Wishful thinking of a public four-year college for our community is taking a truly sensible route — yet it runs through economy-beleaguered voters, so it could be a tough trip:

On Aug. 3, county residents will be asked to approve a $35 million bond issue for Santa Fe Community College. The biggest of its five elements would put $12 million toward a cooperative learning center where our state's universities could provide bachelor-degree programs.

This is a vastly better idea than turning yet another junior college into yet another four-year institution in a state already overrun with such things.

We can see the learning center, proposed as a midtown neighbor to Santa Fe University of Art and Design (still better known as the College of Santa Fe), as a miniature version of downtown Denver's "Auraria Campus." There, the University of Colorado, the local community college and Metropolitan State College share such things as a library, a computer center and a student union, as well as college credits.

This has been a successful education solution for Denver — which, like Santa Fe, is a state capital without a four-year state school of its own. UNM, New Mexico State and New Mexico Tech have shown interest in such a concept.

For many Santa Feans, it would mean the end of long commutes to New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas or The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque — and less-lengthy drives or rides to the emerging four-year Northern New Mexico campus in Española.

And for those suspicious that SFCC President Sheila Ortego has four-year aims for her college, part of her pitch for the bonds is that she'll keep in place a two-year school.

She also says that the new bonds won't increase taxes; the old bonds have been paid down to where today's property tax rates, and today's low interest rates, will pay off the $35 million during years to come.

The four other goals of this bond issue are:

• $7.6 million in improvements to the roads, entries and parking lots of the school's main campus on South Richards Avenue.
• $7 million in energy-efficiency projects, including photovoltaic arrays, that offer long-range savings on utility bills as well as lessened environmental impacts.
• $5.4 million in continually pressing computer-technology upgrades and backups, as well as infrastructural renewal such as water-saving installations and cooling-tower and roof replacement.
• $3 million in renovations for some of the buildings and grounds of the campus, which in places is beginning to show a couple of decades' age.

With a student body approaching 6,500, demands on the college are growing. And as more students gain their associate degrees, more will welcome the challenges and opportunities of bachelor degrees and beyond.

The proposed higher-education center is a reasonably priced approach to serving many of those students. We think President Ortego and the SFCC board should have offered the community a two-part ballot a week from Tuesday, with the midtown-campus center separate from the main-campus bonds.

However, the prospect of pursuing four-year degrees, at state-college tuition costs, perhaps just two years from now, should be too appealing for Santa Feans to turn down.

The New Mexican recommends approval of the bond issue.