The UCSB Faculty Club’s poolside locker room and toilets will have to close by June 1 if sufficient funds are not found to rehabilitate the facilities, the club’s board of directors has announced. This would mean closure of the swimming pool, too.

In a letter dated March 21, Loy Lytle, club president wrote: “Deterioration of the locker and toilet facilities serving the swimming pool have reached the point that the Campus Building Official (inspector) has ordered the locker and toilet facilities be either rehabilitated or closed…”

The financially strapped Faculty Club, continued Lytle, “simply has no funds to accomplish the needed work….Consequently,…the Club can expect closure of those facilities and the pool by June 1, 2008.”

The club, which is open to staff as well as faculty members, was built in 1968 with the locker room as “a temporary building, but sufficient funds were never available to renovate them," said Linda Ruuska, club manager for 23 years. The source of the immediate problems is that a retaining wall has moved, affecting the locker room and its contents, she said.

She and the board are working to stave off the locker room closure, and some members have already volunteered to donate to a fund for that purpose. However, Ruuska said, any likely solution to the retainer wall and locker room problem would be temporary. “It would be a mini-fix,” she said in light of the backlog of deferred maintenance problems with the whole facility. “And we do not know if the inspector would accept a mini-fix.”

Still, she is hopeful that the special contributions the club has made to UCSB over the last 40 years and the high quality services it now provides will encourage supporters to step forward. “Right now, what the club needs is an angel or an advocate,” she suggests.