The long-closed Sunnyside School in Los Osos is being put up for sale and residents need to decide if they want to buy it. Drone photo by Dean Sullivan
Los Osos officials have begun a process that could lead to at least addressing some of the town’s nagging issues, but a decision will have to be made on funding and priorities for what’s being called “a once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity.
In January the San Luis Coastal Unified School District announced that it wanted to sell two, long-closed school sites — Morro Elementary in Morro Bay and Sunnyside in Los Osos. Both were closed about 20-years ago due to falling enrollment in the two towns. In Los Osos, the building of Monarch Grove in the 1990s made Sunnyside expendable.
Last Saturday, the Los Osos Citizens Advisory Council (LOCAC), and the Community Services District (LOCSD), hosted a town hall meeting at Sunnyside, and residents packed the school’s multi-purpose room to hear the pitch.
Well over 200 people turned out to hear the beginnings of a plan to bring Sunnyside under the CSD’s ownership. That turnout pretty much answered the panel’s first question — is there interest in keeping Sunnyside in public ownership?
It was standing room only at the town hall meeting on Sunnyside School’s future uses. Photo by Neil Farrell.
LOCAC Chair, Deborah Howe facilitated the meeting, with LOCSD General Manager, Ron Munds and Dist. 2 County Supervisor Bruce Gibson handling the majority of the questions from the audience.
Nearly two months ago, the CSD Board hired the engineering firm, Wallace Group of San Luis Obispo, to look at Sunnyside and draw up some preliminary ideas on what could be done with the 12-acre site.
Matt Wilkins, Director of Landscape for Wallace Group and his colleague, Ann Sever, a senior landscape architect, said they broke down Sunnyside’s campus into 10 areas, each with different existing structures and uses; and two possible scenarios — minimum improvements and moderate improvements.
Dist. 2 County Supervisor Bruce Gibson answers questions
from the audience. Photo by Neil Farrell.
Wilkins called it “The Cost Continuum,” with different price tags depending on what the community decides it wants there. This shows what money can do to make improvements happen, Wilkins said. “There’s a lot of infrastructure here to work with, he added.
Sever quickly ran through the areas noting that the youth sports leagues and pickleball players have said they need playing fields and Sunnyside has two diamonds now, but Sever said they need a lot of work, and have serious gopher issues.
Much of the rest of the school is being used by several different organizations — a Waldorf School, day care center, and a training facility for Cal Fire, which they said is planning to move to a site at Cal Poly.
Costs were a large part of the discussion. The asking price for Sunnyside is about $6 million, Wilkins said. And depending on what improvements would be done, costs range from $5 million to $6 million for minimum improvements; and $8-$10 million for moderate improvements.
Added on top of that is $1-$2 million a year in operations and maintenance costs. Those numbers deflated the air a bit in the room, but Supervisor Gibson pointed out that Cayucos and Cambria both managed to raise significant monies to support projects in their town — namely a skate park and the Fiscalini Ranch open space in Cambria and the Cayucos Pier and the Vet’s Hall. Gibson added that when grant funding agencies see that a community has stepped up and raised significant funds for a project, they tend to support those more, with as much as a 7 to 1 ratio.
LOCSD Munds answered a question about the timeline the townsfolks were looking at. He said they received a letter from the school district in January and had 30 days to respond with a letter of interest, which the LOCSD Board did. Now they have a few months to enter into serious discussions with the school district, so it’s a total of about five months they will have to truly get the ball rolling.
If the citizens want the property, they will likely have to pass some sort of assessment district and attach some amount to the property tax bills of the roughly 6,000 private parcels within the City Limits. That number was based on the properties included in the CSD’s fire district, Munds explained.
Howe, stressed a public survey being conducted online now and accessible through the CSD’s website (see: www.losososcsd.org).
That information will help the CSD Board and LOCAC, who are teaming up for this effort, to get a clearer idea of the public’s interest.
