The Brief

Across California’s public university systems, students, faculty and staff are learning and working in aging academic buildings where air conditioning, roofs, plumbing and electrical systems are either deteriorating or not functional. Every year, maintenance costs for University of California and California State University campuses total a combined $1.5 billion.

But those repairs don’t always get made. The unpredictable nature of the state’s budget means there isn’t always enough money to make all the necessary fixes. State revenue has been sporadic, with hundreds of millions some years and no money in others. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed 2025-26 budget does not include any money for repairs, known as deferred maintenance, or other infrastructure projects.

Absent a long-term funding plan, the deferred maintenance backlog has grown to an estimated $9.1 billion for the University of California and $8.3 billion for Cal State University as of the 2023-24 school year, driven by aging buildings and increasing costs for labor and parts.

Given the size of the backlog, in 2023 the state Legislature’s budget advisory office urged lawmakers and system leaders to create a long-term funding solution for maintenance. Without those fixes, students and employees have had to endure extreme indoor heat, electrical and plumbing problems, and failing, outdated roofs.

State funding has been sporadic

The state’s public university systems are some of the largest in the nation, both in terms of enrollment and physical size. The UC operates 63 million square feet of academic space across 10 campuses and the Cal State system spans 43 million square feet across 23 campuses. Large physical systems come with large price tags to maintain them, especially as campus infrastructure ages. A majority of both systems' buildings are over 30 years old, according to the Legislative Analyst's Office.

Each year the UC and Cal State systems provide the Legislature with a five-year plan of proposed building improvement projects with cost estimates. This year, one proposed project includes replacing Santa Clara Hall at Sacramento State. Built in the 1960s, the building houses the engineering laboratory and has HVAC, electrical and telecommunications infrastructure that have “exceeded their useful life,” according to the California State University’s five-year plan.

While both university systems have robust tracking to quantify the size and cost of their maintenance backlogs, it's harder to track the amount they spend on deferred maintenance projects. That’s because a building project, like Santa Clara Hall, may include replacement of old or faulty components in addition to other improvements or renovations, like making a building safer during an earthquake. What also complicates matters is the various sources of funding the systems tap to pay for expensive projects.

Noah Galbraith with Students Against Tuition Hikes shows fallen and bulging ceiling tiles inside of King Hall across from the a Pan-African studies office at Cal State LA on Feb. 29, 2024.

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At the campus level, administrators can choose to use a portion of their base budget or reserves saved from previous budget allocations to fund repairs to academic buildings, though some campuses spend “little, if any, ongoing funds” on such replacements, according to the Legislative Analyst's Office.

In 2013 and 2014, respectively, state legislation granted the UC and CSU systems the ability to issue their own bonds to finance large projects, like entire building renovations or replacements. The systems then pay back the debt from those bonds using their general budget allocation. From 2013 to 2023, the UC financed about $1.1 billion in projects using university issued bonds and Cal State financed roughly $1.8 billion in projects through its own bonds from 2014 to 2023, according to data reviewed by the Legislative Analyst's Office. In addition to financing, both UC and Cal State can use revenue from system investments to pay for building improvements.

But the amount that the campuses and systems have been spending on replacements has not kept pace with the growth of the maintenance backlog. “To have the ongoing funding, to any degree, any amount — the restoration of that would be a significant plus towards working down this inventory,” said Ron Kalich, the director of Facilities and Asset Management for UC.

State support has been sporadic in recent years, largely influenced by the overall state budget conditions. Since 2015, the state has provided $689 million to UC and $784 million to Cal State to fund deferred maintenance projects in addition to making seismic safety and energy efficiency updates. Nearly half of that money came from the 2021-22 budget. That year each system received $325 million. Other years have been more lean. Newsom’s proposed 2025-26 budget has no allocation for deferred maintenance, nor was there any this year or last year.

We have not seen any designated facility deferred maintenance related funding from the state for a few years now, which has exacerbated critical issues as our campus continues to age,” said Mark Zakhour, Cal State Long Beach associate vice president of the building services division.

The Legislative Analyst's Office recommends the Legislature work with UC and Cal State to develop a plan to provide ongoing funds for future deferred maintenance repairs based on the size of each system’s needs. In the meantime, the Legislature is reviewing a newly introduced bill to put a bond before voters in 2026 that would fund repairs for both systems.

Students and faculty await fixes across the state

In the meantime, students and faculty are in buildings with broken or dilapidated equipment. At Fresno State around 62% of campus buildings are over 60 years old, according to Lisa Bell, Fresno State’s public information officer. Faith Van Hoven, a fourth-year philosophy major, says the air conditioning is so outdated it can’t keep up with the heat. She remembers sitting down during her ethics in criminal justice course on a day when the temperature reached triple digits. She looked up at the ceiling fan as it rotated but felt no reprieve.

