New Coast District Chief Named; Union President Is Critical

In a move that quickly drew criticism from the faculty union president, trustees of the 55,000-student Coast Community College District named Ventura County educator Alfred P. Fernandez as new chancellor Friday.

Fernandez, 54, has been chancellor of the Ventura County Community College District since 1982. He will assume office July 18 and succeed incumbent Coast District Chancellor David A. Brownell, who is retiring.

Trustees, after a 7 a.m. meeting, issued a prepared statement Friday saying that Fernandez had been selected chancellor on a 4-1 vote following a nationwide search.

Objects to Pay

Governing board member Sherry Baum dissented, saying she objected primarily to the “liberal” pay and fringes being given Fernandez--$97,500 a year plus a $400-a-month expense account and a mileage allowance of $220 a month. Baum said the salary is more than the $91,470 paid to the state community college chancellor and is hard to defend “in a year that we only gave our faculty a 2% pay raise.”

Fernandez earns $87,400 in Ventura.

His selection was quickly followed by complaints reminiscent of the types of controversies that have swirled around several major personnel actions in the Coast district in recent years.

David Jarman, president of the union representing the faculty at colleges in the Coast district--Orange Coast in Costa Mesa, Coastline Community, headquartered in Fountain Valley, and Golden West of Huntington Beach, charged that the trustees violated the state’s open-meeting law, the Brown Act, by, in effect, selecting the new chancellor behind closed doors last Tuesday night but failing to announce it immediately. Jarman pointed out that Fernandez’s contract shows May 18, 1988, as the “date of acceptance.”

Trustee Baum also said she “had problems” with how the selection was handled. She said a decision in favor of Fernandez was reached Tuesday night, “but they (the other trustees) called it a poll; they were playing word games. . . . I stressed my objections to the process.”

Board president Walter Howald, however, said the board’s decision was reached on Friday morning. “I’m not sure when Dr. Fernandez signed the contract, but I signed in behalf of the board only on Friday morning,” Howald said.

Jarman said Coast district faculty are dismayed not only at the selection process but also because Fernandez “had received a no-confidence vote by the Ventura Community College District faculty in April.”

Ruth Hunt, executive director of the Ventura County Federation of College Teachers, American Federation of Teachers, Local 1828, confirmed in a telephone interview Friday that teachers there last month had taken a no-confidence vote on Fernandez and the district’s board of trustees. Hunt said the voice vote was approved “overwhelmingly.”

She said the vote was not on Fernandez’s overall capability, but on how he and the trustees had conducted salary negotiations. She added that the no-confidence vote was never formally delivered to Fernandez because a contract agreement subsequently was reached.

Hunt charged that Fernandez has a poor record of dealing with the faculty in pay negotiations. “In four of the past five years under Al Fernandez, we’ve had to go to fact-finding in contract negotiations, and that’s probably a record for state community college districts,” she said. Fact-finding is a crisis stage of contract negotiations, and it is the final stage before teacher strikes are legal in California.

Hunt also criticized Fernandez’s overall dealing with community college faculty. “He does not believe in shared governance,” she said. Shared governance is where an administrator allows subordinates to take major roles in setting goals and making decisions.

In a telephone interview Friday, Fernandez disagreed with Hunt’s viewpoint, saying: “I am very much in favor of shared governance.” And he defended his role in contract negotiations while at Ventura.

“District solvency comes first, but we gave the max to our employees while still keeping that solvency,” he declared. He said that the most recent contract gave Ventura district teachers a 5% pay boost for 1987-88 with another 5% to begin July 1 this year, and yet another 2% to be added in February, 1989.

In response to questions, Fernandez acknowledged that he had considered applying for chancellor in the Los Angeles and Long Beach community college systems, in addition to Coast district. “I was recruited--I was asked--to apply at all three, and I think that says something about my statewide reputation,” he said. “I looked over the Los Angeles and Long Beach districts” and decided to accept the offer from Coast.

Howald said he and the other trustees were aware of the no-confidence vote by the Ventura faculty aimed at Fernandez and the district board of trustees. “That vote was held in abeyance, however, and I imagine it was an effective bargaining tool,” Howald said.

Howald added that an inspection team for the board returned a favorable report after going to Ventura County and interviewing many people about Fernandez.

Fernandez was chosen over incumbent Coast District Vice Chancellor Phillis Basile, who Jarman said had the backing of the union. Basile, a Laguna Beach resident, is a former president of the Coast union and rose to prominence, and an administrative position, after an upheaval in 1983 involving a previous Coast board of trustees.

That board, in 1983, said that about 100 teachers had to be laid off because of shrinking state budgets. The union, angered at the move, successfully worked to have a new three-member board majority elected in November, 1983, and the new board then rescinded the layoffs.

Controversy in the district continued as incumbent Chancellor Norman Watson, who had been bitterly criticized by the union, announced his resignation shortly after the November, 1983, election. The new board majority announced a nationwide search for a new chancellor and appointed Brownell as interim chief. Later, the board abruptly canceled plans for the nationwide search and named Brownell to the full-time position, a decision prompting criticism from the state community college chancellor’s office for allegedly not following affirmative-action procedures.

More controversy erupted in the district as presidents or acting presidents of all three community colleges resigned during the past four years. In response to criticism, trustees said no pressure was used to oust the presidents.

Last summer, a controversy swirled around the board’s decision to give Brownell a 53% pay raise--from $93,756 to $144,000--for his final year in office. Teachers in the district angrily noted that they received no pay raise whatsoever last year. One teacher branded the board’s offer to Brownell as “a golden handshake that was platinum-plated.” The trustees, stung by the criticism, subsequently lowered Brownell’s final-year salary to $97,506.

The Coast Federation of Employees, American Federation of Teachers, Local 1911, has succeeded in winning public election of all Coast Community College District trustees it has endorsed over the years. In one case, the union dumped a trustee, the Rev. Conrad Nordquist, after the union, which helped elect him in 1983, decided he was not supportive enough of the faculty. Nordquist was ousted in the 1987 election by Paul Berger, whom the union endorsed when it dropped Nordquist. All five trustees currently on the board were elected with the union’s endorsement.

“We helped elect this board,” Jarman noted on Friday, as he criticized the board’s selection of Fernandez. Jarman pointed out, however, that the new chancellor will face an unhappy majority of teachers.