Los Angeles’ Community Colleges Under Siege

At a time when community colleges are taking on an increasing role statewide in preparing workers for the new economy, the nation’s largest two-year system--the Los Angeles Community College District--is struggling to recover from its worst crisis during a two-decade decline.

A confluence of chronic under-funding, excessive union influence, declining enrollment, administrative instability and a bloated bureaucracy have pushed the system to the edge of bankruptcy.

It is a district under siege, with colleges trying to stave off a possible loss of accreditation, a Board of Trustees threatened with abolition and a budget faced with a possible loss of state funds.

The president of one college called it a system that has been dead for two years “and we didn’t know it.”

Tens of millions of dollars in state revenue are lost each year as nearby districts, with cleaner campuses and better libraries, siphon away about 50,000 potential students.

The deficit swelled to $13.1 million last fiscal year. Bankruptcy was narrowly averted through a combination of spending cuts and larger than expected tax revenues. The district was expected to end up with a $2.3-million general fund surplus, according to officials. However, a multimillion-dollar shortfall is again forecast for the fiscal year that started July 1.

The state imposed a $2.8-million fine because the district had lost track of how many full-time teachers it employed--a penalty that district officials called an unfair application of state regulations. Minutes from board meetings in 1996 have still not been typed up.

A disastrous real estate deal could result in losses of $20 million. The campus police union is in charge of deployment and scheduling officers’ overtime. Partly as a result, some officers are paid more than some teachers, who in turn make more than most of the deans who supervise them.

District headquarters consists of leased space in a gleaming downtown high-rise, while on the nine campuses--many of which lack air-conditioning--weeds thrive, the paint is chipped, ceiling tiles fall and hit people on the head, bathrooms have no soap and the most basic learning supplies are scarce or nonexistent.

Problems come in all shapes and sizes at the Los Angeles Community College District, an Ellis Island of academia serving 102,000 students--more than a third of whom speak a language other than English at home. Many of the students receive a good education, but often only after surmounting extra hurdles created by the district’s disarray.

Even the trustees concede that a major overhaul is essential to save the system. Yet the trustees, whose elections are ignored by most citizens except for those who do business with the district, have so far proved unable to lead the district out of its morass. A prestigious citizens commission recently recommended abolishing the board, whose spending priorities are cited by many critics as a prime cause of the crisis.

As enrollment declines, the trustees have ruled out the option of closing smaller campuses to cut costs. The two campuses with the fewest students--Southwest College on West Imperial Highway and Mission College in Sylmar--serve predominantly minority communities. Closing them would be politically disastrous.

Besides, officials say, there is no lack of potential students in the region. The solution, they say, should be not to cut but to attract new students--and the state funds that would flow from growing enrollment.

However, the trustees’ idea for reform--a decentralization plan that would have shifted authority from the district office to individual campuses--was stalled last month after being declared in violation of state law.

From Sacramento to Southwest Los Angeles, students, teachers, administrators, college presidents, elected officials and taxpayers are asking: How did things go so wrong?

Fees Fueled Slide in Early 1980s

Until Proposition 13 passed in 1978, money was seldom an insurmountable problem for the community colleges. But when the property tax well went dry, the system had to turn to Sacramento and get in line behind the more prestigious University of California and California State University systems.

In the early 1980s, funding for community colleges became a battleground between then-Gov. George Deukmejian and the Democratic Legislature, with Deukmejian vetoing increased funding for the colleges until he won an unprecedented $50-per-student tuition fee.

Although small, the fee cut into enrollment. A bigger problem was the elimination of residence requirements, which sparked an exodus of students from the Los Angeles colleges to small, neighboring districts they were now able to attend. Between 1981 and 1985, district enrollment dropped by 40,000 from its peak of 139,000, with a corresponding drop in funding--a plunge from which it has never fully recovered.

The district’s chronic fiscal problems resurfaced last August, when district Vice Chancellor Bonnie James warned the board of a possible budget shortfall that could reach $13 million.

In a letter to employees in September, then-Chancellor Bill Segura suggested that the district was in denial about its worsening financial condition. Chronic fiscal instability had given it a bad reputation in Sacramento, he wrote. That, in turn, harmed efforts to secure additional state money and threatened the colleges’ accreditation.

