Ballot Beat: Board Candidates Alan Wong and Heather McCarty and their Plans to Avert a Fiscal Freeze

By John Schneider

jt.wildfeuer@gmail.com

 

On Nov. 5 San Francisco voters will choose from eight candidates who have qualified to run for four seats on the Community College Board. 

 

Once seated, they will join Trustees Vick Van Chung, Anita Martinez, and Susan Solomon in guiding the college through several key transitions and decisions. These include reconciling the college’s budget and enrollment with the end of the “hold harmless” provision of the state Student Centered Funding Formula (SCFF), addressing three action items necessary for the maintenance of its accreditation, considering the future of the Free City program in light of proposed reductions from the city, and hiring a permanent chancellor.

 

Leading up to the election The Guardsman will be interviewing candidates, providing context for current issues facing the college and proposals to address them in an ongoing segment.

 

The Guardsman interviewed Board President Alan Wong, who spoke to the progress that’s been made with budget and enrollment, the importance of the Free City program, and the work that remains to avoid a funding freeze. Dr. Heather McCarty, also interviewed, offered novel solutions and described the difficult dynamic between board, administration, accreditation commission, city and state government, and student body and how this necessitates better training and collaboration.

 

President Alan Wong

 

President Alan Wong is one of two incumbents seeking another term, the other is Trustee Aliya Chisti.

 

Speaking to the personal connection he has with City College, President Wong said it “shaped my entire family’s life, and it’s given us so much opportunity.” When his father was laid off from a factory job, he turned to City College for ESL courses in the hopes of improving his prospects. Through the culinary program he trained to become a hotel cook which enabled him to support his immediate and extended family in the Sunset.

 

Through City College classes he took on a low-income waiver, President Wong was able to add extra units and graduate from UC San Diego with a Bachelor’s Degree at age 19.

 

This, he said, is “why we need to defend Free City College, because that represents everything that City College is about, promoting access and opportunity for all people.”

 

Free City, a program launched in 2017, is a collaboration between the college and the City and County of San Francisco that offers free tuition to all city residents. At that time it was the first of its kind in the United States.

 

In light of the novel nature of the program and the potential it represents for upward mobility in California, a state that consistently ranks high in income inequality, President Wong said that ending Free City would “set a negative example for the entire country.”

 

The program is paid for with funds generated by Proposition W, a measure approved by voters in 2016 which raises the transfer tax by a quarter of a percent on properties over $5 million.

 

President Wong said the transfer tax added up to “$38 million a year to the city’s budget with the intent of funding Free City College.” Despite this, he said “During the first two years, they only gave $5.3 million.”

 

The current agreement over Free City between the college and the city, signed in 2019, provides $15 million per year for the program for a period of 10 years. Free City credit enrollment is down from 24,000 in 2017 to 17,000 last year, despite an uptick in overall enrollment in the last year. As a result, the city is attempting to renegotiate its Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the college to restrict access to Free City to students pursuing an associate’s degree or a career program certificate.

 

President Wong said, “That will hurt our enrollment … during a year when our budget will become flat unless we significantly increase enrollment.”

 

City College has struggled in recent years to maintain adequate levels of reserve funds, putting the institution in a more precarious position as it transitions to the state’s Student Centered Funding Formula (SCFF). The funding formula was enacted in 2017, but implementation has been delayed several times for districts like City College through a “hold harmless” provision as it attempts to make structural changes to comply with the state’s priorities and regain enrollment lost in part as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

President Wong said efforts by past administrations and board members to recover from this “very crippling situation” have included “financial gimmicks” like rent paid in advance on Mission Campus, which “was used to balance the budget … but that’s not really cash on had to be used for reserves.”

 

During his term, President Wong said many of these issues have been resolved or improved. “Now we have a balanced budget,” he said, “with five percent reserves for the last several fiscal years.” 

 

Enrollment has increased. According to the most recent Term Headcount fact sheet, the rate was about 7% from Spring 2023 to Spring 2024. President Wong cited 12% for that period. Either way, this is an improvement from the 27% decline from Spring 2018 to Spring 2019, the next most recent year for which there is complete headcount data (according to the Office of Research and Planning, data for 2020-22 does not include noncredit and overall headcounts “due to the changes and challenges in data collection during the COVID-19 pandemic”).

 

As a result of changes on the state level, “hold harmless” no longer expires resulting in a fiscal cliff, but constitutes a funding minimum prompting a funding freeze. Consequently, should the college fail to make improvements to qualifying enrollment by FY 2025-26 it will not receive any cost of living adjustments (CoLA) from the state of California.

 

To avoid this outcome President Wong said the college will need to be “reprioritizing classes that bring in the most demand so that we can grow our enrollment despite a flat budget for potentially several fiscal years.”

 

Speaking to his record, President Wong said he is proud of his role as a “principal staffer that worked on drafting and advancing the Free City College legislation in 2019.” He also points to the college’s Green New Deal aimed at “eliminating all of our greenhouse gas emissions and electrifying our buildings and our vehicle fleet,” as well as the college’s balanced budget and enrollment gains.

 

Dr. Heather McCarty

“The board should know they are the fiduciary responsibility of the institution,” said Dr. Heather McCarty, “the buck stops with them.”

