The Santa Clarita Community College District Board of Trustees will hold a business meeting Wednesday, Oct. 9, beginning at 5 p.m. in closed session. Open session will follow at 6 p.m.

Items on the agenda include:

Move Approval of Resolution No. 2024/25-12: To Return the Student Housing Funds to the State of California.

The agenda item reads:

“College of the Canyons applied for and was approved to receive $61,585,000 to build affordable student housing. The State changed the grant’s parameters to be a lease revenue bond during the 2023/24 academic year. To utilize the lease revenue bonds, the District must leverage two buildings.The District would also be responsible for the ongoing maintenance and operations of the student housing without any outside funding beyond the rents collected. Since this is low-income housing, the district must use a strict formula to calculate the rent for each unit.

At the August 2024 Board of Trustees meeting, the district heard a presentation on the total cost of ownership from Ann Volz of the Volz Company and Dr. Jasmine Ruys, Vice President of Student Services. The presentation is attached to this item for reference.

After a thorough analysis, the District leadership recognized there will be a significant cost to the district in both the initial construction of student housing and in the ongoing maintenance of the building. The analysis can be found in the attached presentation given at the August Board of Trustees meeting.

In early 2024, the District began working with Volz Company to do an analysis on the cost of building, running, and maintaining student housing on the Valencia Campus. After reviewing multiple proformas on the project, the District determined the project could not be built within the $61.8M budget without a significant scope reduction to the design of the building. The District would need to contribute a significant amount of funding to the project to build as it is currently designed. If the District decided to reduce the scope the building, the District may be liable for ongoing maintenance and operation of the building once open. The District cannot increase the rents to make up for the difference since the building must be low income driven.

Based on the current design, cost of construction, and ongoing operation and maintenance cost associated with the student housing project, the District administration does not feel it is fiscally responsible to build the student housing structure as currently planned. The current plans cannot be built within the $61.8M budget.

Fiscal Implication: Return the $61,858,000 to the state of California.

The full agenda can be found at https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/coc/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=CYMRGT6DF0BB.

The meeting will be held in the University Center, Room 301 on the Valencia campus of College of the Canyons, 26455 Rockwell Canyon Road, Valencia, CA 91355.

This will be an in-person meeting with the ability to view the meeting virtually.

To live stream the meeting copy and paste into your browser: https://canyonsonline.zoom.us/j/81556417016.

WEBINAR ID: 815-5641-7016