Governor Mark Sanford says it's a bad idea that would be like your getting a 30-year mortgage to pay for fixing the trim on your house. But the state's colleges and universities are doing it anyway.

The Commission on Higher Education plans to issue $30 million in bonds to pay for 77 deferred maintenance projects at colleges, universities and technical schools around the state.

For example, Greenville Technical College will get more than $575,000 for heating and air conditioning and lighting upgrades. USC-Upstate will spend $500,000 on a new roof for the Humanities and Performing Arts Center.

Gov. Sanford and state comptroller general Richard Eckstrom voted against the plan at Tuesday's Budget and Control Board meeting, saying maintenance should be paid for out of schools' operating budgets. But they were outvoted by the other three members of the board.

Dr. Conrad Festa, executive director of the state's Commission on Higher Education, doesn't dispute the governor's analogy of getting a mortgage to fix your house. But he says deferred maintenance is a much larger problem.

"We have in the state, as in every state, dug a hole with deferred maintenance," he says. "And the reason there's deferred maintenance is because there were higher priorities in the institutions for the funds available."

He says colleges and universities do have money in their budgets for maintenance, and the money did go for that. The problem is the needs were far greater than the money available.

"They're saying, 'I'm not going to reach into my funds that I'm using for academic quality to do that. The state ought to be doing that'," he says.

As large as $30 million is, it doesn't even scratch the surface of what's needed. Dr. Festa says the total deferred maintenance needs of all the state's colleges and universities is $658 million.

It's a problem that's affecting all states. The state of North Carolina passed a $3 billion bond to pay for deferred maintenance and new construction at its colleges and universities.

Dr. Festa says South Carolina lawmakers need to take action to find a permanent solution to paying for maintenance.

For example, they could change state law so that some of the money for constructing new buildings on campus could be set aside for future maintenance. Right now, that's not allowed.

He says recent double-digit tuition increases have not been used to pay for maintenance, but borrowing this money could prevent tuition from going up even more in the future. That's because if schools did not have any other way to get the needed money, they would have to resort to higher tuition.