 

McCarty has taught at Ohlone College for over 18 years in their History Department and Gender and Women’s Studies Department and is Chair and Co-Director of the Lytton Center for History and the Public Good.

 

In 2012 a friend in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office urged McCarty to run for a seat on the Community College Board after City College received a “show cause” order from the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) requiring the institution to demonstrate why it should not have its accreditation revoked. 

 

The order marked the start of a several years effort by the college to keep its accreditation, including a lawsuit filed by then City Attorney Dennis Herrera and a decision issued by California Superior Court Judge Curtis Karnow critical of the ACCJC’s handling of the accreditation review. McCarty had just welcomed a newborn into her family and before long would take her first City College courses, Early Childhood Education’s parent observation classes. At that time McCarty said she would run at some point after she retires.

 

This remained her plan, even after training with Emerge California, an organization that trains Democratic women to run for office. “Then,” McCarty said, “[City College] got put on warning again, and this time the accreditation warning is exclusively because of the actions of the Board.” Drawing on eighteen years in the community college system as well as her experience working on accreditation at UC Berkeley, McCarty was mobilized by the abnormality of such a warning. “That’s it,” she said, “I’m running. This is crazy. Totally mad.”

 

The warning, issued in January 2024, calls on the college to provide a Follow-Up Report by March 1, 2025 demonstrating compliance with three requirements: that the Board “consider the College’s long-range fiscal implications when making financial decisions,” that it “act in a manner consistent with its policies and bylaws,” and that the Chancellor be allowed to “implement and administer Board policies without Board interference.”

 

McCarty said, “there needs to be college-wide conversations with all of the stakeholders, including students, discussing what City College should look like in ten years and five years, and backwards planning from there.” This approach may be helpful in guiding financial decisions and anticipating their long-range financial ramifications, but it may also shed light on the gap that exists between City College and the vision for it implied by the state’s Student Centered Funding Formula (SCFF).

 

“The State Chancellor’s Office,” McCarty said, “is really pushing towards having community colleges be junior colleges.” This is reflected in the increased focus by the SCFF on degree completion, certificates, and increasing transfers. She said, “That’s not what the city of San Francisco needs.”

 

McCarty suggests rolling over funds from courses that exceed their cost neutral enrollment (the number needed to offset the cost of faculty and facilities) to cover noncredit courses which are given lower apportionment under the SCFF. By using an “efficient enrollment management system,” she believes the college can better meet its obligations to both the state and its local community.

 

Beyond retaining a robust course catalog through increased efficiency, McCarty also proposes returning to a strategy used in the past to offer courses “where students were,” by partnering with the community. By removing access barriers and transferring facilities costs to community partners, she said, noncredit courses could operate at a lower cost. A similar approach could be applied to dual and concurrent enrollment by hosting City College instructors on SFUSD campuses, potentially increasing enrollment and minimizing the cost of facilities.

 

What is lacking, McCarty said, is “a real culture of collaboration,” both with the community and internally among City College stakeholders. This is an obstacle to implementing novel solutions and “shaping a vision.” She cites “massive administrative turnover,” including in the chancellorship, as a reciprocal cause of these shortcomings. 

 

The current board appointed Mitchell Bailey interim chancellor on May 31 of this year, but does not appear to have begun searching for a permanent chancellor despite having been given notice of Chancellor Martin’s planned departure in September 2023, a decision that McCarty describes as a “misstep.” 

 

While acknowledging an overall trend of administrative churn in higher education, McCarty said current City College trustees have erred in ways that may alienate potential administrators in the future. Part of the ACCJC warning, McCarty said, could not have been included without a trustee sharing information with the site visit team about their “evaluative process with the chancellor,” which in her experience is typically handled in private between fellow board members. She said prospective administrators will note, as she has, how this was handled and that they won’t “want to come to an institution that has a board that is so incompetent that they risk their college’s accreditation over petty infighting.”

 

Along with improving the board’s functionality, McCarty believes members ought to be receiving training, especially “budget training.” For example, she said, “They were late to start to deal with their OPEB, their Other Post Employment Benefits.”

 

OPEB are life and health insurance benefits provided to retirees. After settling on a percent to fund these benefits at “the board voted to lower the amount,” McCarty said, adding, “A board should not do that in the middle of an accreditation process.”

 

McCarty is involved in budgeting at Ohlone College and describes herself as a “budget nerd.” While their power is limited, she said the board can change the budget timeline so that “they have enough time to actually give feedback, and that they get multiple versions.”

 

Next year marks the 90th anniversary of City College’s 1935 charter. To flourish by the time it reaches a century, McCarty said City College is “going to be an institution that’s a community college, first and foremost, it’s going to be an institution that’s fiscally solvent, and it’s going to be an institution that’s enrolling a lot more students than we currently have.”

 

Four Seats, Eight Candidates

 

Between now and Nov. 5, voters will have time to get to know each of the candidates running for Community College Board which, along with one student trustee, constitutes the City College Board of Trustees.

 

The candidates are as follows: Aliya Chisti, Ruth Ferguson, Ben Kaplan, Leanna Louie, Heather McCarty, Julio Ramos, Alan Wong, and Luis Zamora.

 

In the coming weeks, The Guardsman will be interviewing each candidate who responds to a request for comment as well as providing data and context for the myriad complex issues facing City College.