A UC Santa Cruz blog has posted what it says is the itemized list of charges on which the university based the $944 fines that it has assessed against students involved in last semester’s Kerr Hall occupation. (Photos of the document can be found here, with a transcript here.)
If this document is genuine, a few aspects of it seem quite significant.
First, though news reports based on administration statements have characterized the takeover as causing “nearly $34,000 in damage,” several of the line items on the list appear to be unrelated to physical damage to the building. The list includes a $1242.60 charge for the university’s lockshop to “check locks, panic bars,” a $121 charge for an “HVAC check out” that found “no damage to equip,” and a $242 charge for a check of fire alarms’ “signal history” that found “no problems.”
Second, many of the listed charges appear to refer to the cost of university employees’ labor. These entries include those listed above, as well as listings for carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and even $720 for Physical Plant manager Ron Davis‘ coordination of the cleanup. In all, only four of 19 budget lines refer explicitly to payments made to outside vendors.
Unless all of UCSC’s maintenance staff, including its managers, is being paid on a per-hour, as-needed basis, it would appear — again, if this memo is genuine — that the university is attempting to force students to reimburse it for phantom “costs” that cost the university nothing.
The blog Occupy CA reported yesterday that UCSC students are planning a Friday rally against the fines. I’ll have more as the story unfolds.
studentactivism.net 
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April 14, 2010 at 12:13 pm
Tommy
Some folks are saying that some folks who have been charged were racially and gender specifcally targeted for the fine
April 15, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Emily
From your post: Unless all of UCSC’s maintenance staff, including its managers, is being paid on a per-hour, as-needed basis, it would appear — again, if this memo is genuine — that the university is attempting to force students to reimburse it for phantom “costs” that cost the university nothing.
I see where you’re coming from, but that’s an exaggeration. Even if an employee is paid a fixed wage/salary, their time is valuable. If they had to perform tasks above and beyond their regular duties as a result of damage from the occupation, it is arguably reasonable for the university to pass these costs on to the students, calculated based on the time that was spent on the extra work. To say that the students shouldn’t have to pay for it because it wasn’t performed by an outside contractor on a per-hour basis seems irrelevant and a little disingenuous to me.
More salient is the question (which you also address) of whether the university is padding the bill with work that wasn’t necessitated by the occupation, or which the students hadn’t negotiated to be responsible for.
What exactly did the students agree to — that they would pay for the repair of damage caused by the occupation, or that they would pay for all the university’s occupation-related costs (including off-schedule security and maintenance checks that found no problems)? Fine print, but a big difference in the bill. My guess is that these details weren’t discussed in explicit terms at the time, and now the university is using that ambiguity to be as inclusive as it can in its bill. It will take a judge to parse out which costs are reasonable for the students to pay and which are spurious.
And, of course, all this is begging the philosophical question of whether the protesters should be held responsible at all for costs of the occupation, or whether the protest, with its reasonable wear and tear of campus property, was their right as members of the university community.
April 15, 2010 at 9:41 pm
GK
Just to make it clear, unlike at SFSU where students signed a letter saying they would cover the costs of the business school occupation, UCSC students did not “agree” to anything. These letters are being forced on students, and the appeals process is highly questionable and confusing.
Here’s the full story from City on a Hill Press, the UCSC student newspaper:
http://www.cityonahillpress.com/2010/04/15/zuidema-issues-resolutions-35-to-pay/
April 16, 2010 at 10:14 am
Emily Kelly
Thanks for the clarification. In my zeal to opinionize, I got my campuses confused.