A scraggly patch of grass and asphalt just north of Sacramento State's football field is where the university hopes to repair its ties to local businesses while building a new 8,000-seat arena.

University President Alexander Gonzalez wants to build a $73 million arena and student center. And here's the iffy part: He has publicly committed to raking up more than a third of the money - $25 million - from private donations in a stingy region.

The arena could become the symbol for an up-and-coming California State University, Sacramento, and the cornerstone of a new era of visibility for the school often overlooked by potential donors and by the 80,000 local Sacramento State alumni.

But if the arena proposal fails, it will leave a stain on Gonzalez's reputation as a savvy fund-raiser and cement the notion that Sacramento's business sector, as one alum put it, still needs to mature.

Gonzalez, 58, took over Sacramento State's top post last summer after six years as president of California State University, San Marcos, in San Diego County. While there, he won accolades for cultivating well-heeled donors and was directly responsible for the 7,600-student campus receiving a $1.2 million gift that became seed money for a new field house. Student fees paid part of the construction costs as well.

Gonzalez started talking up a new arena shortly after arriving in Sacramento.

"The arena idea is about building a reputation," said Paul McClure, vice president of Sacramento advertising agency Glass McClure Inc.

"A multiuse arena like this would be step one to getting more business people and alums to set foot on campus to attend a concert or another event. Then, if they experience a quality facility, they would associate it with the quality of the school," he said.

Marketing experts call this "branding." A powerful symbol - say, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Golden Arches or Notre Dame's Golden Dome - can distinguish a city, product or even a university from its competitors.

Once you've risen above the rabble, it's easier to persuade people to check out your city, buy your hamburgers - or donate to your school.

"The biggest challenge for us is just getting on a company's radar screen," said Debbie Wilson, one of seven development directors who raise outside money for Sacramento State. "We need to do a better job of getting the word out about this university."

Sacramento State is the seventh-largest school in the CSU system, but it has consistently ranked lower in terms of charitable donations since 1990, according to statistics kept by the Council for Aid to Education.

In one particularly rough patch from 1997 to 2002, Sacramento placed no higher than 12th out of the system's 23 campuses. CSU schools in smaller cities with smaller enrollments, such as Chico and Sonoma, placed higher on the fund-raising list than Sacramento.

The university ranked seventh in donations in 2003, its $12.6 million in gifts bolstered by a $2.6 million donation of Greek artifacts by local developer Angelo Tsakopoulos. That was still less than the $22.4 million raised by fourth-place Fresno, whose fund-raising prowess bedevils Sacramento State officials.

"When you start comparing schools, reasonable variables are hard to nail down," said Robert Jones, vice president of university affairs at Sacramento State since 1984. "I mean, what else are you going to do in Fresno? It's Fresno. It's a unique case. They're the only game in town."

But in the next breath Jones admits wistfully: "We've been trying for years to replicate Fresno. We look at those numbers all the time. Sometimes we feel great; sometimes we plunge into despair."

Even if Sacramento State builds a new arena with a brand as exciting as Fresno's winning football or men's basketball programs, the region's businesses may not respond with an outpouring of dollars.

"Sacramento has always faced fund-raising challenges because there's little of the philanthropic spirit that exists in other regions of similar size," said Scott Syphax, a 1988 Sacramento State graduate and president and chief executive of the Nehemiah Corp. of California. His organization has worked with 9,000 lenders across the country to provide down-payment gift money for affordable home purchases.

The region's tight-fisted business history, he says, derives from a half-century of a local economy driven by McClellan and Mather air bases and the state government.

"Because of our lack of large corporate headquarters, we don't have senior executives with huge pools of resources competing for status in the region," Syphax said. "That means that we don't have an egos arms race, where people get engaged in robust charitable one-upsmanship. And that's a detriment to fund raising in the Sacramento area."

But, he noted, the military bases closed a decade ago, and California's budget crisis means a job with the state no longer guarantees lifelong employment.

"Now the regional economy must diversify, and (the arena) may be the test to see if the business community still needs to mature to become more philanthropic," Syphax said.

Gonzalez is hedging his bets, waiting to jump into the deep end of the fund-raising pool until Sacramento State students jump first. On April 27 and 28, students will vote whether to approve a new $110-per-semester recreation fee to pay for nearly $50 million in arena construction bonds.

The kicker is that the fee will only be $10 per semester until Gonzalez raises his $25 million. Many of the students who vote on the measure won't be around when the full fee kicks in three or four years from now.

"I think that's kind of chicken," said Sacramento State senior Bethany Holland as she walked to class recently. "Why not get all the money in donations? Why come to us for it?"

But building an arena financed with one-third private funding is hardly a sure thing, if recent history is any guide.

It took the school's alumni association the better part of a decade to construct the $2.2 million Yamshon Alumni Center. Local alums fell short of the goal, raising less than half the money. A group of Southern California grads stepped in to raise the rest.

Nor does it help that Sacramento State is a relative newcomer to the fund-raising game.

The CSU chancellor's office and its board of trustees didn't push fund raising until the early 1990s. Until then, university presidents were strictly administrators, said former Sacramento State President Donald Gerth.

"I became a president in 1976 at the Dominguez Hills campus before coming here," Gerth recalled. "If I had devoted any time to fund raising, I'd have been called into the chancellor's office and really dressed down. We just didn't do public outreach back then."

That changed in the early 1990s, when, as now, California lapsed into a budget crisis and the CSU board ordered schools to collect donations equal to at least 10 percent of their budgets.

Sacramento State didn't reach that goal until last year, in part because it did not promote itself to businesses. For example, the school did not track donors, what fund-raisers call "effective stewardship."

A 2001 report commissioned by the university puts it this way: "There is currently not a year-round schedule of programs and activities to cultivate past, current and potential donors."

University officials say they've made improvements since then.

Certainly, California's budget travail has brought fund raising into sharp focus. In fiscal 2003-04, the CSU system weathered $304 million in cuts, a sum equal to what could be gained by closing San Diego State University, the largest campus in the CSU system.

The state Legislature is considering chopping an additional $240 million for 2004-05, a sum equal to the combined budgets of the Hayward and San Bernardino schools. Should that pass, Sacramento State will have to squeeze $8.8 million from its roughly $200 million budget drawn from state money and student fees.

"Once upon a time we were a state-funded school. Now we have to beat the bushes for donations," said Wilson, the university development director. "We're really behind the eight ball. The state no longer pays for everything. It can't."

That places Gonzalez in an odd position. He is the leader of an economic juggernaut that, according to a recent study, annually generates nearly 16,000 jobs and creates nearly $750 million in regional economic activity. But he has to raise private money for an arena while making tough cuts to services, including class offerings.

It could be a tough sell to ask private businesses to loosen purse strings for a state school that already gets public money.

"A lot of business people probably think that they pay a good deal in taxes," said Roger Valine, a 1973 Sacramento State graduate and president and chief executive of Rancho Cordova-based Vision Service Plan. "They could think, 'I'm already doing my part.' And since other organizations need help, including private schools and charities, their money could go there."

Whether Gonzalez's arena plan succeeds may come down to his ability to brand Sacramento State as an excellent, but cash-strapped, institution.

It's a dangerous pitch, according to the in-house report obtained by The Bee. It warns that fund raising can backfire if it makes the university appear inept.

"Too often an institution will turn to its friends and alumni for private support to eliminate deficits and to reinstate funds eliminated through budget cuts," says the 2001 report by Kelsh Consulting. "While you may resolve some short-term funding issues, you erode the reputation of your institution as a well-managed, strategically led organization."