By SARA HEBEL

Most of the state's public colleges gained the authority to charge tuition in 2005, having previously been limited to assessing fees that could only be used to pay for maintenance, utilities, and other noninstructional costs.

The Legislature passed a measure in March to give Boise State University, Idaho State University, and Lewis-Clark State College the right to send students tuition bills and to use that revenue to pay for both instructional and noninstructional expenses. The University of Idaho continued to be barred from charging tuition because its fees-only restriction was spelled out in the state's Constitution.

The budget that legislators passed in 2005 contained a 2.5-percent increase in appropriations for public colleges and universities. They received a total of $228.9-million for 2005-6.

Higher-education officials said that the slight increase in state aid would not be enough to cover increasing utility bills and the costs associated with growing enrollments, which had risen by 12.4 percent, to 60,565, over the previous four years.

The college officials said that the resulting budget crunch had led institutions to turn more and more to students and their families for funds. For 2005-6, fees for resident undergraduates were set to increase by an average of 9.2 percent.

In other news, a controversy ignited in the fall of 2004 over the renaming of an indoor-sports facility at Boise State. In accepting a $4-million gift the previous spring, the institution agreed to change the name of the facility from the Pavilion to Taco Bell Arena.

Students and faculty members objected to the change. The Faculty Senate passed a resolution in October that called on the university to sever ties with an Idaho-based company that owns regional Taco Bell franchises and to remove the fast-food chain's logo from the 12,380-seat arena. Opposition arose from allegations by agricultural workers in Florida that Taco Bell suppliers engaged in unfair labor practices.

The university's president, Robert W. Kustra, sent the Faculty Senate a letter in which he defended the deal and said that the money it provided to the athletics program could not be easily replaced.

Elsewhere, a management group was chosen for a new national research laboratory being established at sites in southeastern Idaho. In November 2004 the U.S. Department of Energy picked the Battelle Energy Alliance, a team headed by a nonprofit organization, to manage the Idaho National Laboratory for 10 years. The laboratory was to be created by merging Argonne National Laboratory-West, which had been managed by the University of Chicago since 1946, and the neighboring Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, operated since 1999 by Bechtel National Inc., BWX Technologies Inc., and a consortium of eight universities in the Northwest.

Under the contract, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was designated to lead a consortium of institutions to help Battelle develop research programs for the new lab and to establish a Center for Advanced Energy Studies to bring students and professors into the lab and lab scientists into classrooms. The University of Idaho, Idaho State, and Boise State, as well as institutions from several other states, were part of the consortium.

On a personnel front, Brigham Young University-Idaho announced in June that Kim B. Clark would become its new president. Mr. Clark was previously dean of the Harvard Business School.