2 Colleges Scale Back Plans for Campus Improvements

With a new emphasis on the basics, Mission and Pierce colleges last week unveiled revised plans for improving their campuses with the public’s money should a proposed tax by the Los Angeles Community College District be approved by voters in November.

Gone is Pierce’s original proposal for a $6.9-million equestrian center--replaced by a call for improved lighting, sidewalks and landscaping. Mission, meanwhile, wants to expand its small campus in relatively modest land deals with the county.

Indeed, most of the district’s nine campuses seem to be focusing on easy-to-defend lighting and safety improvements in the wake of a public outcry that forced trustees to place a controversial tax plan on the Nov. 5 ballot. In presentations to the district’s Board of Trustees last week, for example, Southwest College also scrapped a proposal for $2 million worth of state-of-the-art scoreboards.

In the coming weeks, officials from other campuses, including Valley College in Van Nuys, are slated to make their presentations to the board. The trustees themselves could make further changes before the balloting, although major shifts are not expected.

“This is one of the toughest decisions the board has ever had to wrangle with, and it’s not over yet,” Trustee Althea Baker said as the board heard the summaries.

Invoking an obscure state law that exempted it from seeking voter approval, the board had voted June 13 to tax 1 million parcels of land in its sprawling district to raise about $205 million for campus improvements.

But in response to 30,000 angry letters, among other criticism, the board relented July 5 and agreed to put the measure on the ballot. Many critics said it was not the tax itself--which would cost homeowners about $12 a year--that bothered them so much as the idea of not being consulted on the matter.

Mission College in Sylmar wants to spend its $11.7-million share of the proposed tax to buy land in the county’s adjoining El Cariso Regional Park and golf course and to build a recreation complex.

Acting President Bill Norlund called the projects “vital to the campus,” noting that its current physical-education program is housed off-campus in a rented building on Foothill Boulevard. But board member Lindsay Conner questioned the value of acquiring the golf course land, whose future development would depend on funding sources other than the proposed tax.

At the bottom of Mission’s wish list now are a soccer field, a parking lot in the northeast corner of the campus, a jogging trail and a $9-million expansion of the recreation complex.

At Pierce College in Woodland Hills, the new priorities include emergency alarms in recreation areas, as well as the lighting and landscaping improvements. Newly appointed President E. Bing Inocencio, who eliminated the controversial equestrian center plan, was one of the few campus presidents to drop a major project in its entirety.

“It did not belong,” Inocencio said, promising to spend his school’s $29.8-million share of the proposed tax revenues on “basic needs.”

Other proposals for Pierce include improvements to campus parking lots, its child-care and fitness centers, and a swimming pool. A $23.1-million proposal to expand Shepard Stadium to seat 15,000 people has sunk to the bottom of the wish list, and a $12.5-million plan to buy the nearby Warner Ridge commercial site had already been eliminated.