do know, they say, is that enrollment is booming and that they don’t have the space they need to provide what students want and what the area needs for its workforce.

Terry Webb, MATC’s vice president for learner success, says the bottom line is that the college has to be able to educate a higher percentage of the area’s population if it is to supply the local economy with the workforce it needs to flourish. In 2000, the college served about 10 percent of the district’s population of people 18 and older. But as the area’s population has grown over the past decade, MATC hasn’t been able to keep pace. In 2009, it served 6.9 percent of those 18 and over in the district, which serves parts of 12 counties with a population of 725,000 in south-central Wisconsin.

The reason that percentage is falling, as college leaders like to say, is because the school is “bursting at the seams” and simply doesn’t have the space to educate more students. The college reports 23,511 students enrolled in degree-granting majors during the 2009-10 academic year, an increase of 17 percent compared to five years ago. This has led to long waiting lists in several popular areas of study, with health care among the top.

“As the population ages, we’re going to need more nurses and lab technicians and the like, but right now the pipeline is clogged,” says Webb.

To address increased demand, MATC has already expanded its presence at its South Madison campus located in the Villager Mall on South Park Street, unveiled a Center for Adult Learning at 2125 Commercial Ave. to get unemployed people trained in fields where there are jobs, and has continued to expand its presence on the west side by moving forward with plans to lease the entire building at 302 S. Gammon Road, the former Famous Footwear corporate headquarters.

For the future, college officials say all options remain on the table, including examining more public-private partnerships to help fund growth and expanding class schedules later into the night and further into the weekends. But with its studies saying that the college is close to maximizing its facilities, a referendum asking for new construction seems like a near certainty. Each state technical college must get approval from the communities it serves if it wants to borrow more than $1.5 million for building projects over a two-year period.

Two projects that appear to be near the top of the college’s to-do list include a new building with a projected price tag of $24 million to house nursing and health related programs, and a new $30 million fire and protective services facility for those studying law enforcement, firefighting or emergency medical care. Both are proposed to be built at MATC’s flagship Truax campus, which school officials hope some day will look more like a typical college campus — with a series of buildings and green space — and less like a large high school.

The lengthy list of “high priority projects” also calls for, among other things, a new campus someday on the south or west side of Madison, an expanded downtown campus, and site improvements at Truax and the college’s regional campuses in Fort Atkinson, Portage, Reedsburg and Watertown.

“Many of our buildings haven’t been updated, to keep pace with changes in technology, for 25 to 30 years,” says Roger Price, MATC’s vice president of infrastructure services.

The college operates under the direction of the nine-member MATC District Board, whose members will decide when to call for a referendum, how much to ask for and how long the school will take to repay the debt.

With so many variables in play, college leaders say they are unable to estimate at this time how much taxes on the average area home might increase if a referendum is approved.

Recent Madison school referendums aren’t a good guide for that calculation because the pool of property owners would be much larger than just Madison. MATC’s district includes most of Columbia, Dane, Jefferson, Marquette and Sauk counties, and specific school districts in Adams, Dodge, Green, Iowa, Juneau, Richland and Rock counties. For the current year, the MATC tax on an average single-family home in Madison valued at $245,000 is $322. Its tax levy of $95 million is $23 million under the tax levy limit the state places on technical colleges.

The decisions on when, exactly, MATC will take its request to the voters won’t be made until the summer, says District Board President Jon Bales.

“We’re not naive to the fact that it’s a challenging economic time,” says Bales, the superintendent of the DeForest Area School District. “We have to balance that against some real needs for the college and the community. Right now we’re studying a lot of data and examining what the community’s needs are and trying to get an understanding of everyone’s willingness to support a possible referendum.”

One of the key people working on that research is Bob Dinndorf, executive director of the MATC Foundation. He says his group, which is the fundraising arm of the college, is working with consultants to test the political waters on expansion plans and to poll voters about various aspects of a referendum.

