Envisioning 2025: ‘In Yo’ Face,’ Township Tells State College

Note to readers: This one in an occasional series of satirical columns imagining how State College may change in the years to come. Earlier installments are posted here and here.

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Good day, State College. It’s March 28, 2025, and here are your top local news stories.

Today will mark the 30th time Penn State President Graham Spanier has appeared before the state House Appropriations Committee for an annual budget hearing. Tough to imagine for the kids out there, but these hearings once brought discussion about the state’s contribution to the university.

Now, of course, it’s all about what the university will appropriate for the state, a pattern going back to 2012.

Spanier has argued it’s only fair that Penn State cap its formal contribution to the state at $200 million this year — given the positive economic impact delivered by the university’s upper-crust students from New Jersey, Maryland and New York. Meanwhile, the demise of Pennsylvania’s once-traditional support for public higher education has hastened the decline of in-state enrollments at Penn State; Pennsylvanians now account for 35 percent of its student body.

For those students who live off campus in State College, housing options are about to grow again. The Ferguson Township neighborhood now known as Skyscraper Kingdom, just west of Buckhout Street and the State College borough line, will add another cloud-kissing complex this summer, a developer announced this week. Township supervisors told StateCollege.com they plan to rename nearby access streets ‘In Yo’ Face,’ a gesture toward State College borough.

The Borough Council will meet in emergency session tonight to decide how to respond to the gesture. Several borough neighborhood associations have already suggested the council respond by acting on the latest proposed West End zoning rules, in the works nearly 20 years now.

But the borough Planning Commission has yet to finish its current review of those rules, which include hotly contested guidelines for door-knocker designs.

The Planning Commission has been busy on another front, too, as the State College school district scrambles to cash in on the Marcellus Shale boom. As state support for K-12 education has fallen to $10 million a year statewide, legislators at the just-renamed Blue Flame Capitol Complex in Harrisburg are encouraging local school boards to explore alternative funding options. 

And so State College board members in December discovered a massive pocket of gas beneath historic Memorial Field, in downtown State College.

‘Turns out that prior board members did well in not selling that acreage off,’ board President David Adewumi told StateCollege.com. He estimated the gas bubble under Memorial Field could throw off some $5 million in annual royalties for the school district — once the bleachers, turf and other amenities are cleared for a well field. The borough Planning Commission is scheduled to finalize a well-field-design recommendation by April.

The borough is counting on the well field to boost flagging tax revenues, waning since the council adopted an official policy against all new college-student housing in 2015. Prior generations of student activists had anticipated rounds of enthusiastic protests and civil disturbances to fight the policy, but none materialized.

‘This century has seen unprecedented complacency among college students, for reasons we’re still trying to understand,’ said Penn State Professor G.E. Tangry, director of the university’s nascent Center for Civil Disobedience Studies.

His center may be trying to understand those reasons for a long time: A state grant that had supported its work has been cut.

Our final story this morning recaps State Patty’s Day, held last month. The drinking holiday, now sponsored by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, saw the biggest turnout in its nearly 20-year history, according to new crowd estimates released by the borough. All the downtown bars closed while state-employed ‘sampling specialists’ offered Jose Cuervo shots to passers-by outside Schlow Centre Region Library.

PLCB executives described it as a revenue-building opportunity. The school district, apparently enraged, threatened to dig an oil well under the state’s downtown Cuervo booth.