Earthquake safety could disrupt Pacific Cultural Center's schools plan

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Santa Cruz City Schools hopes to use the recently purchased Pacific Cultural Center in Seabright to host community meetings and events. Officials say knowing whether it would meet “very stringent” safety standards for potential seismic use was a headache.

Santa Cruz City Schools officials say they are slowly moving forward with 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.

Spokesman Sam Rollins told Lookout that the district is still awaiting a seismic analysis of the building to see if it meets the standards required by the state engineer's department for buildings used by students and teachers. Structural engineers told the district they doubted it would meet standards.

“It is subject to very stringent structural requirements,” Rollins said. “It really has to be very strengthened and very seismically sound. So we've had to do a number of studies to evaluate how seismically strong this space is, and no conclusive conclusion has been reached yet on any of them.”

The school district used reimbursement funds it received from the state from a roofing project in Gault to purchase the center. Future projects for the area in the center will be financed through bond financing or developer fee financing, Rollins said.

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

The district hopes to use the center's main building for community meetings and events, the parking area for student drop-offs and staff parking — the latter of which has already helped ease traffic congestion. Gault is the only school in the district that does not have a designated parking lot. Credit: Kevin Painchaud/Lookout Santa Cruz

There are many possible outcomes and paths the region could take depending on the analysis results and costs.

“We want the easier path for everyone involved — which is to use the building as is. It's unlikely that we'll be able to use it as is,” Rollins said. “So we're just trying to get a final understanding of whether we need to build a plan to retrofit the building to make it seismically sound.” , or make plans to replace the building that we can then present to the city and community to see if we can rebuild something that fits the footprint and fits the aesthetic enough for everyone to be happy.

Based on what he's heard so far from engineers, Rollins said the building likely wouldn't meet state architecture department requirements. In this case, the district would need to either upgrade the building or rebuild it, depending on the severity of its condition.

He added that if the costs — for which he had no estimates — were too great in either scenario, the district might consider leasing the space to groups that have expressed interest in purchasing the building.

“We are aware of local groups that would like a regular space to use, and like the idea of ​​using [center] Because of the large open hall it provides. “We have potential interested parties. But there is also the possibility that the structural engineer will advise us [although] It has not fallen, and is by no means earthquake safe. In this case, we wouldn't really be able to rent it to anyone, if we were told that the building itself was not safe.

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

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