THE CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS : Honig, School Officials Applaud Voter Approval of Funding Measure

After years of declining financial and political fortunes, public schools in California woke up Wednesday with unprecedented new clout, the result of passage of Proposition 98, the school funding initiative.

“This is a fundamental change in how we do business in California. . . . It is a major, major step for public education,” said state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig,who helped draft Proposition 98.

Passage of the measure means that kindergarten through high school grades at public schools, as well as community colleges, will get an immediate budget increase of $215 million for the second half of this fiscal year. Thereafter, schools will receive about $450 million a year above what they are now getting, according to estimates.

Schools officials say they need the money to hire new teachers, buy textbooks and make other improvements in the quality of classroom instruction.

While that is good news for public schools, it is bad news for other state programs, including other segments of the education establishment, the University of California and the California State University system. Deukmejian Administration officials have said the new money for schools will have to come from the budgets of the universities, health, welfare and other programs.

Assistant State Finance Director Lois Wallace said Gov. George Deukmejian, an opponent of Proposition 98, has not made any specific decisions. “We are going to be looking at (all programs). Everything is at risk,” she said. Wallace said budget decisions will probably be announced in January, when Deukmejian releases his new spending plan.

Honig said he viewed the Proposition 98 vote as “vindication” of his position in the long-running feud he has carried on with Deukmejian over public school budgets.

“We won the argument with the public that the schools were under-funded and that we weren’t getting our fair share. I do feel vindicated,” said Honig, a Democrat and possible challenger to Deukmejian in 1990 if the Republican governor seeks reelection to a third term. “I think the governor was a little out of touch with the people on this issue.”

Deukmejian, at a news conference of his own, made only brief remarks about Proposition 98.

The governor, who wrote the ballot argument against the measure, called the vote “irresponsible.” But he said he would implement it.

Proposition 98 may have the most far-reaching impact of the new phenomenon called ballot-box budgeting. More and more, special interest groups are bypassing the governor and Legislature and going to the voters for decisions on spending, tax policy and appropriations.

In the June primary, voters rejected two measures that would have increased state appropriations, one of which would have earmarked funds for transportation programs. In Tuesday’s election, voters in addition to supporting Proposition 98 also approved Proposition 97, which will restore to the state budget the $8-million Cal/OSHA worker safety program vetoed by Deukmejian, and Proposition 99, which will boost the state cigarette tax from 10 cents to 35 cents a pack and earmark the funds for health and other programs.

But Proposition 98, which requires that 39% of the state’s $36.1-billion General Fund budget be earmarked for public schools, will have a much bigger financial impact.

Proposition 98 captured just 50.8% of the vote in Tuesday’s election, the closest margin of victory of any of the statewide ballot measures, final returns showed Wednesday. The difference between winning and losing was 135,355 votes out of 8.6 million votes cast. Proposition 98 lost in Orange and San Diego counties, but won in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Alameda and Santa Clara counties.

‘We’re Ecstatic’

The razor-thin margin of victory was not enough to tarnish the sweet taste of victory for its supporters.

“We’re excited. We’re ecstatic,” said Ed Foglia, head of the 200,000-member California Teachers Assn., chief sponsors of the measure.

Foglia, a veteran of California’s political wars, said the vote was a badly needed morale booster for teachers and others in the public school establishment.

“This is the best thing that has happened to schools in 20 years,” Foglia said.

Beginning in the late 1960s, school officials say they have had to wage an uphill battle to find dollars to keep up with rising student enrollments, inflation and aging school buildings. The biggest blow was passage of the tax-cutting measure Proposition 13 in 1978, which dried up property tax revenues and made the school system dependent on the state for revenues. A year later, the Proposition 13-spawned tax revolt led to voter approval of tightly controlled limits on government spending.

Kept Lid on Budgets

During that time, California was led by two governors, Edmund G. Brown Jr. and Deukmejian, who pride themselves in being fiscal conservatives and who kept the lid on public school budgets.

School officials said they drafted Proposition 98 as the result of mounting frustration with both the electorate and the budgets coming out of Sacramento.

Honig, at a news conference in Burbank on Wednesday with Foglia and others, said he believes that Proposition 98 will make schools much less dependent on statehouse politics.

“We’ve been having our future decided by the political realities in Sacramento. This gives us much more independence and something we’ve been asking for a long time: long-term sustained funding that we can depend on and plan for,” Honig said. He called the Proposition 98 vote “a watershed election.”

Share Guaranteed

One of the provisions of Proposition 98 guarantees public schools a 39% share of the state’s $36.1-billion General Fund budget. In addition, schools each year will get budget increases tied to the rate of inflation or an index based on student enrollment, whichever is higher.

On top of that, Proposition 98 makes a major amendment in the government spending limit measure approved by voters in 1979 in that it guarantees schools tax rebates that previously would have gone to taxpayers.

Had the measure been in place last year, taxpayers would have received only about half the $1.1 billion rebated to them because of the budget surplus. Schools would have gotten the other half.

Richard Simpson, director of the California Taxpayers Assn., which organized the opposition to Proposition 98, said opponents just were not able to overcome the fund-raising and organizational abilities of Foglia and other sponsors of the measure.

Supporters spent about $5.3 million--$4.5 million of that from the California Teachers Assn.--compared to the about $200,000 raised by Simpson’s No on 98 Committee.

Simpson said that because of the closeness of the vote, sponsors of the measure “should not delude themselves into thinking they have anything like a mandate. It looks like the electorate is about as evenly divided as they can be.”