“We’re trying to get more of a general temperature, not ‘should we build a health care building or some other building,’” says Dinndorf. “We’re asking people how important is it that we have a top-rate facility so we can serve more people? We’re asking when should we do this and is $300 million too much to think about now? Or should we come back in a couple years (to ask for more funding)? We’re just trying to find what preferences people have.”

A key person to ask might be Carol Carstensen, the former Madison School Board president who left the board in 2008 after six terms and 18 years. She backed 14 referendum questions during that period, 10 of which voters approved, including one in November 2008 when nearly 68 percent favored a plan that allowed the district to exceed its tax limits by $5 million during the 2009-10 school year, then by an additional $4 million in each of the following two years.

It’s notable that the referendum passed overwhelmingly despite the fact that the stock market crashed just two months earlier.

“It’s always a question of tying in what you want to do to the basic mission of the institution and to the good of the community — how is this going to benefit everybody,” says Carstensen, who keeps busy these days by volunteering at Madison East High School and serving as a board member of both the Social Justice Center and the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools. “In general, people around here are very supportive of education and understand the importance of it to the broader community and to the viability of the community in the long term.”

Decisions about spending millions of dollars are routinely controversial. MATC got voter approval for a $30 million expansion of its campus in 1974, but then the real debate began. After much wrangling about where a new campus should be built, the new $46.9 million Truax facility opened in 1986. It is almost triple the size of the downtown campus, which had previously been the hub of MATC.

This time, the complicating factors will be the economy and potentially some dissent from within MATC’s own ranks.

“We don’t necessarily have an objection to the college expanding if it’s a smart expansion,” says Mike Kent, a part-time lecturer since 2005 who is president of the MATC Part Time Teachers’ Union. “I just don’t think they’ve shown why the expansion is needed.”

This isn’t the first time Kent and his union have butted heads with MATC leaders. Bargaining for a new contract between the district board and the union broke down over the summer and the union voted to allocate $100,000 to fund a “public education” campaign that included purchasing air time, producing print ads and putting up yard signs in an effort to make people aware of what it views as an unfair situation.

Kent’s union is frustrated that the average part-time teacher at MATC, who receives no benefits, will earn about $2,600 per three-credit course during the 2009-10 academic year. A full-time faculty member, meanwhile, gets an average of nearly $13,400 in total compensation (pay plus benefits) for the same class. The part-timers have proposed a freeze in their pay for now if, in years to come, they receive the same pay raise — not on a percentage basis, but in real dollars — that the full-timers get on a per-class basis.

The sides still are at an impasse, and Kent says the groups likely are headed to arbitration in April.

In a last-ditch effort to put pressure on college leaders, Kent wrote an e-mail to union members last month saying the referendum offers them a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to apply pressure to the administration on a matter they do care about.” The part-timers fear that if the college takes on a good deal of debt to fund an expansion, it will be in no position to address their needs.

Taking this backdrop into consideration, Kent nonetheless makes some interesting points for why MATC might not need to expand.

First, he contends the school isn’t exactly “bursting at the seams” when it comes to enrollment.

“Sure, if you come out to the college and take a look at the parking lot Monday through Friday at 9 a.m., it’s packed,” he says. “But come out on Saturday morning at 9 a.m. or in the later afternoons or evenings during the week, and it’s virtually empty. It’s not so much that we don’t have the space, as much as we maybe don’t have as much space as we’d like on weekdays between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. I think we’d have room to spare if we were to do more evening and weekend classes.”

Kent also says college officials are projecting steady enrollment increases of 3 percent per year into the foreseeable future and are using that figure to explain why expansion is necessary.

“They’re assuming the spike in enrollment that we’ve seen because of the recession is permanent, and that’s a questionable assumption,” says Kent. “That’s an especially serious increase when one realizes that the number of kids graduating from high school in the area is expected to decrease over the next 10 years.”

But MATC officials like Webb say they don’t see demand dropping off.

“I think the college has been very sensitive to the local taxpayers’ needs and reluctance to pay any more taxes than they need to,” says Webb. “But we’re full and that’s part of the reason we expanded to the west and we’ve invested taxpayer money in that expansion. But the students keep coming to us and saying, ‘We need your services.’”