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R-02-05 A RESOLUTION CONCERNING DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW TIDEWATER COMMUNITY COLLEGE CAMPUS AT VICTORY CROSSING. WHEREAS, the Portsmouth Campus of Tidewater Community College was established in 1968 as the founding campus of Tidewater Community College; and WHEREAS, the beginnings of the Portsmouth Campus date back to a four-year, private liberal arts college known as Frederick College, when Frederick W. Beazley, a local philanthropist who strongly supported education and the City of Portsmouth, donated the buildings and infrastructure of this college, including 750 acres of land in the City of Suffolk and a check for $1,000,000, to the Commonwealth of Virginia to launch a comprehensive community college in the Tidewater area of Virginia; and WHEREAS, the facilities of the Portsmouth Campus are inadequate, reflecting the history of the Suffolk site itself as a munitions depot during World Wars I and II; and WHEREAS, the people of Portsmouth deserve a state-of-the-art, comprehensive community college campus that is strategically positioned to meet their education and training needs; and WHEREAS, the Portsmouth Campus of Tidewater Community College served over 8,000 students in academic year 2000-01; and WHEREAS, the City of Portsmouth has undertaken an approximately five hundred-acre revitalization effort known as Victory Crossing, which will include an eighty-acre retail project, an eighteen-hole championship golf course, associated high- quality residential development, and a two-hundred acre business park; and WHEREAS, Victory Crossing is located at the City's center, with easy access to the Interstate highway system and within close reach of both the western portion of Hampton Roads and the Peninsula, and these are the geographical areas, in addition to the City itself, which is the primary source of the student population of the Portsmouth campus; and WHEREAS, reinventing the Portsmouth Campus in part, by incorporating the campus into the Victory Crossing revitalization effort would create a synergistic partnership between the City of Portsmouth and Tidewater Community College which would (1) reach the unserved and underserved pockets of the Portsmouth community that the campus is not currently reaching, while enhancing the campus's service to its existing constituencies; (2) respond to the education and training needs of area residents and businesses while providing an "in-town" venue for collaborating with Portsmouth City Public Schools, particularly in the areas of occupational/techincal and career education, and (3) contribute to the City's economic vitality while advancing the pace of economic development for Victory Crossing itself; and