Both Parties Plan School Bond Ballot Proposals : Legislature: GOP wants to include provision for prison construction funds, which may thwart bipartisan support needed for either measure’s passage.

Responding to a space crunch that educators say is nearing a crisis, Republican legislators plan to move quickly when they return to Sacramento next month to try to place a $3-billion bond issue to build and renovate the state’s schools and universities on the March ballot.

But the Republican bill will include a provision to place a $1.9-billion bond measure for prison construction on November’s ballot, which could doom the entire package, because legislators are divided over building more prisons. Democratic legislative maneuvering in September blocked a similar measure.

“We have a need for school construction and a need for prison construction and Republicans will propose a bill in the early part of the session to do both,” said Assemblyman Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga), who will shepherd the bill through the legislative process.

Democratic leaders in the Assembly also plan to propose a school construction bond for the March 26 ballot, but their bill will not include a prison bond.

Neither bond proposal will make it to the ballot without backing from some members of the other party or from independents, because bond measures require support from two-thirds of both houses.

Republicans hold a one-vote majority in the Assembly and would need to attract 13 more votes; in the Senate, Democrats have a five-vote margin and would need to line up six backers from outside their caucus.

In comments this past week, neither party seemed ready to open the door to compromise.

“The Republican approach is still to hold the schools hostage to building prisons,” said Los Angeles Assemblyman Richard Katz, who heads the Democratic caucus. “The Democratic view is we need to build public schools to reduce class size . . . and after we deal with schools then we’ll deal with prisons.”

Republicans say new schools and new prisons are both urgently needed.

“It’s intellectually dishonest to say you support tough-on-crime legislation and not support building prisons to get the criminals off the street,” Brulte said.

But Senate Democratic Majority Leader Bill Lockyer said his caucus wants to rein in “reckless” spending that has made California prisons far more expensive to build than elsewhere before agreeing to more construction. Republicans want to “invest in our failures rather than our future,” he said.

Neither party will have time to wrangle over subtleties because they must meet a Jan. 8 deadline--five days after the Legislature goes back to work--to get a bond measure on the ballot in March, as educators would like.

The last school bond measure approved by voters was in 1992, but that money has run out. A bond measure on the ballot in June 1994 was narrowly rejected by voters.

Bond supporters say schools are crumbling from neglect, are outmoded and, with enrollments increasing by 140,000 annually, are jam-packed.

If the bond measure were to pass, public schools would divide about $2 billion and higher education would get about $1 billion.

The state has approved, but not funded, $800 million in school remodeling and construction projects; but the public schools have applied for state financing for $7 billion worth of projects on top of that.

In addition, the state’s three systems of higher education estimate that they will need to spend $10 billion over the next decade to renovate and repair buildings and accommodate increasing enrollments.