Community College Scrambles as California Freezes Money for Project Under Construction

California’s budget woes come at a particularly inopportune time for Shasta College. Construction on the community college’s new library annex is half finished, but the state has frozen the money to pay for it. College officials say it’s too late to stop the $10-million project—they have to live up to the terms of their contract with the construction firm, for one thing, and if they did halt construction, they’d be left with a giant safety hazard in the middle of the campus.

According to an article in the Redding Record Searchlight, the state government’s decision to put a hold on money for construction projects statewide has left Shasta administrators scrambling to investigate borrowing options and whether to put up another campus building as collateral. The 20,600-square-foot project was to have been paid for entirely with proceeds from a 2006 state bond offering, the newspaper said, but the state had only transferred $3.2-million to the college before the spending freeze took effect.

“It’s a nightmare,” said Joe Wyse, vice president of administrative services for the college, adding that the state money would come at some point. “We just don’t know when.”

Meanwhile, the college is facing a $2-million budget shortfall of its own, the newspaper reports. And enrollment in September—8,000—was nearly 10 percent higher than at the same time a year earlier.

Shasta is hardly the only college whose construction plans having been affected by the recession. Cornell University’s president announced Sunday night that the university would extend a freeze on new building that began in October, according to the Ithaca Journal.