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cont...
Up For Sale
Having reached retirement age shortly after 1970, Quaglino sold
his pharmacy and placed his office complex on the market. The
IVCC tried desperately to find the finances to purchase the complex
to make permanent its status as a community service center. For
several years it was available for $139,500. Ross Pumphrey, the
administrator of the IVCSC corporation in the early 1970s, and
Lauri Bacon, IVCC's planning director 1974-75, together must have
prepared and submitted twenty grant proposals to secure the building,
all to no avail.
The university refused to help out, even though the Regents report after the 1970 riots (The Trow Report) had strongly recommended that UCSB start holding classes in Isla Vista and put many of its community-relations personnel here. The administration even vetoed a student-supported plan to purchase the complex with a $4.5-million student registration fee surplus, instead hogging the entire surplus to build a UCen addition in the mid-1970s.
And then-State Assemblyman Gary K. Hart was unable to find any state resources to purchase the building.
Of course, if Isla Vista had formed a city in 1973 or 1975, the community could have easily purchased the buildings and made them City Hall.
Breakthrough!
However, in 1976, while I was working in a CETA slot as the Economic Development Coordinator for the IVCC, I caught the County trying to hold the second required public hearing for a $3-million pot of federal community development money on the same day as the first hearing.
A quick reading of the federal regulations told me this wasn't
the correct procedure. So between the morning and afternoon hearings,
I chased down the staff person responsible and threatened to blow
his cover if some of the money didn't come to Isla Vista.
We found in the regs that a "neighborhood center" qualified
for the grant, and the staffer and I quickly reached a figure
of $50,000 as appropriate for the project, which was then approved
by the supervisors on a 5-0 vote. Of course, the Supes had no
idea how this project had been added to the staff's recommendations
between the two hearings.
With such a large down payment, I figured the community would
easily be able to find a bank--or even Quaglino himself--to finance
the balance of the selling price.
We took our situation to Quaglino and he agreed to sell us the
two buildings based on the County's down payment, although somewhat
reluctantly because he didn't like it that it might take up to
six months for the county to actually release the funds to him.
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