Support for P

Having lived and grown up in Santa Barbara over the last 70 plus years, my wife and I came to appreciate how important SBCC is to the health and welfare of our community. We attended local public schools and took advantage of SBCC upon graduating from high school. She was in one of the first graduating classes in the radiologic technician program in 1972 and practiced at all the local hospitals and for many doctors. I transferred in 1972 to Cal Berkeley and eventually got my MBA. SBCC launched our careers and allowed us to stay in Santa Barbara.

SBCC’s buildings and facilities are the same ones we experienced over 50 years ago. They are in desperate need of maintenance, repair and, in some cases, replacement for safety reasons. The extension of Measure P will provide critical funding for SBCC to continue to be the educational beacon for thousands of local students trying to get a start in life with an affordable education, WITHOUT INCREASING TAX RATES beyond what we approved in 2008.

My goals in retirement are to give back to the community that lifted my family in life. So I volunteer with and support the United Boys & Girls Clubs and The SBCC Foundation to ensure that our community’s kids and students have the best chance to succeed. These institutions deserve our support to keep the vitality in this special community. Supporting Measure P is an investment in the future prosperity of the Southcoast. 

Paul and Karen Menzel

Summer Plans

Reading Bob Hazard’s recent column was personally triggering as he rehashed living through the long and difficult years of delays to improve our iconic hotels in Montecito – no easy task.

I served on teams for Ian Schrager and Ty Warner when they owned Miramar and can attest to the burdensome (to put it lightly) process.

When Ty Warner was the Miramar owner, he preserved and protected the blue-tiled cottages in anticipation of needing to apply them to the renovation. After some time – and some worrisome signals from the county – Warner’s team attempted to forecast a timeline to earn approval for his Miramar vision while he was going through renovations and approvals for the Biltmore and Coral Casino renovations.

The assessment made it clear to the Ty Warner team that the Miramar would be a long-drawn-out process and that it was prudent to sell the property and focus bandwidth and resources on the improvements to the Biltmore, Coral Casino, San Ysidro Ranch, and the Montecito Club as he did — investing millions of dollars to the legacy of those properties.

It turns out, the assessment on the Miramar was accurate, as it took more than a decade for a plan for the Miramar to be approved. (That said, rather than Caruso selling his interests to off-shore investments – as Hazard suggested – he should check in on Ty’s interest to take the hotel back. Maybe he’ll bring back the blue tiled roofs.)

Today Ty is investing in a second renovation for Biltmore after 20 years. The request before the Montecito Planning Commission is to approve pool amenities for hotel guests (unseen by the public) while offering a drastic reduction in the number of keys (rooms) to meet the desires of today’s luxury traveler. The plan will result in a huge increase in new tax revenue of more than $15 million for the community with fewer neighborhood impacts. And Ty is still awaiting approvals.

Ty’s goal is to get approved asap so he can open for summer 2025. If there are further delays, Ty Warner and the community may have to wait until summer 2026 to reopen to capture the lucrative peak season.

John Davies

The Cost of Measure P

One fall day in the late 1970s in Pennsylvania, as I knelt on the roof of a new home and hammered nails into plywood in a bitterly cold wind, I had a sudden realization. My father’s long-ago advice was right: I needed a college degree.

So I came home to California, and settled in Santa Barbara, a few hours’ drive from where I grew up in Irvine. I entered Santa Barbara City College, intending to become a mechanical engineer, working on renewable energy projects, which I thought was the coming thing.

In a required introductory programming class, I found that I liked writing software. When I transferred to UCSB, I changed my major to computer science and graduated just in time for the takeoff of the internet.

All of which is to say, Santa Barbara City College changed my life for the better, in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

My education there was mostly at the expense of California’s taxpayers, in hopeful expectation that the beneficiaries of their largesse would become productive citizens, making life better for everyone. It was a good bargain both for the taxpayers and for the students.

Today, City College is still vital to our community. It must be well managed and sufficiently funded so that it can fulfill its educational mission for decades to come.

Which brings me to Proposition P, a bond measure on the November ballot advertised as raising $198 million from local property taxes.

Smiling graduates, slick mailers. I first heard of Proposition P when I received a glossy color mailer, with a picture of a smiling college graduate on the cover and, on the inside, photos of buildings in various states of decay.

The latter images were alarming, but they raised questions: if the buildings are in such bad shape, who was in charge of maintenance? Isn’t keeping the buildings in repair just as important as hiring the right professors?

The mailer claimed that Proposition P means “investing in SBCC’s future without increasing tax rates.”

