New Trustees Inherit A City College in Flux

Monroe Lace, Erwin Tam and Elijah Ball won the seats on the City College of San Francisco Board of Trustees on Tuesday and will take office in January 2027. The election results come in as the college investigates its chancellor and looks for ways to close a projected structural deficit. 

The college faces a projected $24 million structural deficit beginning in fiscal year 2029-30, according to the adopted budget announced earlier this semester, closed its Downtown Center at Fourth and Mission streets this summer, and has had 15 chief executives in 18 years, more than any other California community college.

Chancellor Kimberlee Messina was placed on paid administrative leave in October after allegations of financial misconduct, and David Yee, who started as a student tutor at City College in the 1980s, was named acting chancellor by the Board of Trustees.

Lace, Tam and Ball were endorsed by GrowSF, Abundant SF, Mayor Daniel Lurie and state Sen. Scott Wiener, and reviewed the college’s budget together before answering GrowSF’s candidate questionnaire. 

They beat a labor-backed slate of Leah LaCroix, Bunny McFadden and Jeremy Lee, supported by the faculty union American Federation of Teachers Local 2121. Independents Lisa Wynn and Rome Moses Jones were also on the ballot.

Tam, who ranked third of community college board trustee candidates and received 18.71 per cent of the votes at 125,600 votes, said the election results and "heaviness of being able to represent a million people well" have just dawned on him, days following Nov. 4.

"I've been trying to process...about a hundred thousand people (would have) voted for me," he said. His co-slates, Lace and Ball, received 138,627 and 131,089 votes respectively.

Lace, a middle school teacher and the first transgender woman crowned Miss San Francisco in 2023, ran on strengthening the pipeline from K-12 classrooms to City College through dual enrollment and career technical education.

"Dual enrollment shows the importance of City College," Tam said.

Tam, who took Calculus at the college "years ago," is finance director at the California Housing Finance Agency. Now working for the municipal level as an elected official, he said he brings experience in knowing how the system works from within from his work in Sacramento.

“I have a level of expertise and want to empower systems internally in CCSF to help me solve these problems,” he said. “One of my first orders of business is to have conversations with stakeholders.”

Ball, a campus planner for community college districts including Foothill-De Anza and Los Angeles, wants the Downtown Center reopened by 2030. 

Asked during the campaign what he would cut in a serious shortfall, he named no program.

“That is a huge discussion that just does not fall within one trustee,” he told The Guardsman in September, adding that students, faculty and other stakeholders should be involved.

Tam said he will spend these next few months doing his homework by going through important documents, like the enrollment plan being worked on by the Education Strategic Plan Workgroup before taking a seat with the rest of the trustees.

“I really want to make sure I’m ready to start day one,” he said. “And that there’s not going to be training wheels.”

Yee is co-chair, alongside Alberto Vasquez, of the ESP workgroup this semester.

The trustees will serve four-year terms.