GILROY
– Gavilan College hopes to use a proposed $138 million bond to
accommodate more students and has scheduled three meetings to
gather input on the plan.
Gavilan President Steve Kinsella said he hopes to put the
bond
– first proposed at a July 8 board meeting – before the board of
trustees in November.
GILROY – Gavilan College hopes to use a proposed $138 million bond to accommodate more students and has scheduled three meetings to gather input on the plan.
Gavilan President Steve Kinsella said he hopes to put the bond – first proposed at a July 8 board meeting – before the board of trustees in November.
The college will hold three public forums in the coming weeks to share the tentative bond proposal with the public and further develop its working project list.
“(The forums will) provide information to the public and allow the public to respond to the list,” Kinsella said, “and we will answer any questions they may have.”
The list of projects that will be funded by the bond is taking shape based on feedback from a community advisory group. The group of about 20 community leaders was created to provide recommendations for specific projects and facility improvements needed at the college. It met for three two-hour sessions to produce the tentative project list.
Based on the group’s feedback, the bond will focus on two areas of facilities improvement, Kinsella said.
First, the college will update and improve its existing facilities to allow the college to accommodate more students. Enrollment at the college continues to increase and is already close to capacity, Kinsella said. The college would be able to both increase capacity and upgrade aging facilities using $68.4 million of the bond.
The community advisory group said that utilizing all space on the Gavilan campus should be a first priority.
“The recommendation was made to do as much as we can with the assets we already possess,” Kinsella said.
The college has grown from serving 1,200 students 40 years ago in the buildings that make up most of the main campus, to now serving 6,000 each semester. As the population in the area grows and enrollment at all community colleges increases, growth at all three Gavilan sites is expected to continue. This makes increased capacity an important priority, but more so in Gilroy because there is little room for expansion, Kinsella said.
“We want to take full advantage of the square footage we have right now,” he said.
Gavilan is unable to use many classes in the afternoon because they do not have air conditioning, he said. One of the proposed bond issues is providing energy-efficient heating, ventilation and air conditioning to all facilities. Classrooms would also be remodeled to provide better lighting or room configuration and computer and phone lines.
More classrooms would be created by converting several large lecture halls on campus that hold 90 to 150 students to smaller rooms for 30 to 40 students.
The second part of the proposed bond would help Gavilan deal with continued growth by expanding its facilities in the Morgan Hill and Hollister areas. About $70 million would be used to purchase land and begin developing sites that would serve about 3,000 full-time students in both areas.
“From our perspective where we sit in Gilroy, there are some expansion opportunities here but not enough to serve those areas,” Kinsella said.
The bond money will help Gavilan accommodate additional students within the next three to five years, Kinsella said, but the development of Gavilan satellites will continue through the next seven to 10 years. The bond money will help the college acquire the land, but more money may have to come from the state before the college could afford to construct buildings.
“If we don’t do something quickly in terms of land, it will be developed to the point where we can’t touch it,” Kinsella said.
The bond project list is a work in progress, Kinsella said, and it will be revised based on the upcoming public forums before it is presented to the board in November.
If the board approves the proposed bond, Kinsella said he is unsure whether it would be placed on the March 2004 or November 2004 ballot. That recommendation will come from the Lew Edwards Group, Gavilan’s campaign advisor.
“There is no perfect time to go,” said Catherine Lew, Gavilan district’s bond consultant. “If the community has a good consensus and the bond plan has been defined well, there may not be a reason to wait until November.”
The trustees, who will likely approve the bond, will consider public feedback before making their final decision.
“We’ll definitely support it, and we hope the public supports it,” said Trustee James De La Cruz. “If we don‚t have quality facilities, then how can we provide quality education to our students?”
Jesse Sandow, Associated Student Body representative to the board, said students would fully support the potential bond. During last Tuesday’s ASB meeting, members voted to assist the campaign not only vocally but financially as well with $30,000 from reserves.
Sandow said he looks forward to some quality air conditioning as well.
“It gets pretty warm,” he said. “Last summer, I had a class in the arts building and it doesn’t have air conditioning. It’s kind of sad that that’s what students have to put up with.”
Community support for the measure is strong, according to a poll of voters conducted in June that showed 63 percent of registered voters in Gilroy, Morgan Hill and San Benito County would support a $155 million bond. The bond would require 55 percent voter approval.
The picture changes when the poll factors in the impact on property taxes, however. In that case, only 50 percent of voters supported the $155 million bond.
For a $138 million bond, annual property taxes would increase $23 per $100,000 assessed property value.
Kinsella is hopeful the public will support the bond. While the state has assigned Gavilan the fifth-highest growth rate in California, financing is tight, he said. Kinsella said that if Gavilan does not have the capacity to support growth, it will be unable to serve the needs of the community and would lose potential funding from the state.
“The need in my mind is very clear,” Kinsella said. “In my mind, it’s convincing and it’s very compelling.”
The first bond forum will be held Tuesday from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Student Center at the Gilroy campus. The second will be Oct. 7 from 7 to 9 p.m. in Hollister City Council Chambers. The third will be Oct. 14 at 7 p.m. during the public comments portion of the regular board meeting, which will be held at the Morgan Hill Unified School District offices.
