Emails shed light on UI decision to exit Macbride Nature Recreation Area

A year ago — in early September 2024, just as a 10-member committee was starting to review the feasibility of continuing the University of Iowa’s 66-year-old lease of the Macbride Nature Recreation Area — a UI land manager for the 485-acre property emailed Parking and Transportation with a request.

“We have some major potholes that need to have more repairs than just fillers to maintain the safety of our road,” she wrote. “In several places it could pull someone into the ditch. Would you mind taking a look at them and seeing what can be done?”

The question came amid rumors the university planned to exit its no-cost lease with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and news UI executives had convened a committee “to engage the community regarding the use of Macbride Nature Recreation Area.”

Administrators at the time indicated they were withholding any decision on whether to leave the lease, pending the “in-depth review of the financial and operational sustainability” of the area — given the university is responsible for all maintenance and operational costs associated with the land and its programming.

But an associate vice president hinted toward their thinking in her Sept. 3, 2024 response to the road-repair request.

“The project to fix this road as it needs to be is on hold,” Debby Zumbach, associate vice president and director of Business Services and Parking and Transportation, wrote. “But if we can patch etc. until we are no longer managing MNRA, we should keep it operational.”

A Parking and Transportation manager responded with a list of concerns, recommending work across 10 sites that had either been “compromised” or “pulverized beyond what patching can fix.”

Zumbach took the request to UI Senior Vice President and University Architect Rod Lehnertz, who suggested taking the question to an upcoming “core team MNRA future meeting” — given it is “sensitive and actions may have implications.”

“I suspect there will be preference to stay quiet and do nothing during the review, but maybe not,” he said.

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Should UI decide to exit the lease, Lehnertz said, “I would only want to invest if not doing so would force safety closures (and even then, we might want to think about where/how much would have to be closed).”

Zumbach suggested “minimal work” to get them through the winter.

“Institutional roads funds will cover maintenance,” she said of a state revenue-sharing program. “But I was more worried about optics.”

Lehnertz said small-area patching with gravel seemed “a responsible way to reduce the costs (for now) and stay relatively quiet while the review takes place.”

“We should have clarity and then ‘freedom’ as May arrives,” he said, referencing the due date for the committee’s final report.

When asked last week whether the university ended up doing any repairs based on those requests brought to Zumbach last September, officials told The Gazette, “no.”

‘Quite a few questions’

In the weeks and months that followed the September road-repairs exchange, according to emails obtained by The Gazette through an open records request, UI administrators, staff, committee and community members discussed a range of MNRA issues, like what it might cost to “appropriately and safely keep” the lease; funding options to cover the costs; and when and how to engage the public.

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The Corps itself — a few months into the review — asked how to provide input.

“There were quite a few questions from the attendees about the process around the review of whether to terminate the lease agreement the university has with the Corps,” Mary Sue Bowers, a natural resources specialists with the Corps, told UI representatives in a Jan. 10 email about a meeting at which the lease was discussed.

“(The UI MNRA representative) was not able to shed much light on where people should direct letters of support or questions to, so if you have any information about that, please let me know,” Bowers wrote, adding, “Hopefully you all know that the Corps would like the lease to remain with the university, and if there are specific issues that we could help with we would like the opportunity to try.”

When the university in June 2024 first announced its lease review — after earlier that year declining to help its College of Education cover maintenance and operational costs for the area going forward, despite plans to do so — officials said the committee would gather input from “the campus and broader community.”

Seven months later, having heard nothing since, Connie Mutel — a retired senior science writer with the UI College of Engineering and member of the Johnson County Conservation Board — wrote to committee members and UI President Barbara Wilson asking when and how that was going to happen.

“The committee’s report is due in three months, and I am concerned that I have not heard anything about a public forum or a solicitation of written comments from the public,” Mutel wrote Jan. 28. “Local and state residents (including UI staff and students) have asked me how they could express their support for MNRA. I haven’t known how to respond to these inquiries, but I am concerned about the apparent lack of transparency regarding the committee’s considerations.”

Pete Matthes — senior adviser to the president, vice president of external relations, and MNRA review committee member assigned to the “external groups” subcommittee — responded three days later on Feb. 1, saying “UI has solicited and received a broad array of feedback from a host of stakeholders.”

That engagement, Matthes said, “has occurred in one-on-one meetings, letters (such as yours), and small group meetings.” Without detailing who and how many people or groups the committee had engaged, Matthes urged Mutel to give his email address to anyone wanting to provide additional information.

Less than a week later on Feb. 7, Lehnertz — also serving on the review committee, but assigned to its finance-focused subgroup — sent “draft language” of a report summary to Finance and Operations staff for review.

“Pete Matthes has offered a very early draft version of something that will become a summary for the president (due by May 1),” Lehnertz wrote, referencing “chapters” of the final report that will come from each of the committee’s subgroups: “finance and history,” “academic programs,” and “external groups.”

“I want to first make sure that each of you are generally comfortable with the language and claims made in Pete’s summary,” Lehnertz wrote. “As one might expect, our chapter is an important one.”

Mutel the following week emailed Matthes’ to ask again about public feedback.

“Have you considered also holding a public forum before the report is finalized?” she said. “This could be an excellent way to gather additional input, as well as dispel any apparent lack of transparency.”

