WACO, Texas (Texas Tribune) — The students training to go into construction can feel the classroom floor dip under their steel-toed shoes. The carpet sits on an incline — it has been stretched thin over a metal drain pipe, a relic from when the facility had a different life.
Next door, about a dozen plumbing students are digging out tough soil to practice installing a sewage system. The pipe materials they will use are housed outside because they’ve run out of room for storage. The unlucky ones may find a lone snake or a few rodents.
This Texas State Technical College campus was once retrofitted out of a former U.S. Air Force base. About 60 years later, the school is still operating some classes in a hangar. Because of chronic underfunding, Texas State Technical College and its 11 campuses have struggled to come up with the money to upgrade decades-old infrastructure.
Students have had to make do, working amid cluttered conditions with equipment long past its lifespan. But that’s if they can get into the program at all. The school had to turn away 500 young adults ready to be trained for the workforce this fall because facilities for about two dozen programs had reached their capacity limit, according to data the college shared with The Texas Tribune.
The technical school has been beholden to the will of the Legislature. But this election, Texas voters will decide whether Texas State Technical College, the state’s primary higher education system for workforce development, should get a new, permanent funding source for its capital needs. On the ballot is Proposition 1, which would create an $850 million endowment, resulting in an estimated $40 million in extra funds each year for fixes.
At a time employers are begging schools to churn out more skilled workers, the fight to get the referendum approved reveals just how badly the technical college needs help to build out and train the future workforce.
“We have to keep up with the demand for trained technicians to keep our economy going.” Joe Arnold, the deputy vice chancellor of governmental relations at Texas State Technical College, said. “If the economy goes south, then the citizens of Texas are the ones that are ultimately going to suffer.”
Brian Spy, the program team lead for plumbing, shows off the dollhouses that sit in the plumbing school, which help students visualize where real plumbing equipment would go inside of actual homes.
Ambitions outrun budget
The pressure on Texas State Technical College to deliver is about sustaining the economy . The state has been walking toward a labor cliff: An aging workforce and increased demand means Texas is estimating a need for 7,000 plumbers, 4,500 HVAC technicians and 10,000 electricians by 2030.
“We’re talking about tens of thousands of positions that go unfilled because we simply don't have people trained sufficiently to do those jobs,” said Tony Bennett, the president of the Texas Association of Manufacturers. “We desperately need Texas State Technical College to scale their campuses to help close that gap.”
Funding at Texas State Technical College depends on graduates getting economic value out of their degree and joining the workforce. If students don’t get a job in their field within six months of graduation, they can get their money back. The state also won’t pay the school.
The technical college also faces a unique limitation: It can’t levy taxes and raise bonds from those taxes, a critical avenue peer education institutions go down to expand their campuses and update their facilities.
Advocates say that puts the technical college at a real disadvantage to expand its footprint to meet the workforce needs of the state. For example, the Alamo Colleges District in San Antonio secured nearly $1 billion in bond money this spring to keep up with growth and Austin Community College obtained $770 million the same way three years prior.
The technical school has, ultimately, been at the mercy of state lawmakers, which has resulted in uneven funding from year to year. The Legislature on occasion gives the school extra money through what is known as capital construction assistance projects. That makes it hard to plan for, but such a move allowed the school to break ground on a new building at their Waco campus that they estimate will allow them to increase enrollment by 30%.
“Whenever TSTC needs to build a new building or expand a program, they have to go beg the Legislature for money,” said Mike Meroney, a lobbyist for Texas businesses.
A plumbing classroom at Texas State Technical College in Waco. The school, which sits on a former Air Force Base, has repurposed rooms and certain equipment for learning.
‘Lipstick on a pig’
As the college feels the pains of uneven funding, instructors have to get creative to stretch out the money they get. Behind the one-story plumbing building, students cut pipes out of a shed. Without exhaust fans to ventilate the space, the instructors have resorted to keeping the front door open, bringing in winter’s wind chill and summer’s heavy heat.
Outside another building, two slabs of metal double as a doormat. It’s pitted with rust and speckled with brown and white, the surface dulled by years of boots and weather.
“We’ve been really good stewards with the property and the money the state has given us. But everything has a shelf life,” Arnold said. “There’s this old expression, you can't put lipstick on a pig. … That’s where we’re at with some of our buildings.”
The plumbing students had previously been using a bandsaw from the 1970s, a piece of machinery that was missing some standard modern safety features. The college says they have sometimes had to delay replacing costly equipment, a gamble that could mean students are familiarizing themselves with machines they won’t see when they enter the workforce.
The college is also struggling to fit students into the space they have – forcing them to add waitlists to 22 of their programs. In one room on their Waco campus, plumbing instructor Tony Montoya’s cubicle is so small, he cannot fit a single blueprint he needs to grade over his desk. In another, two students are assigned to a single toilet to practice fixing leaks, with the toilets a few feet away from each other.
“We’re utilizing every inch of every space,” Montoya said.
Construction employees continue work on the outside of a new Texas State Technical College building in Waco. The building has a projected opening date of Spring 2026.
The promise of Proposition 1
Texas lawmakers came close to passing a constitutional amendment to fund Texas State Technical College before. In 2023, it was among a slew of legislation Abbott vetoed to signal his disappointment on property tax negotiations.
Business leaders were watching with bated breath during this year’s regular session to see if Proposition 1 would be a casualty in political negotiations. The funding effort almost got caught in the crosshairs last spring when House Democrats threatened to shoot down all constitutional amendments over school vouchers.
If voters approve Proposition 1, the state would take $850 million out of the general revenue fund and put it into the Texas Institution Infrastructure Fund. The comptroller’s office would funnel some of those dollars into a new Workforce Education Fund for the technical college to access.
Arnold estimates the college would get about $40 million a year at the onset. He said it won’t fulfill all their needs — they’ll have to make careful choices on how to spend it — but it will make a dent.
“That's the biggest thing that the endowment does for us. … We will have a reliable source of income for capital projects and only for capital projects,” Arnold said. “That’s the game changer.”
The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
