District board overturns Measure G megaproject plans

By Rory Conlon COPY EDITOR

The Foothill-De Anza Board of Trustees overturned proposed plans for spending the $898 million Measure G bond and moved to redirect resources toward other purposes during their meeting on May 8.

De Anza College President Lloyd Holmes presented his plans for Measure G to students and faculty, explaining the administration’s goal of building a new Event Center on campus to replace the now-defunct Flint Center. This study session served as a second major update in Measure G plans after students and faculty raised concerns regarding communication about these plans and no permanent spaces being designated for the arts.

said. “We didn’t catch a lot of use for a performance-based venue from users, both off-campus and on. The demand only accounts for 26 days of use (a year).” needed to give input on future courses of action so he could pass that information on to the newly-formed Measure G taskforce.

“When I was trying to host a Measure G event, we tried getting an MLC room and I was told that students are not allowed to rent out any rooms at MLC. We’re talking about building this entirely new thing, but we aren’t even able to rent out rooms that already exist on-campus.”

Academic senate President Cheryl Jaeger Balm highlighted the original idea behind relocating the arts quad and proposed using the bond money on upgrading the infrastructure of creative arts buildings.

“As we were talking about building the Event Center, one of our vice presidents said that we need to relocate the arts quad because if they were a student, they would be embarrassed to show our facilities to their parents,” Balm said. “If we take this $100 million and we don’t primarily use it to help out the creative arts after all that was said about how terrible their facilities are, there’s going to be a lot of frustrated people at De Anza.”

The meeting started with two research consultants, Bill Blake and Amy Ben-Kiki, presenting their findings on the feasibility of building a new Event Center through analyzing supply and demand for the venue.

The first thing they reviewed were the results from 46 stakeholder interviews they conducted, which included organizations ranging from DASG and De Anza faculty and staff to the Cupertino Chamber of Commerce and Santa Clara County Supervisors.

“In these interviews, we had a few consistent themes emerge,” Ben-Kiki said. “We heard that the primary group that the Event Center should serve above all the others is the students of De Anza. This was often framed in contrast to the Flint Center, which was seen as not having been part of the student life.”

The consultants also collected and evaluated responses from people who would use the facility by presenting their content in the venue. Blake explained that the potential user survey was open for four months and sent to 54 local organizers and promoters, 18 of whom responded.

“The demand is clustered around a venue with 850-1200 seats,” Blake

At the end of the presentation, the consultants gave board meeting members three choices to discuss moving forward, which were to “meet” the market, to “make” the market or to redirect resources elsewhere.

The first option involves designing and developing a series of smaller, flexible spaces.

The second option involves designing a multi-use event space for college-driven programs.

“Build something very flexible and dynamic that can convert to flat floor space, which would be unique in the market for the many things it can do,” Blake said.

The third option entails refocusing the “Event Center” concept and directing resources to other priorities such as renovations or improvements to pre-existing assembly and arts buildings.

“To tee up what you might want to think about,” Blake said, “(consider) this concept of an event venue and what its real purpose would be given that you want to serve the student needs first, community needs second and have some revenue opportunities – if possible – third.”

President Holmes said the board needed to give input on future

“Do we continue down the road we’re on based upon the information that we’ve received?” Holmes asked. “Can we modify the space per the AMS feasibility study?”

He also addressed the possibility of scrapping plans for a new Event Center.

“I want to make certain that, as the task force is working to move things forward on our campus and engage with our constituency groups, we have a very clear direction from the board,” said Holmes.

Holmes turned it over to Susan Cheu, the vice chancellor of business services, to give her perspective on the situation.

She agreed with Holmes’ statement about deciding whether or not the board wants an Event Center, and also explained the original process of planning possible projects funded by bond money.

“When we initially went out for the bond, we had about $1.5 billion worth of need and had to whittle that down to $898 million,” Cheu said. “There were a lot of changes that were made as we moved along as a result of deciding to put the Event Center and housing as two of our priority projects.”

She also addressed some budgetary concerns that could arise if the

Event Center is not built.

“If it’s not built, (we need to) look at those areas that were cut (in the initial budget) and then look at some projects that are coming in over (budget) – the inflation cost cannot be underestimated at this point,” she said. “The task force can be a start in deciding the yes or no question (of building the Event Center) and then what comes next would be a broader conversation.”

President Patrick Ahrens asserted the need for the board to give “scaffolding” to the De Anza Measure G taskforce so they could be “set up for success.” He also shared some of his thoughts on the findings from the feasibility study.

“There isn’t a market for a formal Event Center, and that we tried this before – it’s called the Flint Center,” he said. “That’s not something we wanted. I’m certainly not in favor of making the market because I can’t get behind a venue that’s going to be operated only 26 days of the year.”

The board opened up to comment from public attendees. Amy Huang, the DASG president and a student representative on the task force, said she saw no need for a new Event Center.

“There’s an under-utilization of on-campus resources, including Smithwick Theater and VPAC,” said Huang, 24, a business tri-major.

After consideration based on ideas presented above, Ahrens suggested the board issue a general directive to the task force to redirect resources and hear what the individual campuses have to say regarding these possibilities.

Cheu discussed when she could return estimates for different proposed projects. She said she could quickly give rough estimates with the assistance of Joel Cadiz, the district executive director of facilities and operations, but final estimates would take longer.

“We can pull out the resources that are available for the Event Center, the student services building, and swing space for the arts,” she said. “Joel Cadiz can give some very round numbers of what things might cost in terms of updating an arts quad and updating audio-visual equipment. We need to get a consultant to give really hard numbers, but I would beg that we don’t do that until July because we have a tentative budget coming up in June.”

Ahrens set the deadline for Cheu turning in a budget for different options to the taskforce for July, with some leeway until August.

Ahrens then set the next independent study session on Measure G issues for October, when classes would be back in session and students and faculty would be able to attend to give their opinions.