For City College, but Against Proposition 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 twenty 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 percent. A building in the FCI range of 5-10% is considered to be in excellent condition, and a building with an FCI of 30 percent 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 percent.

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.