“When it gets to be 110 [degrees] here, it can be really, really hot, and there's not always accommodations that are made for students and for the faculty,” Van Hoven said.

She’s tried to push through the heat with a small, personal fan that does little to cool the air. Students like Frederick Lisitsa, a fourth-year double major in philosophy and psychology at Fresno State, choose to avoid the indoor heat altogether.

“I do not stay in that class. I'm like, ‘I will do the homework, but I'm gonna go home,’” he said.

Rats, heat and cold have kept Carolynn Patten, a professor of neurobiology at the UC Davis School of Medicine, and her team from safely conducting research with recovering stroke patients. Her lab is housed within the 86-year-old Hickey Gymnasium building.

“The building is so old and the HVAC system is so decrepit that without exaggeration, in the winter, it will get so cold that we will be working indoors in outdoor jackets, hats, gloves,” Patten said.

The Janss Steps and Dickson Plaza are featured in this aerial view.

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Alan Nyiri

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During hotter weather, extreme indoor heat isn’t just uncomfortable for her students and research participants. It affects her temperature-sensitive research equipment. “The temperatures in the room get to a point that they're really out of the operating range for my equipment. And so now I have $2 million of equipment in there that is being compromised just because we can't create the right environment,” Patten said.

Rats have also chewed the cables that power her equipment, leading her to cancel experiments and halt her research. Patten explained that due to the constant delays, her research partner said he will stop payments because he’s not getting timely data.

“The reason we haven't delivered data is we couldn't do experiments,” said Patten. “I will, in no way, do anything that will compromise patient safety. It wasn't safe to do experiments because the rats had damaged their equipment, and now it's going to have an impact on funding my research.”

How maintenance backlogs grow on campus

UC officials say ignoring small fixes can lead to costly repairs down the road. “If you don't do the proper preventive maintenance, you shorten the life cycle of these things, so then they become deferred maintenance,” said Clint Lord, associate vice chancellor of facilities at UC Davis.

That’s part of the reason why money is allocated for operations and maintenance in the budget for any new building project. Money is allocated per square feet to pay for ongoing upkeep of the building. But the cost to eventually replace building components is not included in those building budgets, which is part of the reason why backlogs have grown so large. When something needs replacing every couple of decades there’s no pot of money set aside specifically to pay the replacement costs.

“When the state started funding academic facilities, they missed one key component,” said Shawn Holland, chief of Facilities Operations at Cal State. “What they never considered was, ‘What does it cost to renew that building 20 years later?’”

That’s not the case for all buildings on campus, though. Buildings that generate revenue, like parking structures or dormitories, do have money allocated by square footage to pay for forecasted replacement costs over time. Making that process uniform with academic buildings is one way the state can begin budgeting for the costs of academic buildings that will need new equipment or upkeep in the future, Holland said.

That change wouldn’t impact the current backlog, however. Campuses leaving deferred maintenance projects unfixed can also put a university’s mission in jeopardy, said Matt Gudorf, assistant vice chancellor of facilities at UC Irvine. Emergencies caused by infrastructure failure can displace students, faculty and staff and strain campus operating budgets.

“Now we are impacting people's ability to go to class, to go to their office, to do research,” Gudorf said. “It not only costs facilities more money, but you're disrupting the whole mission of the university, and that's a huge issue.”

Leaving items on the backlog can also make the replacement more expensive as inflation drives up pricing for parts and workers who are qualified to make updates. Inflation has been “the biggest driver in cost increases” of the deferred maintenance backlog at UC, according to Kalich.

Exploring alternative funding

In 2023, the Legislative Analyst's Office proposed that the university systems and lawmakers develop a long-term funding model that would provide universities an ongoing percentage of the value of their deferred maintenance backlog to help bring it down over time. University officials and legislators haven’t done that though lawmakers are looking at ways to increase funding outside of the systems’ budget allocations.

Assemblymember David Alvarez, a Democrat from Chula Vista whose district includes San Diego State University, introduced AB 48 to put a bond measure on the 2026 ballot to raise billions of dollars for UC and Cal State to address their growing maintenance backlogs. The bill doesn’t have a dollar amount yet, said Alvarez, who sits on the Assembly Education committee.

“We have to go back and really explain to the voters why this [bond] is important and why we should invest in higher education facilities,” Alvarez said.

A cyclist rides through campus at Cal State Long Beach on July 25, 2022.

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CalMatters

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The last time UC and Cal State received money from a statewide bond initiative was in 2006, when voters approved $3.1 billion for community colleges, UC and Cal State campuses to address infrastructure needs.

