UCI On-Campus Housing Problems

All Palo Verde residents should have gotten a notice about the upcoming elections to the Palo Verde Residents Council.
As a founding member of the PVRC, I strongly urge everybody to vote.
Your participation is important to help improve things in UCI housing and in particular in Palo Verde. The PVRC represents you, the residents of Palo Verde, in all matters related to your housing needs.
The announcement (I obfuscated Josiah's email address):

May 30-June 1 2007, all authorized residents of Palo Verde are invited to elect the members of the Palo Verde Residents Council for the July 2007-June 2008 term.

Candidate statements can be found online at: http://palo-verde.org/?page_id=28 , and should be posted near this notice.

If you would like to vote, please visit http://palo-verde.org on May 30 for the url to vote electronically (if you have not received notification or other instructions via email). If you have any questions, or would like to acquire a paper ballot, email Josiah Carlson (jcarlson at uci dot edu) with the subject of ?elections? BEFORE 5PM on June 1, 2007.
If there are no challenges, results of the election will be posted on June 8, 2007.

Recently, the UCI Graduate administration has sent out letters to graduate students in on-campus housing, essentially threatening to throw them out.
In particular, these letters went to people who were living in UCI Graduate Housing on or before June 2002. In June 2002, the university, in the course of a housing policy change, agreed to grandfather in all graduate students who lived in on-campus housing on or before June 2002.

An excerpt from the letter:

Campus Administration together with the Academic Senate have
approved a graduate student housing policy which guarantees new PhD and MFA students campus housing for normative time for their program minus one year. According to the time to degree policy adopted by the Graduate Council on March 4, 2004, students who are beyond their maximal time to degree shall not have access to non-instructional university services, including housing. This policy, which underwent lengthy review before its adoption by the administration, was intended to address the need to maximize the number of lower-cost housing spaces available for new students and for continuing students who are within the maximal time to degree.

Students who have been in housing prior to June 1, 2002 are grandfathered _as long as they are making satisfactory progress toward their degree completion_. Our records indicate that you are beyond the normative time to degree for your program and will reach or have exceeded the maximal time to degree at the end of Spring Quarter 2007.

Accordingly, your name will be forwarded to Student Housing identifying you as a student whose access to Student Housing services expires at the end of Spring Quarter 2007. In accordance with this academic policy, Student Housing will be responsible for managing your transition out of
housing by the end of the Summer 2007.

This is in stark contrast to the actual letter people received in 2003 regarding the policy changes and the grandfathering in. I have a copy of the letter here: page 1, page 2.
In particular, there is no mentioning of "as long as they are making satisfactory progress toward their degree completion."
However, it says clearly, and with emphasis:

Applies to contract holders with a move-in date on or after 06/01/02.

Even the UCI Housing website says:

Effective February 1, 2006, current residents of Palo Verde and Verano Place with an original housing contract date between May 31, 2002 and May 31, 2006 will be eligible to remain in residence until he/she has reached the published normal time to degree for the academic program in which he/she is enrolled. Residents with original contract dates prior to June 1, 2002 will not be affected by this length of stay limit.

BTW, I have saved a copy of the website from this date here, so even if they change it, I can prove that it had this statement.

Furthermore, my rental agreement says:

3. ELIGIBILITY AND RESIDENCY LIMITS

RESIDENT'S eligibility for this on-campus housing is based on being:

a) a full-time University of California, Irvine (UCI) or California College of Medicine (CCM) Graduate Student
(a full-time graduate student is defined as a student taking a minimum 12 units or 8 units plus a research or teaching assistantship);
b) a post-doctoral appointee ("Post-Doc") associated with UCI or CCM;
c) a Medical Resident associated with UCI, CCM, or the University of California, Irvine Medical Center (UCIMC).

Again, nothing about "as long as they are making satisfactory progress toward their degree completion."

And a fourth point: At least in the Information and Computer Science program, there was no maximum time to degree set until after 2002.

Based on all this, I think the university is violating their agreement from 2002 with this letter.

With the beginning of the Fall quarter, UCI put nice signs up, like this one:

In light of the misuse of rental money as documented here, this is of course very hypocritical, in particular the "integrity" and "accountability" parts.
University administrators have shown anything but integrity and accountability.

The university has decided to use rent from on-campus Graduate Housing to pay for modifications to Anteater Drive.
From an email by Bill Zeller, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Housing:

Student Housing funds are being utilized for the funding of this project.

The modifications, a median and trees on the University Hills side of Anteater Road, do not benefit Palo Verde at all. They only benefit 2 home owners in University Hills.
It is interesting to see that the university takes from students with an income of $12K/year and gives to professors with an income in excess of $100K/year.
Obviously, graduate students are not valued by this university administration. I'll keep that in mind when the Alumni organization calls me to ask for donations, and when prospective graduate students ask me about studying at UCI.

This morning, I found a flyer on my door, from a group pushing for a rent reduction in Palo Verde.
The justification is that Verano had the landscape cost increase cut from their budget, but Palo Verde Housing refuses to cut the same item from the PV budget. They apparently want to do a shady deal to keep the money.
The flyer says in part:

Palo Verde Residents: Want to reduce your rent by 4%?
Verano Place rents will increase by 4% instead of the initially planned 8% next year, because UCI corrected a mistake in the budget regarding landscaping expenses (Oops!). Even though the Palo Verde budget contains the same mistake, PV refuses to correct the budget and reduce our rent. All we are asking for is equal treatment with Verano residents.
Why should the rent be lowered in PV?
PV plans to collect more rent than necessary to operate our community. You will pay up to $792 more rent a year than is necessary! Palo Verde has already become too expensive for many graduate students. Because not enough graduate students can afford PV, UCI chose to fill our apartments with 89 undergrads as well as staff and postdocs.
What can I do?
If you want to lower your rent, we need your help. The Housing Administration and Vice Chancellor Gomez have refused to pass on the savings from the landscaping contract and insist on collecting more rent than necessary to operate PV. Please write to Executive Vice Chancellor (EVC) Gottfredson that you disagree with this practice. Ask him to instruct Vice Chancellor Gomez to correct our rents in PV just as he has corrected rents in Verano.

I have sent a letter to EVC Gottfredson. Please do the same. A sample letter is at www.lowerrent.org.