Two days later, the UI Office of Strategic Communication on Feb. 13 gave campus members a month — until March 14 — to submit input about the MNRA lease to an “MNRA-feedback@uiowa.edu” email address.

‘Will not renew’

The final report — made public July 10 — said the committee got 676 responses to the “widely disseminated email address,” all but six of which asked the university to “maintain MNRA.”

The largest chunk — 40 percent, or 272 — were Johnson County residents, and 24 percent were involved with School of the Wild, a 26-year-old collaboration between the UI College of Education and local schools inviting thousands of elementary students to learn and explore on the property for a week every fall.

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The report said “public feedback prompted the committee to seek engagement with community organizations to evaluate their interest in pursuing” one of three levels of collaboration: Assume full responsibility and the terms of the remainder of the lease; become the primary lease holder, with UI as a partner; or share the lease responsibilities with UI and other community groups.

UI officials told The Gazette the committee engaged five external groups about the partnership options but declined to provide specific group names — other than Johnson County Conservation, which made its own name public.

“Has this been shared with and approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers? I don't know if the current lease with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers allows the UI to have a sublease with other entities,” Johnson County Conservation Director Bradley Freidhof said in response to the committee’s outreach about possible collaboration on April 2 — less than a month before its final report was due to President Wilson.

“If the lease were available for review, I think that would be helpful,” Freidhof said, adding that additional information “would be of assistance for the Conservation Board to have to make an informed decision.”

The committee member who had sent over the collaboration options — UI Engineering Professor Craig Just — said he hadn’t seen the lease, “and to my knowledge the review committee hasn’t seen it either.”

“But I can imagine the terms are fairly straightforward,” he said, adding later in the email, “The committee has not discussed the potential viability of the ‘brainstormed’ partnership ideas with the Corps.”

A copy of the lease provided to The Gazette in June 2024 indicates the university — which must maintain the property and provide three years notice if it wants to exit the lease — cannot transfer or assign the lease or any property on the premises, nor sublet it or grant any interest, privilege or license in connection with the lease “without permission in writing from the district engineer.”

“The lessee will not sponsor or participate in timeshare ownership of any structures, facilities, accommodations, or personal property on the premises,” according to the lease.

On July 7 — three days before making the final report public — the university put in its notice with the Corps.

“The university has determined it will not renew the ground lease with the Army Corps of Engineers when the lease expires in June 2029,” according to UI Business Manager David Kieft. “The university intends to fulfill its lease obligations over the next four years.”

However, he wrote, aspects of the university’s programming on the land “will be relocated between now and the end of the lease.”

That, he said, will include School of the Wild, Wildlife Camps, and the Iowa Raptor program.

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‘A higher priority’

Among the biggest challenges the committee cited in maintaining the lease was nearly $15 million the university would need to spend right away — in year one — to “ensure the site remains safe and operational.”

Additionally, the committee’s finance subgroup determined the university would need to spend nearly $1 million annually going forward on building and landscape maintenance.

The university’s most recent 2023 operation and maintenance plan for MNRA had its College of Education covering land management staffing and other budget needs, “with the goal of having funding responsibilities taken over by the University of Iowa’s general fund in coming years.”

The college in fiscal 2023 reported an MNRA budget deficit of $533,840, with its $1.2 million in expenses surpassing its $643,216 in revenue — although College of Education Dean Daniel Clay told UI Provost Kevin Kregel that land management expenses alone, excluding costs for educational programming, hovered around $250,000 a year.

Despite the prior plans, UI administrators in March 2024 notified Clay “that the university will not be providing financial support for MNRA.” In evaluating the implications of that decision, the College of Education finance director in April 2024 told Kregel, “Our UI WILD programming does not generate enough revenue to cover any of these expenses, so we are fully subsidizing this from the college’s other funds, which we do not have the ongoing resources to commit to.”

And the review committee’s July 2025 report shared the college had ended its funding of MNRA maintenance in January 2025 — leaving “no specific UI or departmental source of funds allocated for these expenses, which are associated with the no-cost lease from the Corps of Engineers.”

In parsing out the $15 million in year-one, up-front costs to maintain the lease, finance subgroup members determined the university would need to spend more than $8 million on facility repairs, a new storm shelter, required restrooms, and internet and cellular infrastructure.

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Report: Continuing Macbride Nature area lease would cost UI $14.8M

More than $6.6 million of the total would go toward replacing chip-seal roads with concrete, according to a Shive-Hattery engineering report the committee relied on for its findings.

And while $5 million of that $6.6 million would be eligible for UI-designated “institutional roads” funding — state-shared revenue from a Road Use Tax Fund — the committee didn’t reference that funding option in its report.

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“We have many more UI campus roads that would occupy a higher priority, and before suggesting ‘we’ (institutional roads) would help to fund part of the MNRA need, I would want to make sure the main campus is appropriately addressed,” Lehnertz wrote in an email in October. “That might mean zero for MNRA, in which case I would include $6.6M as a ‘cost due’ to appropriately and safely ‘adopt’ MNRA.”

Lehnertz asked Zumbach if she thought some portion of the $5 million in institutional roads-eligible costs at Macbride “could or should be covered” — noting “we have planned to steer $1.3M there previously.”

A UI five-year institutional roads program update from 2024 slated $1.3 million to improve the MNRA main road in 2025.

“I would limit to the $1.3M we already committed to MRNA,” Zumbach told Lehnertz — although that designation was not noted in the final committee report.

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com