PG’s rent hikes on public buildings have instructors irked.

Al Shoats of the Pacific Grove Judo Academy says he feels like PG City Hall has him in a financial headlock. The rent he pays for space in Chautauqua Hall to teach judo is about to quadruple, thanks to a restructured fee schedule set to take effect beginning April 1.

Christina Ferrante, the city’s Recreation Program Coordinator, will deliver her new fee schedules for the professional instructors who teach classes at Chautauqua Hall and the Community Center to the City Council on March 2. Her proposal would raise the fees to $25 per hour for Chautauqua Hall and the Lebeck Room and $18 per hour for the Yoga Room at Chautauqua Hall and the Kuwatani Room at the Community Center.

In Shoats’ case, this would mean a 311 percent increase from the $125 flat fee he’s been paying the last few years.

The plan, which the Pacific Grove Recreation Board unanimously approved at a Jan. 11 meeting, would similarly affect such programs as Dance Jam, Yoga, Jazz Dance, Brazilian Samba, Chess, Rosen Method Movement and Capoeira Angola.

After review of the usage of city facilities, Ferrante calculated the amount the city pays in utilities, supplies and maintenance. Under the current agreement, the amount the instructors have paid does not cover the expenses, falling short by more than $700 a month.

“We’re not trying to make money, we’re just trying to break even,” Ferrante says.

Yet Shoats is angry about the fee increases and considers them a breach of trust between the city and the professional instructors who use the public facilities.

“In 2002 they tripled our rent and swore up and down that this would be the last fee increase in awhile and then the very next year they’re attempting to triple it again,” Shoats says. “Everyone knows there are cuts that have to be made in the city’s budget, they just don’t want to make them on their end.”

Ferrante, who assumed her position last October, says her predecessor, Walter Davis, adopted a flat facility rental fee in 2002, a move she described as an experimental and temporary departure from the “75/25 split” fee structure, in which the city received 25 percent of the income generated by each program’s classes. That arrangement had been in place since 1989.

“The [2002] facility rental fees were based on the programs’ performance of years before. We averaged their income over a 12-month period and based a fee on that,” Ferrante says. “It was temporary, just to see how the new fee scale might work.”

Yet Shoats contends that the new fees would make his classes unfeasible.

“They would pretty much cripple our program,” he says. “We’ve been down here a long time. We don’t really make money. They’re making kids and the community pay for the city’s financial mismanagement. It’s wrong.”