The Isla Vista Community Services District tightened its budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year after falling short of projected revenue by $100,00 in the last fiscal year. The new budget decreases funding on nearly all programs, with some readjustments to the budget — an effort by the Board of Directors to minimize slashing programs outright.
The Isla Vista Community Services District (IVCSD) acts as a local government for Isla Vista, providing programs and services for the community like its Community Spaces and the Isla Vista Parking Study. It gets most of its revenue from Measure R, a User Utility Tax which applies an 8% surcharge on certain utility bills like gas, water, trash and electricity charged to residents of Isla Vista. This fiscal year, from Oct. 1 2023 to Oct. 1 2024, brought in $1.3 million. It is the first year that the tax revenue stagnated for the district since 2019, meaning the revenue didn’t meet projected increases.
Since natural gas prices decreased in the past year, the tax didn’t meet the IVCSD’s projected revenues, the board of directors said. In 2021, the price of natural gas peaked due to cold weather, increased exports and low coal inventories. The price steadily decreased and reached a record low this year due to a natural gas market surplus.
The rest of IVCSD’s funds come from property charges and state revenues, including grants.
“We faced a shortfall that was a little over $100,000 and had to make really tough decisions about, ‘are we going to eliminate some of the free programming at the community center that people have come to rely on, like yoga classes, guitar lessons, dance lessons, or are we going to try to raise funds to be able to continue those?’” IVCSD director and finance committee member Spencer Brandt said.
The IVCSD finance committee deliberates on budgets four times throughout the year. In June, the district reviews their preliminary budget, and after deliberations delivers a final budget document in August. These budget deliberations help prepare for the new fiscal year, which begins annually on Oct. 1.
This year, the IVCSD also faces the increased cost of conducting business due to inflation, which includes paying off rent for its properties, the Community Room and Community Center, alongside employee expenses, advertising, labor and more.
In total, funding decreased by about $332,000, 6% lower than in 2022-23, with community programs seeing the most significant cuts. IVCSD used about $53,000 from its reserves along with $67,000 in reductions to balance the budget, General Manager Jonathan Abboud said.
While it was a difficult budget year for several governmental agencies including the Governor’s office, the IVCSD could absorb many of the cuts with its reserves, so ongoing projects such as the Isla Vista Parking Study weren’t halted or dropped altogether.
“And that's taken a lot of maturity, not for our board, but specifically for our organization. We've just grown in staff, we've grown in the success of our programs, and we've grown in our budget every single year except for this past year,” IVCSD Board President Marcos Aguilar said.
“The lack of growth this past year, I don't think is a sign of a trend. I think it's a reflection of greater economic inflation that Americans were experiencing since the primary revenue we get is from the User Utility Tax,” which “isn’t market volatile,” he continued.
Community programs see biggest cuts
Most of the drafted 2024-25 IVCSD budget, 41%, is allocated toward community programs, with the largest chunk going toward community programs, $800,165 of a total 1.9 million-dollar budget. IVCSD’s community programming includes its Community Spaces, Isla Vista Beautiful, Isla Vista Compost Collective, Rental Housing Mediation, Interpersonal Violence Investigation and Prevention Program and Isla Vista Safety Stations.
The IVCSD community programs had the biggest cuts, their overall budget decreasing from $983,000 to $814,000, for a reduction of $169,000. A large portion of the costs include rent and upkeep of the Community Room and Community Center. The IVCSD began charging for use of its community space this year to balance this cost.
While $46,000 from the regular salaries of Community Programs was dropped, much of it was reallocated to other areas. In 2023-24, the board had $30,000 to hire a dedicated community engagement director, but the effort was unsuccessful because they couldn’t find someone to fill the position. The funds were reallocated for an intern in operations — better matching their needs.
“Looking at the budget, [it appears] there was a big cut in the salaries for the community center. That's not what happened. It was more that we did a reorganization of the staff, and so we just moved positions around and did promotions [and] eliminated older positions,” Abboud said.
The budget for IVCSD interns hasn’t decreased, but the working hours for interns are limited. Community Programs and Engagement Director Myah Mashhadialireza said that, to provide new jobs, the district is opening a community ambassadors volunteer program, where volunteers will offer career mentorship to students.
“We're still trying to offer those opportunities, especially for our community members, even if they look a little bit differently,” Mashhadialireza said.
Of programs that were cut altogether, the Isla Vista Compost Collective’s food scrap collection project lost its $30,000 funding in the new budget. The district still accepts compost donations, but will not be collecting it from households.
“We had been providing the doorstep collection service to about 140 households, and that was costing about $30,000 so that was an area where we made that reduction,” Abboud said.
Many of the cuts had been to funding that was not being used or was over-budgeted, including $15,000 for marketing, $10,000 for an app intended for residents to report community incidents and $15,000 that had been allocated for Isla Vista Beautiful — which tackles waste removal, repairs and other issues in I.V. Contractual services were added into the employee budget for the board to do more work internally.
Other eliminations included previous allocations for furniture and equipment which had been important when the organization was younger.
“This year was a good lesson reassessing what is critical for us to operate, to serve the public best,” Abboud said. “It reaffirmed something, which is that our organization is very nimble and agile and able to adapt. We came together to be able to say we're making some changes to our budget, but we want to be able to serve the public the same, if not more and better.”
A version of this article appeared on p. 4 of the Oct. 10, 2024 edition of the Daily Nexus.
