Saying “NO” to Proposition P
by Dale Francisco
Smiling Graduate, Slick Mailers
Santa Barbara City College is vital to our community and to our future. I want it to be well managed and sufficiently funded so that it can fulfill its educational mission for decades to come.
Which brings me to Proposition P.
I first heard of Proposition P – a bond measure on the November ballot advertised as raising $198 million from local property taxes – 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 the mundane work of keeping the buildings in repair just as important to City College’s mission as hiring the right professors?
The mailer’s headline claims that Proposition P means “investing in SBCC’s future without increasing tax rates.”
The assertion arises from the fact that 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; however, assessed values have gone up, consequently so would the tax bill.
Taxpayers need to know how much they’re being asked to pay, not the formula used to derive the payment.
The notion that a nearly $200 million bond measure would be sprung on the voters a month before ballots went out seems fishy. If that much money was so vital, wouldn’t it have made sense to present a detailed case to the voters about why the money was needed, and to make that case far enough in advance that voters would have time to make an informed decision?
The Numbers Behind Measure P
For these reasons and more, I decided to investigate the origins of Proposition P in more detail.
What I found was not comforting.
Santa Barbara City College is in trouble. Some of that trouble is due to long-term demographic changes over which it has no control, some to changes in technology, and some to the COVID shutdowns. Some of it is due to being slow to face those problems.
The fundamental problem 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. And of that greatly diminished number of students in 2023, 39 percent of the classes those students were taking were online-only – meaning students in those classes didn’t need to set foot on campus.
These astonishing changes are not unique to Santa Barbara.
Nationwide, hundreds of colleges have closed or downsized, in response to long-term demographic and cultural changes. The post-World-War-II “baby boom,” combined with the sudden realization early in the Cold War that we would need far more scientists and engineers if we were to stay ahead of our global adversaries, led to dramatic increases in the college student population in the 1960s.
But that time of expansion is long over.
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.
That’s not likely to change. Education researchers have predicted for years that after 2025, the number of high school graduates would fall and continue falling for at least a dozen years.
Santa Barbara City College Must Change
The decline in enrollment had already reached a crisis point by 2016. 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 a report issued on September 11, 2017, “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.
Because the student population is declining, revenue is declining. Yet since that 2017 report, not enough has been done to put City College on a road to solvency. 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.
Two Dramatic Changes Required
What needs to be addressed are facilities (classrooms, labs, and administrative offices) and staffing (teachers, administrators, and other support staff). In both of those major 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 or renovation. (The college had attempted to make up for budget shortfalls caused by declining enrollment by reducing what it spent on facilities maintenance – a policy that only made the maintenance problem worse over time.)
In 2023, in collaboration with consultants Cambridge West Partnership, LLC, the college issued Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)—Implementing TCO for Maintenance, a report that, despite the sleep-inducing title, is full of valuable information and good advice.
Total Cost of Ownership is defined as the sum of all building costs: construction, to recurring maintenance, to renewal, to end-of-useful-life. Knowing those costs for each building on campus is essential to understanding which buildings are worth maintaining and keeping.
One more 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%. Most practitioners consider a building in the FCI range of 5-10% to be in excellent condition, and a building with an FCI of 30% or higher to be in poor condition.
According to another Cambridge West report (Budget Sustainability Workgroup Updates and Next Steps, April 16, 2024) 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 now asks taxpayers for $200 million for facilities without presenting a plan for how the number of buildings is going to be reduced, either through productive re-purposing or demolition, and how the remaining buildings are going to be maintained in good condition.
New Phys Ed Facility a Big Part of the Plan
One of the few details Measure P proponents have given us is that the biggest single item on their facilities plan 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 most pressing issue facing the college, spending on facilities needs to 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. Given our gentle climate, SBCC better could be the pioneer in a completely outdoors PE program.
Staffing & Payroll
The second major problem that City College faces, and that it has not begun to address in a comprehensive way, is staffing. Salaries and benefits comprise 85% of the college’s expenses. There is no way to reduce the budget in line with the enormous decline in enrollment without reducing staff. This of course is the most difficult problem to face.
Though the Budget Sustainability report referenced above mentions staffing, noting the dramatically reduced class sizes resulting from the enrollment drop, and the ever-increasing costs of CalSTRS and CalPERS pensions, it has nothing to say about how to reduce staff and thereby bring the college’s budget into balance.
However it is done, the staff needed to support the education of a much smaller student population needs to be itself much smaller than what it has been in recent decades.
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.
•••
Dale Francisco, an SBCC and UCSB alum, is a software engineer who served two terms on the Santa Barbara City Council.
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What an excellent article describing the root of the problems at SBCC. This is why Mr. Francisco was such an excellent city council member! And boy are you missed.
Thank you, Dale for the extremely clear and informative column about P. I was already going to vote no on P, but your column raises more questions. Given what you - and others on SB Current - have written about SBCC's budget issues, shouldn't we, as citizens, be demanding a thorough disclosure from the college about what has gone wrong and how they plan to fix it?
I was fortunate to go to SBCC in the 70s. It was a terrific two years at a low cost. Yes, we had classes in makeshift temporary buildings, but it was an outstanding place to be with some of the best teachers I ever had. All one needs from a CC education.
Coming back to Santa Barbara I've been shocked at the expansion, both on the campus and in the nearby housing when I was also reading about the decline in enrollment. It seems as though they've created spiraling costs with no basis for them. And this affects Santa Barbara on every level.
I may be unfair, but it seems to me that the management of SBCC got stars in its eyes because the college got such high ratings. The sensible thing would to have concentrated on keeping the education first rate, not opting for a glossier and glossier campus. But that wouldn't have proliferated jobs for more and more Democrat voters - power and money for those in charge, rather than quality of life and education for those who pay their salaries.
This is symptomatic of every Democratic Party problem we are facing in Santa Barbara. The nitwits that get voted in to run this city have idealistically showy goals that are going to do nothing but ruin us financially as a community and make it impossible to lead any kind of normal life here.