Earthquake safety could disrupt schools’ plan for Pacific Cultural Center

Santa Cruz City Schools officials say they’re slowly progressing on plans to repurpose the Pacific Cultural Center – located across the street from Gault Elementary School at Seabright Avenue and Broadway – after purchasing it in June for about $2.6 million. 

Spokesperson Sam Rolens told Lookout the district is still waiting on a seismic analysis of the building to know whether it meets standards required by the Division of the State Architect for buildings that students and teachers use. Structural engineers told the district they doubt it will meet the standards.

“It’s under very stringent structural requirements,” Rolens said. “It really, really has to be very reinforced and very seismically sound. So we’ve had to do a number of studies to assess how seismically sound this space is, and none of them are yet conclusive.”

The school district used reimbursement funds it received from the state from a roofing project at Gault to purchase the center. The district’s future projects at the center would be financed by bond funding or developer fee funding, Rolens said. 

The sale of the center to the school district upset some community members, who mourned the loss of a community space and potentially the loss of a historic building and feared it would be rebuilt as a classroom or merely a parking lot. School district officials have said that’s not the case.

The district hopes to use the center’s main building for meetings and community events, and the parking area for student drop-offs and staff parking – the latter of which has already helped alleviate traffic congestion. Gault is the only school in the district without dedicated parking. 

There are several potential outcomes and routes the district can take depending on the analysis results and costs. 

“We want the easiest route for all concerned – which would be to utilize the building as is. It’s very unlikely that we’ll be able to utilize it as is,” Rolens said. “So we’re just trying to get a definitive understanding of whether we need to build a plan to retrofit the building to make it seismically sound, or put together plans to replace the building that we can then present to the city and to the community to see if we can rebuild something that matches the footprint and matches the aesthetic enough that everyone will be happy.” 

Based on what he’s heard so far from engineers, Rolens said the building is likely not going to meet Division of the State Architect requirements. In that case, the district would either need to retrofit the building or rebuild it, depending on the severity of its condition. 

He added that if the costs – which he doesn’t have estimates for – are too great in either scenario, the district has considered renting out the space to groups that had expressed interest in purchasing the building. 

“We are aware of local groups who would like to have regular space to use, and like the idea of using the [center] because of the big, open hall that it provides,” he said. “We do have potential interested parties. But there is also the possibility that we’re advised by the structural engineer that [although] it hasn’t fallen down, it is not in any way earthquake-safe. In that event, we wouldn’t really be able to rent it out to anybody, if we’re advised that the building itself isn’t safe.” 

Considering all of the factors, Rolens said it was difficult to provide even a rough timeline of when the building could be used for district meetings or events. 

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