CSU Pushes Budget Vote to Post-Election

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez has asked California State University leaders to explain why a university budget meeting typically held in October has been pushed back several weeks, and will now occur after the November election.

In a letter sent Thursday to the board of trustees, Nunez (D-Los Angeles) pointed out that the panel generally votes in October on the politically sensitive question of whether to raise student fees for the next school year. He questioned whether the postponement was politically motivated.

Nunez, who is a Cal State board member because of his state office, said he would be disturbed to learn that university officials or trustees, some of whom were appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, “allowed election politics to impact the timing” of a budget vote.

Cal State officials said Thursday that was not the case, although they said a desire to know the outcome of the election did figure in the decision to delay the budget discussion.

Patrick Lenz, the Cal State system’s assistant vice chancellor for budget, said it would not have made sense for trustees to consider and adopt a 2007-08 budget without knowing which administration they would be working with, that of Schwarzenegger or his Democratic challenger, state Treasurer Phil Angelides.

In recent weeks, Angelides has criticized Schwarzenegger for a multiyear budget agreement with the state’s public universities that includes regular student fee hikes -- even though those fees, at the governor’s request, were ultimately frozen for the current school year for Cal State and University of California students. The Democrat has campaigned on a promise to reduce costs further.

Lenz said the decision to postpone the trustees meeting “wasn’t predicated on a decision on student fees specifically, but that we couldn’t predict any of our budget right now. It would have been presumptuous to ask the board to adopt a budget before knowing the outcome of the election.”

rebecca.trounson@latimes.com