Oakland City Officials Send Letter to Holy Names University: City officials seek collaboration to preserve higher education on campus
By Dr. Kimberly Mayfield, Rebecca Kaplan, Carroll Fife, and Janani Ramachandran
The following letter, which the Post obtained on March 9, was sent to Steven Borg and Sister Cynthia Canning, leaders of Holy Names University in Oakland.
As Oakland Leaders who hold the well-being and educational needs of Oakland residents to the
highest priority, we respectfully request your collaboration with the City of Oakland to ensure that an educational institution serving the community will exist on the Holy Names University site in the future.
Holy Names University provides vital community needs by expanding access to jobs for underserved communities, providing career opportunities within the university itself, and helping remedy the labor shortage for essential workers, including teachers and nurses in Oakland. Not only do students, faculty, and the community of Holy Names enjoy these benefits, but the community overall benefits from all the university provides.
Understanding the unique role Holy Names University plays in Oakland, in 2019, the City authorized the issuance of tax-exempt bond financing at the request of Holy Names University to enable and support these vital public purposes.
Due to our interest in preserving and improving the quality of life for our constituents and preserving the educational use of the campus site, which is its appropriate General Plan designation, we are concerned about the future of Holy Names University, and its announced closure in May of this year.
It is our goal to ensure that an educational institution serving the community will exist on the Holy Names site in the future. We have learned that a variety of stakeholders and other universities have expressed interest in preserving this site for educational purposes and that the lender is ready, willing, and able to support such efforts.
We want to make clear that any efforts to remove resources from Holy Names University’s approved public purpose as a university would be inappropriate. The endowment, the tax-exempt bond approval, the Oakland General Plan designation for the site, and more, are all based on the designated use of the Holy Names campus as an educational institution, and we are prepared and enthusiastic to help ensure this already designated use for the site persists.
It is encouraging to hear that outside stakeholders have expressed interest in maintaining the Holy Names site for higher education. We request your collaboration with us, Preston Hollow Community Capital (PHCC), and other stakeholders, to preserve Holy Name’s current site use for the purposes of higher education.
We are confident that there is a win-win, amicable solution where we can work with you and your lender to find a successor university and absolve HNU of the debt, while providing a better future for the workforce and vital educational programs.
Thank you for letting us know about the breakdown in communication with the lender whom you had chosen to work with for the bond financing. We are happy to help broker a mutual resolution by which the property would be transferred to a new university, and there would be a mutual commitment that any excess proceeds from such sale would be dedicated to an appropriate non- profit entity.
We gladly welcome the opportunity to collaborate with you and hope to connect within the next week to work towards achieving this goal.
Signed:
Dr. Kimberly Mayfield, Deputy Mayor
Oakland Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan, At-Large Oakland Councilmember Oakland Councilmember Carroll Fife, District 3
Oakland Councilmember Janani Ramachandran, District 4
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