New Community College District Fee Sparks Swarm of Protest

Irate property owners are flooding the phone lines of the Los Angeles Community College District after receiving notices that they may be assessed a special fee to pay for campus improvements.

More than 500 calls have poured in since Thursday, when the notices about a proposed Landscaping and Lighting Assessment District went out to owners of 1.1 million properties in the Los Angeles area.

The proposed assessments for 1996-97 would amount to $12 for a single-family parcel, $9.36 per unit for apartments and condos, and $66 per acre of improved commercial property, college district officials said.

The volume of calls forced the district to install three more phone lines and a voice mail system, said Blair Sillers, an assistant to Chancellor Neil Yoneji. Phones also have been ringing off the hook at the offices of a local taxpayer group and Los Angeles City Council member Laura Chick.

About eight in 10 of the callers to the college district oppose the fees, said Sillers, who has handled many of the complaints.

But the callers’ level of hostility “diminishes once they have a better understanding of what the money will be used for,” he said. “It’s not for salary increases. It is restricted to recreational facilities that the public has access to and frequently uses.”

Forming an assessment district is a new tactic for the nine-campus college system, which failed to win passage of a bond measure two years ago that would have provided millions in construction funds. Now it hopes to raise more than $200 million from property owners to help pay for repairs long neglected because of inadequate state funding.

The funds from the assessment district would pay for such projects as improving the stadium lighting at Los Angeles City College, which campus officials say is needed to enhance safety and increase nighttime use of the facility. Other possible uses include repaving cracked basketball courts and landscaping surrounding areas.

“It sounds like icing on the cake, but unfortunately there is almost no cake to ice . . . given the deferred maintenance that our district has suffered for far too long,” said Jeff Cooper, Los Angeles City College’s dean of academic affairs.

The college district has a backlog of maintenance and repairs totaling $22 million but expects to receive only $1.3 million for those purposes from the state this year, Sillers said.

Opponents of the fees include homeowners like Joseph Batko, 75, of Woodland Hills.

“All they’re doing is giving us another tax,” Batko said. “We should be able to vote on this.”

Batko said he will write a formal letter of protest to the district. But it will take hundreds of thousands of letters to block the assessment. By law, at least 50% of the property owners in the district would have to object in writing to stop it.

“It would be impossible to achieve that amount of protest,” said Joel Fox, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., which also has heard from hundreds of callers opposed to the assessment.

Lindsay Conner, one of two district trustees who voted against the assessment proposal in January, agrees with Fox that the assessment runs counter to Proposition 13, the 1978 anti-tax initiative. He hopes the board will reject it when it takes a final vote June 12.