Following a disastrous St. Patrick’s Day weekend last year that resulted in at least 156 citations and 12 arrests, San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly are adding stronger restrictions to help deter weekend partying and destruction.
Cal Poy representatives attended the Feb. 4 SLO City Council meeting to talk about new initiatives the university will enact during the holiday weekend to help keep decorum in surrounding neighborhoods.
“We’re all aware that the event last year negatively impacted our local neighborhoods, and the university also experienced significant vandalism and property damage,” Cal Poly’s Senior Vice President for Administration and Finance Cynthia Vizcanio Villa said. “Law enforcement will be highly visible and take a zero-tolerance approach. Our Cal Poly Police Department is closely coordinating with the San Luis Obispo police to maximize enforcement on and off campus.”
From March 14 to 17, Cal Poly Police will increase the number of on-duty officers, she said.
Along with normal patrol, six teams of officers will roam through campus with double staffing in the dispatch office to help “deter disruptive behavior and hold individuals accountable.”
Cal Poly students can say goodbye to overnight guests that weekend as the university is only allowing students living in on-campus housing to be in the dorm buildings from March 13 to 18. All entrances and exits will be monitored by staff, and students must carry their ID cards to be allowed in.
For those looking to sneak around this new guideline, Villa said students found violating these policies will be referred to Cal Poly’s Dean of Students Office for disciplinary review.
“We’re also working closely with our fraternity and sorority life leadership to get them to help us to discourage parties and promote responsible behavior that ensures all students, especially fraternity and sorority life students, are aware of those additional enforcement measures that are planned throughout the weekend,” Villa said.
Cal Poly is also partnering with representatives from university housing, public safety risk management, the student affairs office, and the SLO Police Department.
SLO Police Deputy Chief Fred Mickel said that the department is also updating its March Safety Enhancement Zone Response Plan in preparation for St. Patrick’s Day weekend. He told the council that citizens can expect to see increased fines for noise citations.
“Your first offense is $350. However, during the safety enhancement zone it’s doubled,” he said. “Then it’ll go up to $1,000 if we come back. We can’t go above $1,000 so we can just give you repeat $1,000 tickets.”
To get the message out there, the SLO Police Department will be using social media through “organic and paid posts” statewide asking adults between the ages of 18 and 26 to not come to SLO during St. Patrick’s Day weekend.
Officers from surrounding agencies will come and help increase police presence in San Luis Obispo throughout the weekend.
“They’re going to boost up our foot patrols,” Mickel said. “We’re going to have our motor units out there, our bike units, we’re going to have the fire medics and rescue units out there that are going to be staged, because safety.”
Cal Poly and SLO police said these steps are necessary after the damage from last year.
According to previous New Times reporting, SLOPD began receiving disturbance calls as early as 3:30 a.m. over the 2024 weekend as 6,000 to 7,000 people took to the streets to party.
Muir Hall at Cal Poly, a freshman dorm, experienced damages so severe that university officials temporarily closed the building and evacuated around 300 student residents to repair and restore fire suppression and alarm systems, according to a March 16, 2024, letter from Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong. Ī
This article appears in Health & Wellness 2025.