In 2020, voters rejected Proposition 13, the largest school bond proposal in state history, which would have provided the UC and Cal State $2 billion each to fund infrastructure projects and repairs in addition to $11 billion for K-12 schools and the California community colleges.

Lawmakers included UC and Cal State in an early version of Proposition 2, a school bond measure approved last November, but the university systems were eventually left out to limit the amount of bond money voters were asked to approve. At the UC, where total capital needs are expected to grow to $30.7 billion by 2030, system leaders said they were disappointed to be left off the state bond despite 18 months of lobbying the Legislature.

“Going forward, UC will be exploring other options to address our construction, renewal and deferred maintenance needs,” wrote UC spokesperson Heather Hanson via email.

Cal State trustee Jack McGrory said being left out of the bond was “upside down” at a board meeting in September and urged the board to figure out a plan to secure desperately needed state funding. The deferred maintenance backlog at Cal State is expected to increase by $397 million annually due to inflation and aging facilities, according to Steve Relyea, Cal State’s executive vice chancellor and chief financial officer.

“We've got to figure out some different strategy, some alternative for this, because our buildings are in really bad shape,” McGrory said.

Mercy Sosa and Victoria Mejicanos are fellows with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Since 1977, Richard Santillan has been to every Opening Day game at Dodger Stadium. 

“The tradition goes from my father, to me, to my children and grandchildren. Some of my best memories are with my father and children here at Dodger Stadium,” Santillan told The LA Local, smiling under the shade of palm trees near the entrance to the ballpark Wednesday morning. He was there to protest the team less than 24 hours before Opening Day.

Santillan, like countless other loyal Dodgers fans, is grappling with his fan identity over the team’s decision to accept an invitation to the White House and owner Mark Walter’s ties to ICE detention facilities.

More than 30 people joined Santillan on Wednesday morning for a press conference held near 1000 Vin Scully Drive to convey a message directly to the team. 

“We are demanding the Dodgers stop participating in funding of inhumane treatment of families and do not go to the White House to celebrate with the criminal in chief,” Evelyn Escatiola told the crowd. “Together, we have the power to make a change.”

Escatiola, a former dean of East Los Angeles College and longtime community organizer, urged fans to flex their economic power by “letting the Dodgers know that we do not support repression.”

Jorge “Coqui” Rodriguez, a lifelong Dodgers fan, spoke to the crowd and called on Dodgers ownership to divest from immigration detention centers owned and operated by GEO Group and CoreCivic.

Jorge Coqui H Rodriguez speaks at a press conference outside Dodger Stadium on March 25, 2026, to demand the Dodgers not to visit the White House following their 2025 World Series win.

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In a phone interview a day before the protest, Rodriguez told The LA Local he did not want the Dodgers using his “cheve” or beer money to fund detention centers. 

“They can’t take our parking money, our cacahuate money, our cheve money, our Dodger Dog money and invest those funds into corporations that are imprisoning people. It’s wrong,” Rodriguez said. 

Rodriguez considers the Dodgers one of the most racially diverse teams and said the players need to support fans at a time when heightened immigration enforcement has become more common across L.A.

The team’s 2025’s visit to the White House drew ire from the largely Latino fan base, citing the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on immigrants. 

In June, the team came under further scrutiny when rumors swirled online that federal immigration agents were using the stadium’s parking, which immigration authorities later denied in statements posted on social media accounts.

The team again came under fire after not releasing a statement on the impacts of ICE raids on its mostly Latino fan base at the height of immigration enforcement last summer. The team later agreed to invest $1 million to support families affected by immigration enforcement.

When he learned the Dodgers were pledging only $1 million to families in need, Rodriguez called the amount a  “slap in the face.” 

“These guys just bought the Lakers for billions of dollars and they give a million dollars to fight for legal services? That’s a joke,” Rodriguez said. “They need to have a moral backbone and not be investing in those companies.”

According to reporting from the Los Angeles Times, former Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershawsaid last week that he is looking forward to the trip.

“I went when President [Joe] Biden was in office. I’m going to go when President [Donald] Trump is in office,” Kershaw said. “To me, it’s just about getting to go to the White House. You don’t get that opportunity every day, so I’m excited to go.”

The Dodgers have yet to announce when their planned visit will take place. 

Santillan sometimes laments his decision to give up his season tickets in protest of the team. His connection to the stadium and the memories he has made there with family and friends will last a lifetime, he said. On Thursday, he will uphold his tradition and be there for the first pitch of the season, but with a heavy heart.

“It’s a family tradition, but the Dodgers have a lot of work to do,” he said.

A local favorite mom-and-pop bookshop in Eagle Rock is facing displacement due to a steep rent hike. The owners say theirs is just one of several small businesses along Eagle Rock Boulevard struggling to keep up with lease increases.

