Plans on hold as funding fizzles

A student union building, campus safety offices and other proposed projects may not be in Orange Coast College’s near future, as the college district that OCC is a part of has downsized a 2002 bond measure that sought drastic changes at each of its three campuses.

When voters passed Measure C more than four years ago, the bond allotted $370 million for renovations in the Coast Community College District, with OCC getting the lion’s share of around $200 million. The school has since completed or started work on a number of projects, including the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, the Early Childhood Education Lab School and additions to the sailing center and soccer field.

Other projects, however, have landed on a “wish list” for the future as the district has run short of available funds. Spokeswoman Martha Parham said the district expected to cut a number of projects from the Measure C list, including OCC’s new student union center, planetarium and safety offices.

“Unfortunately, with the construction costs being so high, there’s just no way to avoid cutting back on a few projects,” she said.

She added that in June, the district opted to sell the measure’s remaining $260 million in bonds to take advantage of current prices.

“The faster we do our projects, the less they’re going to cost us,” Parham said. “The industry trends are telling us that for every month a project is on hold, the costs go up 1%.”

Richard Pagel, OCC’s vice president of administrative services, said he was disappointed to put some of the projects on the back burner, but noted that the district would take some measures to compensate for them. The school, he said, would make improvements to the existing student center building, safety offices and observatory in lieu of creating new ones.

“At the end of the day, we’ll be able to look at the things the taxpayers voted on and say we made progress on all of those issues,” Pagel said.

Parham and district board trustee Walt Howald said the district had no plans to approach voters for a second bond measure, as the Newport-Mesa Unified School District did two years ago. Newport-Mesa’s Measure A bond, passed in 2000, sought to renovate every campus in the district and left some of the work unfinished.

In 2005, the district successfully floated Measure F, which focused on new facilities rather than existing ones but touched on some of the first bond’s leftover projects.

With the student center and other projects on hold, OCC’s planning and budget committee has opted to fuel funds into an interdisciplinary classroom building that would house business, literature, math and other departments. Student trustee Brent Bettes said he applauded the choice.

“I actually was in favor of the idea, considering we had to choose between starting a student union and an interdisciplinary building,” he said. “It’s always important to have new classrooms as long as we have students to fill them and teachers who want to teach.”