The maroon and gold T-shirts have been made: ASU at Lake Havasu.

And the calls are coming in for orders.

“I’m getting calls now, often, where are the shirts? I want four, I want five, that sort of thing,” said Jerry Clark, a Havasu Foundation for Higher Education board member.

The shirts debuted at the Foundation’s annual banquet March 23. Of the 75 T-shirts available, most of them sold that evening, Clark said.

Tim Shugrue was one of the first in line for the T-shirts.

“When you see that ASU shirt with ASU at (Lake) Havasu on it, it’s like ‘wow, it’s really happening,” said the owner of the Makai Corp., which encompasses several local restaurants. “We’ve been hearing about it for years and years. … When you saw those shirts, it kind of brought it to reality.”

That reality of Arizona State University opening a campus in Lake Havasu City will start becoming visible in the coming months.

Clark said T-shirts would be sold at My Train Shop at 1695 Mesquite Ave. Suite 208A early next week. And bumper stickers stating: “I support ASU at Lake Havasu” should start appearing on cars around town.

Two top ASU officials started unraveling the firmest details regarding the campus opening at the Foundation’s banquet. The Foundation organized in 2004 to bring a four-year campus to the city.

The Arizona Board of Regents, which oversees university policies and growth, charged the state’s three major colleges in 2009 to increase baccalaureate production and access statewide.

Richard Stanley, Arizona State University’s senior vice president and university planner, said Wednesday the university talked to a dozen potential “partners” around the state to open a new campus.

“We needed people that would help us get started with facilities and get us through the bumpiness of the start-up mode of a new campus,” Stanley said during Wednesday’s banquet. “We’ve had lots of interested people, but in the end we had not been able to figure out a way to get it done anywhere. And now, Lake Havasu has stepped up to the plate and identified a way we can get this done. … You’ve got a lot of mayors and a lot of other city councils around the state looking and seeing, wondering how it is that you are pulling it off and they couldn’t pull it off. You should be very, very proud of yourselves.”

Stanley said Wednesday the vacant Daytona Middle School site at 98 Swanson Plaza — one block from the city’s Main Street — “meets all of the criteria that we had hoped to find in locations for these kind of colleges.”

Stanley said the proximity to existing housing, restaurants and shops cuts the cost of starting a new campus.

“We think it will be a very successful site,” he said. “We hope to move very quickly on this. We will do our part, but you have to do your part in order for this to happen. The sooner that we can get good progress toward the $2 million fundraising goal, the sooner we can engage the architects, engage the renovation work that we need to do to get the campus going.”

The Foundation’s incentive to raise $2 million to help with renovation and operating costs helped move ASU forward on the project, officials have previously said. The Foundation wants to raise at least $1 million by the end of June to trigger ASU’s campus renovations and faculty and student recruitment.

Foundation board member Jo Navaretta previously said pledges total $578,000 — and that is before the official fundraising drive begins.

Stanley said they are looking at opening the campus in the fall of 2012 with around 200 students. Expected undergraduate degree programs are business, communications, biology, life sciences, political science and psychology.

The ASU officials also impressed that the campus would be a “community” campus and an “integral piece of ASU.”

David A. Young, ASU’s senior vice president of Academic Affairs, said during the banquet the education offered at Lake Havasu City’s campus would be unique.

“One of the nice things about starting something from scratch is that you can change, you can do things differently,” he said. “We will be able to do things very differently here than we would be able to do in Tempe. Tempe is just too large. This we can do some very, very interesting curricular innovations… . Because we can do things differently, I’m convinced that we will be able to get students through faster and at a lower cost than we would be able to do at any of the other institutions that are part of ASU. … General education on this campus will be very different than general education on any of the other university campuses in the state and I might suggest in many other states.”

You may contact the reporter at jleatherman@havasunews.com