Cabrillo College and UC Santa Cruz students could be moving into a new housing project on Cabrillo’s Aptos campus as early as fall 2026, now that the California government has walked back a plan to force community colleges to issue bonds to pay for building new campus housing development.
Cabrillo College President Matt Wetstein said he’s hopeful the groundbreaking for the 624-bed project will be in September 2024 after receiving the news that the project will now be fully supported by the state, and the college is no longer being asked to issue bonds to finance it.
“We are super excited,” he said.
Earlier this year, Cabrillo College and UCSC applied to the state’s Higher Education Student Housing Grant Program with the hope that the state would fund the community college’s $111 million portion of the costs. UCSC applied with the intention to fund its portion of the costs, $70 million, through bonds.
In June, however, the state changed the funding model from a grant to asking Cabrillo, and other community colleges who had also applied for grant money, to issue bonds. Wetstein and other community college officials pushed back, saying the bond issuances would burden colleges with the cost of building campus housing and that they wouldn’t be able to offer the beds at affordable rates unless the projects were funded through grants.
Following two months of discussions between legislators including state Sen. John Laird, the community colleges’ leadership teams and the state, the sides agreed to a model that Wetstein says will work for Cabrillo. The University of California is selling the bonds to cover the entire cost of the joint project and the state will pay the debt costs for those bonds, according to Laird, whose district includes Santa Cruz County.
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