Plan Would Decentralize L.A. Colleges

The new board president of the Los Angeles Community College District unveiled a wide reorganization plan Thursday that would shift decision-making power over everything from budgets to curriculum from the central office to the district’s nine campuses.

Board President Elizabeth Garfield said decentralization is needed to save the district from being choked to death by “a centralized bureaucracy [that] stifles the creativity and flexibility of the colleges.”

The sweeping proposal comes in response to the district’s financial crisis: an impending $13.1-million deficit and threats from the state chancellor’s office to send a monitor to oversee the district’s finances.

Although Garfield could not say how much money the plan would save, she said it gives college presidents authority over their budgets and holds them accountable if they dip into red ink.

“We will no longer tolerate deficit spending in the district,” Garfield said. “If a college overspends its budget, the college president’s employment [contract] will not be renewed.”

Garfield said she has five votes on the seven-member board to adopt the plan at next Wednesday’s Board of Trustees meeting, the first she will lead since a coup that toppled former President Althea Baker.

Baker was ousted by colleagues who thought she was dragging her feet on reforms.

The proposal to decentralize was met with a mixture of excitement and trepidation from college presidents, outright opposition from the district’s Academic Senate chairman, and a call to “slow down” by a faculty union leader.

“It’s amazing to me that anyone is complaining that the board is moving too fast,” said Carl Friedlander, president of the American Federation of Teachers’ College Guild. “We should not go into another two-year debate on the issue. . . . But even I’m saying, ‘Maybe they are moving too fast.’ ”

The notion of decentralizing the 100,000-student community college district--the nation’s largest--has been kicking around for years.

Indeed, a faculty union task force just completed a draft report urging many reforms similar to those proposed by Garfield. Trustees David Lopez-Lee and Julia Wu have signed on as co-sponsors of the proposal.

Gloria Romero, vice president of the board, said she too favors making bold changes immediately. “We can talk ourselves into oblivion,” Romero said. “Hallelujah that we finally have the leadership to move forward. The time is now. We are moving.”

Under the proposal, each college, working with its faculty, would determine its own academic requirements and curriculum.

That way, colleges could move more quickly to offer courses that students want, without first getting approval from the district administration and the Academic Senate.

To reward creativity, colleges would keep any extra money they generated from new academic programs, instead of handing it over to district headquarters, as is now required.

The trustees’ plan would let college presidents work out many of the details, including determining which district office functions they wanted to take over and which ones they wanted to leave to the central bureaucracy.

It makes sense to keep some services at the centralized office, such as personnel management and legal counsel, said Ernest Moreno, president of East Los Angeles College.

Yet overall, said Moreno, “I welcome a decentralized operation that gives us more authority so we can make real decisions without always being second-guessed and reversed by some other group.”

Garfield expects the presidents to opt for many changes that will greatly slim down the district office staff, distributing their jobs to the campuses that stretch from Pierce College in Woodland Hills to Harbor College in Wilmington.

In a push for speedy action, the plan calls for the reforms to be in place by July 1, the start of the new fiscal year.

But Tyree O. Wieder, president of Valley College in Van Nuys, said he doesn’t “see any way for it to happen by July 1. The concepts are good, but there are a lot of issues as to its implementation.”

Winston Butler, president of the Academic Senate, said he could not support the proposal without more “detailed planning” of how the idea would work.

He called the plan “a power play” by the faculty union that would make the union more powerful than it already is. “The unions should only be dealing with wage and benefits issues,” he said.

But Garfield dismissed Butler’s objections as coming from someone “who has a stake in the status quo.”

Garfield acknowledged that she was taking advantage of the district’s fiscal crisis to take on the district’s entrenched bureaucracy.

“It’s so difficult to make changes when everything is moving along OK,” she said. The crisis, she said, “has provided the impetus for doing the things that everyone has been talking about for years.”