Report: College-owned island is too costly

COSTA MESA — A study group recommended Friday that Orange Coast College give up its programs on Rabbit Island, but urged the school to seek alternatives to holding classes on the remote Canadian property.

At a public meeting in the Student Center Lounge, consultants Susan Allen Lohr and Paul Siri told the audience that paying the island’s expenses would be nearly impossible. Lohr and Siri, who spent the last two days conducting interviews at OCC with a group of experts, said the island would cost about $150,000 a year if fully staffed.

The researchers, however, applauded OCC for giving field opportunities to science students and suggested that administrators look for other locations that are less expensive and closer. As an example, they cited a proposal by the city of Fort Bragg to implement a field station by the northern California coast.

“It’s really very difficult to see a realistic plan for keeping Rabbit Island as a resource for the college,” said Lohr, the former director of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado. “The costs are very, very great.”

Biology professor Marc Perkins, one of the faculty members who invited the study group to campus, said he found the study group’s findings mostly encouraging.

“I’m actually excited by their conclusions,” he said. “We’ve put a lot of work into Rabbit Island, and though if we sell Rabbit Island we’re losing a treasure, we can take the work we’ve put into Rabbit Island and use it to give to the state of California.”

Student President Lynne Riddle, whose government recently offered to cover up to $75,000 of the island’s expenses for the next year, also said she was heartened by the experts’ presentation.

“It seems that Rabbit Island, the place, is somewhat limiting our ability to serve different students and different programs,” she said. “They’ve shown us really another way of realizing the Rabbit Island dream without Rabbit Island.”

The OCC Foundation expects to vote on selling Rabbit Island this spring. The foundation began publicly floating plans to sell the property last fall, citing the high costs of maintaining it. The school has run summer programs on the island since 2003, shortly after receiving it as a gift from yachtsman Henry Wheeler.

Lohr, in her comments, noted that running courses on Rabbit Island also posed environmental concerns, due to the amounts of carbon and diesel fuel needed for transportation and facilities.

“The carbon footprint of each student who goes there is really quite large,” she said.