OCC island sale delayed

Orange Coast College Foundation members voted unanimously Thursday evening to wait 60 days before deciding whether to sell Rabbit Island, giving students, faculty and community leaders a chance to seek other ways to pay for the island’s upkeep.

At the meeting in the new Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion on the OCC campus, a number of people who had taught or taken classes on Rabbit Island defended the British Columbian property as a valuable resource. Several foundation members said that operating the island has become too great a financial drain. Selling the island could net up to $1.75 million, foundation President Doug Bennett has said.

After nearly an hour of discussion, however, the members agreed to postpone their ruling. A core group of faculty members, who have applied for a National Science Foundation grant to fund programs on Rabbit Island, said they planned to ask experts to run a feasibility study on the property in January.

“This was huge tonight,” said marine science professor Dennis Kelly, who teaches summer courses on the island. “This was huge that they did this.”

Nearly all the discussion at the meeting revolved around the money issue, with no one on the board disputing Rabbit Island’s worth as an educational tool. Dave Grant, the head of OCC’s marine activities committee, noted that the School of Sailing and Seamanship had lost $200,000 running the island and would need to be paid back eventually.

“At some point, they need to recover that,” he said. “Fair is fair.”

With two months before the foundation’s next meeting, students and faculty plan to seek community benefactors who could shoulder some of the annual cost of maintaining Rabbit Island. In addition, they will count on the feasibility study for possible methods of streamlining expenses. A group of instructors has approached Susan Allen Lohr, a private field station consultant who lives in Colorado, about bringing a research team to OCC for about three days.

Lohr said she had no official plans yet to take up OCC’s offer, although she acknowledged that she found Rabbit Island intriguing.

“I’ve never encountered a two-year institution with a marine lab so far from campus,” she said in a phone interview Thursday from Colorado.

OCC has held courses on Rabbit Island since 2003, shortly after yachtsman Henry Wheeler donated it to the campus. The School of Sailing and Seamanship, which officially owns the island, has paid as much as $75,000 a year to maintain it.

Earlier this week, OCC’s student government urged the foundation to wait 60 days before making a decision, and the faculty senate seconded the request. At Thursday’s meeting, student Paul Bunch presented an additional petition to the board, featuring signatures from dozens of classmates and instructors.

Bunch, who has taken a course on the island, said he was stunned when he heard that the foundation was considering putting it up for sale.

“It seemed like it was kind of pulling the rug out from under all the work that had been done,” he said.