EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK : Seismic Safety Bill Loses Supporter : Education: Chancellor says state’s community colleges will not try to keep alive measure to relax standards. Quake caused $35 million in damage.

Amid estimates that Southern California community colleges suffered at least $35 million in damage in the Northridge earthquake, the head of the college system said Tuesday that it will stop pushing state legislation to relax seismic safety standards for its buildings.

“The bill will probably be withdrawn and we will not attempt to keep it alive,” said David Mertes, chancellor of the state’s 107 community colleges.

His comments came after an Assembly committee hearing in Van Nuys during which several lawmakers criticized the colleges for not having spent enough money on upgrading buildings.

Assembly Bill 973, introduced last year by Assemblywoman Margaret Snyder (D-Modesto), would have exempted the state’s community colleges from the extra seismic safety requirements in the state’s Field Act.

That law now applies to community colleges and all public elementary and high school buildings, but not to state universities.

Before the 6.6-magnitude earthquake Jan. 17, Mertes said colleges had been backing the measure because the Field Act typically prevented them from buying or renting private buildings for extra classroom space. He said such buildings, although often less expensive than public facilities, typically did not meet the special seismic standards.

During the Assembly Committee on Higher Education hearing, committee Chairwoman Marguerite Archie-Hudson (D-Los Angeles) predicted that Snyder’s bill will instead be replaced with measures to toughen earthquake safety standards for state colleges and universities. And she said state universities will probably be forced to comply with the Field Act.

“We’ll have a fight to the finish. . . . But I think what this disaster has done is told us that the way we’ve looked at a lot of higher education issues in the past is insufficient,” Archie-Hudson said. “We have major responsibilities to protect the health and welfare of all of our students.”

According to preliminary estimates by local college districts, there was more than $35 million in damage.

Santa Monica College reported the most--about $27 million to a science complex building that has been condemned, a multistory parking structure that probably will be, and a liberal arts building that sustained extensive damage.

The nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District sustained at least $4 million in damage, more than half of it at Pierce College in Woodland Hills. Also included is about $740,000 at Valley College in Van Nuys and $179,000 at Mission College in Sylmar.

Interim Chancellor Neil Yoneji said spring enrollment at the three colleges is down at least 10%.

And at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, Supt. Dianne Van Hook estimated that $3.2 million in damage has closed two buildings, eliminating half of the campus’s classrooms.

The science building will probably be closed for several weeks for a hazardous materials cleanup.

The classroom building, with structural damage, may be closed for the semester.