All you folks who are itching to put a new 5,000-student, four-year Oregon State University college campus down in the hole of a played-out pumice mine in west Bend, listen up:

By a recent account, filling the mine hole to a usable elevation will require 150,000 truck loads. Building the Bend Parkway required only 100,000 truck loads of material and still cost more than $100 million. And didn’t it cost $10 million just to clean the trash out of the 10 ballfield acres at Summit High School?

A campus of the proposed size would require about the same amount of concrete as the parkway, which means that the published cost estimates for the campus are, so far, wildly imaginary, using the mine site. “Spectacularly ignorant” best describes the current published cost projections.

The proposed 50-plus acres is about what a parking lot would need for a campus of 5,000 students, not counting staff. I’ve heard officials lament that even in the early stages of construction, parking would be problematic and that they weren’t allowing much money for parking. The notion that everyone is going to ride a bike or walk to a Central Oregon campus is pure nonsense.

The preference of a west-side location, which will be buried in an endless traffic jam, seems to be solely that of the Central Oregon Community College-Oregon State University management, by recent accounts, which made no reference at all to the preference of the customers, the students — many of whom will be from out of town.

It seems to be related purely to management’s convenience. How is that?

I notice that campuses always have great parking for staff. The COCC campus is the worst example in Oregon of planning and leaves out the customers. That campus has never had reasonable parking for students, and anyone who has ever been involved in operating that campus should be automatically excluded from participation in designing a new campus.

Over the past half-century I’ve visited every college campus in Oregon. There are maybe four that ever gave any real consideration to the customers — the students. The private schools are motivated to make it convenient for their customers. Somehow the public school managements think their customers will tolerate whatever they throw out, and that, folks, is what makes private schools.

The mission statement for the new OSU campus includes continuing education. It demands that provisions be made for working folks to be able to quickly access the campus. It also demands that management guarantee that access is convenient when they go to the voters for bond money or expect no support.

The old-timers who laid out the college land-grant system started out with a section of land and master planned it from the start, so that the planning horse doesn’t have to be continually whipped.

There is an unobstructed section of land waiting at Juniper Ridge. Use it. And don’t forget to preplan a location for a stadium. Which OSU staffer thinks you’ll get away with trying to build a 5,000-student campus that has no stadium? Were you going to print up some sweatshirts that say something like “Go Liberal Arts”? Start with the section, one side each for classrooms, housing, stadium, expansion and the center with 5,000 parking spaces. It just ain’t that hard.

I’ve yet to hear any OSU management person address actual proposed curriculum — other than the non-job-producing classes in literature and happiness. There must be a heavy element of technology, engineering, high-speed production and business, just to name samples. This is what is necessary to bring jobs back from China and other offshore spots. Avoid empire building and the PSU model and work to address the 21st century.

But, please, just once, do something for the customer.