Over the past 19 years, many in the neighborhood have come to love READ Books for its eclectic collection of used titles and shop dog Florence.

Co-owner Jeremy Kaplan said it’s been a delight to grow with the community over the years.

“Like seeing kids come back in, who were in grade school and now they’re in college,” Kaplan said.

But the building where Kaplan and wife Debbie rent was recently sold, and the rent increased by more than 130% to $2,805 a month, Kaplan said. He told LAist it was an increase his small business simply could not absorb.

Kaplan said he originally was given 30 days notice of the rent increase. After some research, assistance from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office and some pro-bono legal help, Kaplan said he pushed back and got the 90-day notice he’s afforded by state law.

California Senate Bill 1103 requires landlords to give businesses with five or less employees 90 days’ notice for rent increases exceeding 10%, among other protections.

Systems Real Estate, the property management company, did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

What can small businesses do? 

Nadia Segura, directing attorney of the Small Business Program at pro bono legal aid non-profit Bet Tzedek said California law does not currently allow for rent control for commercial tenancies.

Outside of the protections under SB 1103, Segura said small businesses like READ Books don’t have much other recourse. And even then, commercial landlords are not required to inform their tenants of their protections under the law.

“There’s still a lot of people that don’t know about SB 1103. And then it’s very sad that they tell them they have these rent increases and within a month they have to leave,” Segura said.

She said her group is seeing steep rent hikes like this for commercial tenants across the city.

“We are seeing this even more with the World Cup coming up, the Olympics coming up. And I will say it was very sad to see that also after the wildfires,” Segura said.

Part of Bet Tzedek’s ongoing work is to advocate for small businesses, working with landlords who are increasing rents to see if they are willing to give business owners longer leases that lock in rents.

What’s next 

After READ Books posted about their situation on social media, commenters chimed in to express their outrage and love for the little shop.

While he looks for a new spot, Kaplan says he’s forming a coalition of local businesses and activist groups to see what can be done to help other small businesses facing similar displacement. He wants to address the displacement issue for businesses like his, which have made Eagle Rock the distinctive neighborhood that it is today.

Owl Talk, a longtime Eagle Rock staple selling clothing and accessories in a unit in the same building as READ Books, is facing a “more than double” rent increase, according to a post on their Instagram account.

Kaplan said he’s been in touch with the office of state Assemblywoman Jessica Caloza and wants to explore the possibility of introducing legislation to set up protections for small businesses like his, including rent-control measures or a vacancy tax for landlords. Kaplan said he also reached out to the office of state Sen. Maria Durazo.

By his count, Kaplan said there are about a dozen businesses within surrounding blocks that are at risk of closing their doors or have shuttered due to rent increases or other struggles.

When READ Books was founded during the Great Recession, Kaplan said he knew it was a longshot to open a bookstore at the same time so many were struggling to stay in business.

“It was kind of interesting to be doing something that neighborhoods needed. That was important to me growing up, that was important to my children, that was important to my wife growing up,” Kaplan said.

“And then somebody comes in and says, ‘We’re gonna over double your rent.”

Topline:

Frozen budget: Most of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting budget comes from an assessment that people who own property illuminated by lights pay on their county property tax bill. The amount people pay depends on the kind of property they own and how much they benefit from lighting. A typical single-family home currently pays $53 annually, and in total, the assessments bring in about $45 million annually for the city to repair and maintain streetlights. Changing the amount the Bureau of Street Lighting gets from the assessment requires a vote among property owners who benefit from the lights.

Ballots: L.A. City Council’s vote gives city staff the green light to prepare and send out those ballots. Miguel Sangalang, who oversees the bureau, said at a committee meeting earlier this month that he expects to send out ballots by April 17. Notices about the ballots will be sent out prior to the ballots themselves.

Near unanimous vote: L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez was the only “No” vote Tuesday, saying she wanted to see a more current strategic plan for the bureau. Sangalang said the bureau developed a plan in 2022 that lays out how money will be spent. Councilmember Imelda Padilla was absent for the vote.

Vote count: Votes will be weighted according to the assessment amount. Basically, the more you’re asked to pay yearly to maintain streetlights, the more your vote will count. Ballots received before June 2 will be tabulated by the L.A. City Clerk.

How much more money: According to a report, the amount needed in assessments from property owners to meet the repair and maintenance needs of the city’s streetlighting in the next fiscal year is nearly $112 million.

Use of the money: Sangalang said at a March 11 committee meeting that the extra funds would be used to double the number of staff to handle repairs and procure solar streetlights, which don’t face the threat of copper wire theft. That would all potentially reduce the time it takes to repair simple fixes down to a week. Currently, city residents wait for months to see broken streetlights repaired. The assessment would come with a three-year auditing mechanism.