Many UC Santa Barbara students and local organizations have called out the university for what they say has been a lack of transparency while instituting the return to in-person classes amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Last week, a group of about 50 students marched from the campus’ Storke Tower to Cheadle Hall to demand that the university address its housing shortfall.
“When COVID started, I was in my freshman year of college. This is my first full year back on campus. This was supposed to be something that I could look forward to after a year and a half of being stuck alone, isolated,” Izzy Bahamonde-Partlan, a third-year undergraduate student, said at the rally. “I was supposed to be able to come back to school and feel safe. I have been looking for housing since March, and the university has done nothing to help.
“This entire time, I have been grappling with how to grow up and how to take care of myself while attending a university that will do nothing for me — because I am not a student, I am a walking paycheck.”
At a time when students are desperate to find housing on or near the oceanfront campus — with some living out of their cars or having to make an hourlong commute — the university is facing accusations of breaching its contract to accommodate housing for the increased student enrollment.
In 2010, the university entered into a contract with Santa Barbara County and the City of Goleta in which the university committed to capping enrollment at 25,000 students through the year 2025, to build housing for the 5,000 students it planned on adding, and to construct about 1,800 new faculty and staff units.
Housing became the centerpiece of the 2010 Long-Range Development Plan. However, many community members were unhappy with the agreement and came together to create Sustainable University Now, an organization made up of community advocates.
SUN, comprised of the Citizens Planning Association, the Coalition for Sustainable Transportation, the League of Women Voters of Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara County Action Network, among others, entered into a separate but parallel agreement with the university that created more specific housing accommodations and requirements, according to George Relles, a leader of Sustainable University Now and a Goleta environmental activist.
Santa Barbara County and SUN are both accusing the university of violating the contract by not addressing issues of traffic, congestion and housing.
The county has been in mitigation and settlement discussions with the university, but Third District Supervisor Joan Hartmann said she believes that the “negotiations have gone as far as they’re going to go.”
The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors planned to discuss the negotiations in a closed session during Tuesday’s meeting, according to Hartmann. The agenda included a closed session item to consider initiating civil litigation, and the Board of Supervisors reported no action out of the meeting.
“Either we accept what’s on the table in the negotiations, or we can try to continue negotiating,” Hartmann told Noozhawk before the meeting. “This is a countywide decision, and it is of utmost importance to the entire county, especially in Districts One and Two where they feel a lot of repercussions of this.”
The county’s contract with the university requires yearly meetings to look at enrollment numbers, and that meeting has not occurred at all this year, according to Hartmann.
“The meeting was set, and evidently it did not get put on the university’s calendar,” Hartmann said. “We do not have a date that the university is willing to sit down.”
Third District Representative Gina Fischer said the university used to publish a report that would detail where students were living, and that report has not been sent to Hartmann’s office in two years and can no longer be found online.
“We’re in a difficult situation without the information that they are obligated to provide, have not provided; therefore, it is difficult for us to come to some kind of agreement,” Hartmann said. “This is just me speaking, but if the damage is lack of housing, then the remedy should be more housing.”
The university has taken all of its commitments very seriously, and “it is simply not true that UCSB has failed to fulfill its obligations,” UCSB spokeswoman Andrea Estrada said.
UCSB has added about 1,500 student beds, 89 for-sale faculty housing units, and 35 rental apartments for faculty and staff since the effective date of the SUN agreement, according to Estrada.
“In addition, as we have repeatedly explained both publicly and privately, plans for the construction of the Munger Residence Hall on the main UCSB campus are well underway,” she told Noozhawk.
In a letter dated Sept. 10 that SUN attorney Marc Chytilo sent to UCSB Executive Vice Chancellor David Marshall, which was shared with Noozhawk, Chytilo claimed the university violated its agreement by not fulfilling its commitments to provide housing to keep pace with the increased student and faculty enrollment.
SUN claims that the university has not provided more specific information relating to the 540-unit Ocean Road project and the Munger Residence Hall projects.
University officials say they were waiting to develop new dorms because if the Munger Hall project was fulfilled, then it would be able to accommodate all 5,000 students as required by the Long-Range Development Plan, according to Richard Flacks, director of SUN.
The project is a joint venture between UCSB and billionaire Charles Munger, according to the university, and will provide single-occupancy rooms for students.
“They weren’t able, from their viewpoint, to plan anything else as long as the Munger project was a live option,” Flacks told Noozhawk. “We had no reason to doubt that they would be committing to this.”
However, the Munger residence hall project has yet to be built, and the university has yet to show any evidence of it moving forward, Flacks said.
The letter claims that the Ocean Road Project is “showing no more progress or detail than previously outlined in UCSB’s Nov. 2018 announcement about the project,” and that it seems “highly unlikely that the project will be ready for occupancy” before the end of the Long-Range Development Plan Agreement in 2025.
Even if the project was completed before 2025, the total of 873 proposed staff and faculty units fall short of the 1,800 promised units, the letter claims.
In the last report before the pandemic, the university had added 1,500 to 1,800 personnel and 263 new on-campus faculty and staffing units, according to the letter.
Estrada said that an additional 70 units of for-sale faculty housing are under construction.
The agreement called for a maximum of 500 tripled up dorm rooms, a cap that was supposed to trigger planning for new development. However, UCSB was tripling up 1,700 at the last count before the pandemic, the letter from SUN claims.
“The tripling of dorm rooms may have alleviated some student pressure on the wider housing market as did the new San Joaquin dormitory project,” the letter said. “Even with the new dorms and with tripling, there was still a net shortfall as many as 1,800 on-campus beds.”
The university said that the agreement “only has an aspirational goal” related to triple occupancy, and there are “detailed plans” in place to address housing needs in full compliance with the SUN agreement, according to Estrada.
The SUN letter culminated with a lengthy list of questions demanding that the university provide more detailed information regarding its plan to maintain its commitments to SUN and the county.
“We believe that we are entitled to that kind of transparency. Our goal right now is to get the university to provide a commitment and a timetable of fulfilling its housing promises,” Flacks said. “Blame is not the issue; it’s a lack of transparency. The transparency would be helpful in terms of actually reaching the goals. We want to reach the goals.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Jade Martinez-Pogue can be reached at jmartinez-pogue@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.