Measure P would extend for 20 years an $8.50 property tax charge, approved by voters in 2008 as Measure V, a previous bond measure to finance infrastructure improvements at City College.

It’s true that the rate of $8.50 per $100,000 of assessed property value would be the same as that on the bond passed in 2008. But because assessed values have gone up, so would the tax bill.

The notion that a nearly $200 million bond measure would be sprung on voters a month before ballots went out also seemed fishy. If that much money was so vital, shouldn’t they have presented a detailed case to the voters about why the money was needed, with enough time to make an informed decision?

The numbers behind Proposition P. I decided to look into the origins of Proposition P. What I found was not comforting.

Santa Barbara City College is in trouble. Some of that trouble is due to long-term demographic changes, some to changes in technology, and some to the COVID shutdowns. Some of it is due to not facing those problems.

The fundamental issue is that college enrollments have been dropping everywhere, for years.

City College enrollment peaked in 2010, at 18,761 full-time students. By 2023, that number had fallen to 11,565, a nearly 40 percent drop. Of that greatly diminished number of students in 2023, 39 percent of the classes they were taking were online-only – meaning students in those classes didn’t need to set foot on campus.

Families are smaller now, with fewer children. In line with national trends, City College’s entering student population declined after 2010, then fell off a cliff during the COVID shutdowns, and has stayed at those lower levels since.

State funding, SBCC’s primary revenue source, is based on the number of full-time students enrolled. With enrollment shrinking, revenue shrinks as well, and by 2016, years of deficit spending set off alarm bells.

Then-Superintendent Anthony Beebe brought in a state-level organization called the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team to analyze SBCC’s problems and suggest solutions.

According to the team’s report, “the college’s financial situation continues to be dire, with a significant structural deficit… Unfortunately, the college continues to rely on reserves to cover overspending. Although reserves may seem sufficient to compensate for overspending, a permanent solution is needed since the district is not growing, so revenue options are limited.”

That’s the problem in a nutshell.

Yet since 2016, little has changed. In six of the past ten years, SBCC has continued with deficit spending. The college’s adopted 2024/25 budget shows a $7.4 million deficit.

Dramatic changes are needed. Two fundamental issues must be addressed: facilities (classrooms, labs, and administrative offices) and staffing (teachers, administrators, and other support staff). In both of those areas, drastic changes are needed to fit the reduced size and changing needs of the student population of the next 20 years and beyond.

First, facilities. SBCC has far too many buildings for the number of students, and most of those buildings have had insufficient maintenance for years and require major repairs. 

A term of facilities geek-speak that is essential to understanding the depth of City College’s problems is the Facilities Condition Index (FCI).

FCI is defined as the cost of bringing a building to excellent condition (total deferred maintenance cost), divided by what it would cost to replace the building from scratch.

For example: assume that a building required $100,000 of repairs, and that to replace the building would cost $1 million. That would mean an FCI of 10%. A building in the FCI range of 5-10% is considered to be in excellent condition, and a building with an FCI of 30% or higher to is in poor condition. 

According to a report by consultants Cambridge West, the average FCI of City College buildings is 43%, with some above 60%.

This speaks to a mind-boggling level of neglected maintenance over decades.

Proposition P asks the taxpayers for $200 million for facilities without a plan for how to reduce the number of buildings, either through re-purposing or demolition, or how the remaining buildings are going to be maintained in good condition.

One of the few details that Proposition P proponents have given us is that the biggest item on their list is an expensive new Physical Education building – at a total cost $100 million, with $65 million of that coming from Proposition P.

Since enrollment decline is the main issue facing the college, facilities spending must be concentrated on buildings that have the highest full-time on-campus enrollment. The PE building supports the fewest number of students of any of the major campus buildings, and so should be lowest on the list for more spending, if not for demolition.

City College’s second major problem is staffing. Salaries and benefits comprise 85% of expenses. There is no way to reduce the budget in line with the enormous decline in enrollment without reducing staff.

Though the report referenced above notes dramatically smaller class sizes resulting from the enrollment drop, and the ever-increasing costs of CalSTRS and CalPERS pensions, it has nothing to say about reducing staff in line with reduced enrollment.

Bottom line. Before Santa Barbara City College comes to voters asking for $200 million to paper over years of poor decisions or no decisions, it needs to level with the community about the problems it faces, and present us with a serious, detailed, and factual plan to solve those problems.

The Board of Trustees and the administrative leadership owe that to the people who have faithfully supported the college for more than a century, and who want the college to succeed and to continue to fulfill its promises to us and to its students.

The full version of this editorial first appeared at Newsmakers with JR.

