The Gavilan College Board of Trustees may have violated the law by voting to divert $12 million – eventually $17 million – of Measure E bond funds to bring an out of district operation, The South Bay Regional Public Safety Training Consortium (The Academy), into Coyote Valley leased facilities. Trustees certainly violated the spirit of a law, and that is just as important.
This secret plan was in place sometime prior to late 2006; however, it was never on the ballot-specific project list required by Proposition 39 and, until just recently, it was conveniently missing from the five-year Capital Outlay Plan. Now, a $17 million immediate local funding proposal to accommodate “The Academy” suddenly appears as capital priority two.
With this added, unapproved project and the budget-busting land acquisition, the total Coyote Valley project cost will increase 46 percent from the original $33 million estimate, to $61 million. Meanwhile, the San Benito Campus is priority seven, needing 100 percent state funding for a 2021 opening – funding that the board knows very well it is unlikely to get.
Since the Coyote Valley land is still tied up environmentally, the board is proposing a convoluted build-and-lease-back arrangement in a scheme to justify spending $20 million for land that was budgeted for less than $9 million.
Gavilan President Dr. Steve Kinsella is also chairman of the board of the proposed lease tenant, The Academy, and therefore he has a clear conflict of interest that requires extra scrutiny. Yet the majority of Gavilan’s board just goes along because they too are mired in the mess of land speculation.
In the meantime, the students and taxpayers of San Benito County are being treated as mere afterthoughts even though they comprise more than 25 percent of Gavilan’s current enrollment. The board has handcuffed Hollister’s Educational Center to the long-term Coyote Valley campus by linking the site mitigations and asking for state construction funding – $48 million – for both facilities in the same fiscal year, almost an impossibility.
But most of all, board members failed to use bond monies to get “state-matching funds” as promised by the tax measure. To get matching funds one has to put up a share; if money is diverted to this unlisted major project, it is not available as a match for San Benito.
The excess land in San Benito County and overpriced land in Coyote Valley were both purchased with bond monies at risk that do not count toward matching funds. Gavilan’s own state submission for campus funding shows zero matching funds.
In November 2006, Gavilan was asked to do a needs assessment study by the State Chancellor’s Office if it intended to absorb The Academy; they just voted to divert funds but the study was never completed or submitted. Spend first and study later is neither a good nor legal way to handle bond funds requiring that “specific projects” be presented to the voters beforehand.
San Benito County taxpayers are being milked like cows and the cream is going to the rescue of a really bad land deal; meanwhile the Hollister Educational Center schedule has been pushed out 17 years from the bond vote and the odds of even that happening with all state money are tiny.
This needs some serious investigation before those bond funds disappear forever into a project the voters never approved.
