City College needs upgrades
City College of San Francisco has faced more than its share of nightmare scenarios over the past decade: a fiveyear accreditation fight that nearly closed its doors, a series of highly unpopular class and faculty cuts, and widespread public fury over last year’s bungled plan to hike executive salaries by as much as 90%.
So it takes quite a bit of audacity to for its Board of Trustees to ask San Francisco voters for a whopping $845 million in bonds to modernize and rebuild its facilities. That’s what it’s doing with Proposition A, on the local March ballot.
The board is asking San Francisco voters to put aside the slew of negative headlines and focus on the big picture of an institution that’s saddled with dilapidated buildings all over town.
“This is a safety issue for all of our constituents,” said Alex Randolph, president of the Board of Trustees. “A lot of our facilities date back to the 1960s and ’70s. Our main campus on Ocean Avenue has been particularly neglected.”
Randolph is absolutely right about the state of City College’s facilities. Many of the institution’s buildings are suffering from dilapidated roofs, walls and hallways. Many of its classrooms are outdated and illsuited to serve the needs of contemporary teaching methods and computertoting students. Some of its heating and plumbing systems are inefficient, unreliable and even unsafe.
City College also has a responsibility to improve the seismic safety of its buildings. As hospitals and other publicfacing institutions throughout the Bay Area have learned, this necessary undertaking is also extremely expensive.
“We aren’t prepared for an earthquake,” trustee Shanell Williams said.
About 10% of the bond money will go toward seismically related improvement projects, with a focus on the John Adams library in Hayes Valley and the vocationally focused Evans campus in the Bayview. Another large chunk of the money will go toward improving disability access all over the institution — another improvement that’s been deferred for decades.
The rest of the money will go toward a long list of repair, renovation and construction projects that have been vetted for qualities like state of repair and shovelreadiness.
“This bond will only fund about half of the projects on our list,” Randolph said. “The temptation would be to fund something at every facility, just to spread the improvements around. But we’re doing this based on need first.”
Still, $845 million is a lot of money — and a lot to ask of San Francisco property owners, who will pay $11 per year per $100,000 of their property’s assessed valuation. (The owner of a property assessed at $1 million would pay an extra $110 per year.)
There’s also the risk that City College will be back in front of San Francisco voters with its hands out soon, since this bond measure won’t cover all of City
College’s expenses.
In our editorial board meeting, the trustees talked about how difficult it is to get funding from the private sector and the state for these kinds of capital expenditures. Difficult it may be, but the trustees will need to try a little harder before coming back to the voters for another funding round.
Despite these problems, it’s important to separate City College’s many operational mistakes from its capital needs.
About 70% of the college’s buildings are ranked “poor” or “very poor” on the facilities condition index. The institution has also been a better steward of bond funds than it has been of daytoday operations: Even with all of the turmoil of the last decade, it’s maintained a good credit rating.
These are some of the reasons why we recommend a yes vote on Proposition A. For all of its many problems, City College remains one of San Francisco’s most critical institutions for helping residents better their lives. It can’t continue that mission in the last century’s facilities.