Dale Francisco, an alumnus of SBCC and UCSB, is a software engineer who served two terms on Santa Barbara City Council

Miramar’s Parking Problem

If you’ve ever unsuccessfully hunted for a parking space while going to Miramar, Hammond’s, or Fernald Point beaches, take it up with the Miramar Resort. 

When the Miramar was approved, they agreed with the County to designate 87 parking spaces along Jameson and Eucalyptus Lane for public parking, labeling them “Public Use” to ensure exclusive public use and deter hotel guest use. The Miramar is supposed to monitor spaces on Jameson, Eucalyptus, Humphrey, and Miramar Ave to ensure those spaces remain available to the public and aren’t used by hotel guests or employees. These are our spots, used for beach access, not the Miramar’s spots for their guests
or employees.

But in 2021, when the Miramar installed eight Tesla Superchargers, power supply and other equipment in the employee lot on the corner of Eucalyptus and Jameson, they converted and lost 20 parking spaces. And throughout the years, they’ve lost additional parking spaces in the Eastern lot by the freeway onramp.

The Miramar is underparked, violating its operating permits. This results in a parking shortfall with Miramar employees, visitors, vendors, and contractors parking in those 87 public parking spaces and the neighborhood, using spots designated for beachgoers. 

After it was built, the Miramar applied for multiple changes before the County, increasing its retail stores from 1 to 10, and telling the County it still had 435 parking spaces. That wasn’t true since at least 2021. Each time, the County took their word for it and approved more retail stores. Now they want to add another 10-12 stores, right on the corner of Eucalyptus and Jameson. There could be 22 Miramar stores – one for every seven guest rooms. This will only make a bad parking problem worse. 

The County should force the Miramar to follow their permits and fix their parking problem before the County entertains the idea of adding more stores at the Miramar. 

Sincerely,

Phil Dracht
Montecito

Guy is Our Guy

I’d like to take this opportunity to share why I’m supporting Guy Walker for SBCEO Board Member Trustee Area 4. Guy has a deep passion for quality education and instruction for our youth and has a firsthand understanding of the lifelong value it provides. Our students and families deserve someone who is firmly committed to helping provide the necessary resources and opportunities for emerging generations to achieve excellence. Guy Walker is an exemplar in that regard and that is why he has my enthusiastic support!

Grant Carmichael,
Buellton Resident

Vote “No” on Measure “P”

For the last 10 years, SBCC has been an institution in decline.

The 75-acre campus, on some of the most valuable land in Santa Barbara is under-used and no longer justifies the very large costs of maintenance as a City College.

The number of enrolled students at SBCC has declined from 19,331 ten years ago down to 12,575, a 35% loss.

Of the 12,675 students, over 4,199, study 100% on-line and do not need campus facilities.

Of the remaining 8,476 students, 4,900 study part-time on-line and part-time in classrooms, further reducing the utility of the 75-acre campus.

SBCC has been driven to rent classrooms to a local “For Profit” private university.

The SBCC current budget is $224,347,416, almost a quarter of a billion dollars a year.

Measure P seeks to add, until 2060, almost a half of a billion dollars in principal and interest to the taxpayers’ burden. It would add to an existing bond that will continue to be paid by taxpayers until 2033. 

We need to remember that no matter how SBCC presents its proposal, the interest on the bond usually exceeds the amount of the bond. That is why the real cost of Measure “P” is not just the principal amount of almost $200 million. In reality it is close to half a billion dollars.

Two of the most knowledgeable and experienced SBCC trustees on financial matters in SBCC voted “No” to “Measure P.” We need to know why they voted “No.”

We, the public, and we the taxpayers must vote “No” on measure “P.” To do otherwise would be a foolish waste of an enormous amount of public money.

A deep investigation should be conducted by an independent body into why these everlasting demands for enormous sums of additional money by SBCC is requested, before we again approve new bond proposals from SBCC. 

Where does all the money really go?

The underlying fundamental question is – why do taxpayers need to continue to pay the costs of maintaining 75 acres of some of the most expensive property in Santa Barbara for an institution that is not only declining in overall student enrollments, but also declining further in student use of the campus for education?

The effective, regular, physical use of the 75-acre campus by students is now down to 44% of the total student enrollment of 19,331; the enrollment figure of ten years ago.

We do not need to spend more taxpayers’ money on a new swimming pool and new gymnasium to attract more out-of-county and foreign students with country club amenities.

Why should Santa Barbara taxpayers subsidize attending students who will add to our extreme housing shortage?

A smaller site for SBCC seems a practical move to reduce ongoing costs. That would enable a much more profitable use for 75 acres in the center of Santa Barbara.  

Derek Hanley