Since 1987, “we have not been able to adequately provide even some of the basic essentials for faculty, staff and students, including proper working and learning environments,” Segura wrote. “Furthermore, our instructional and administrative technology is generally antiquated, all of which is documented repeatedly in recent accreditation reports.”

Still, the board made little effort to rein in spending.

By December, Segura had resigned in frustration, just 16 months into a four-year contract paying $140,000 annually. He was succeeded by former Harbor College President James Heinselman--the system’s fourth chief executive in five years--who has signed on for only 14 months.

Soon afterward, a routine, district-sponsored audit confirmed a $1-million shortfall; by February, the deficit had swelled to the predicted $13.1 million.

In sharply critical letters to the board, the state chancellor’s office and the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges, an accreditation body, blamed the fiscal crisis on raises for full-time faculty that far exceeded the state’s recommendations. The agencies said the district could not afford the raises, given its aging facilities and lack of fiscal reserves.

The state chancellor downgraded Los Angeles’ rating on the “watch list” of troubled districts--where it has resided for most of the past decade--and threatened to appoint a state monitor.

The Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges said the Los Angeles district’s mismanagement jeopardized the colleges’ accreditation, which, if lost, could make it more difficult for graduates to move into four-year colleges. Three of the nine campuses are up for review in the coming academic year.

In struggling to combat the deficit and the threats to its academic viability, the district hit upon a decentralization plan this spring that it viewed as salvation.

“For the first time the colleges will be the focus of our district,” said board President Elizabeth Garfield. “The district office and other centralized functions exist for one purpose and one purpose only--to facilitate the work of the colleges.”

Yet the hastily conceived reorganization, which would vest the nine campuses with considerable control over their own destinies, was kicked back by the state chancellor’s office last month because the board failed to consult with the district Academic Senate. Reconsideration will not come until late August at the earliest.

Unions Bankroll Trustee Races

At the helm of the struggling district is an obscure, seven-member elected board whose members are paid $24,000 a year to oversee a system with more than 5,900 employees and an expected budget this school year of nearly $500 million. Most of that money comes from the state, which funnels about $3,400 per full-time equivalent student--about half the national average for community colleges--to district coffers.

Typically, board members win their four-year terms with the generous financial backing of the district’s seven employee unions--historically the only ones interested in bankrolling races that draw little public interest.

For elections in 1995 and 1997, when all seven seats were on the ballot, the American Federation of Teachers College Guild donated $319,353. Six of the seven trustees were elected with substantial union backing--often half or more of the candidates’ funds.

Trustee Kelly Candaele, for example, received $67,409, or 82% of his total 1997 campaign spending, from the teachers union.

“The L.A. board is really a pawn of all those vested interests,” said Donald Phelps, who was chancellor of the district for five years ending in 1993. “There is no check and balance when you have board members dependent for election on unions.”

Board members reject such criticism, saying they are simply living up to their philosophy of paying employees fairly.

“Being a pawn of the union is really far from reality. The board opposes things that the union wants at every meeting,” usually personnel matters handled in closed session, Candaele said.

Trustees run for at-large rather than geographical seats in the far-flung district, which has nearly 2 million registered voters. As a result, said Trustee Gloria Romero, there is no way to connect with the electorate.

“The method used right now is very undemocratic,” said Romero, who was elected in 1995 after being denied faculty union backing. “It makes the trustees ineffective” because “there’s no connection” with constituents.

When the projected $13.1-million deficit was aired at a March meeting, trustees publicly blamed their embarrassing predicament on others, including the college presidents and the state chancellor.

“[The trustees] are very defensive about all this happening, [saying], ‘It really ain’t what we did,’ ” Trustee Kenneth Washington, who died later in the spring, said at the time in a rare acknowledgment of the board’s role by a participant. “But they can’t duck all the responsibility. . . . The truth is we misbehaved.”

Business Blunders on Headquarters

No board decision in memory has proved to be more of a fiasco than the $12.5-million purchase in 1990 of a district headquarters building at 4050 Wilshire Blvd.

The district couldn’t come up with the $10 million needed for renovations, so the trustees let the building sit idle rather than sell during a cold market.

Still needing space for 300 employees, the board signed a long-term lease in 1993 on a new downtown high-rise at Wilshire Boulevard and Flower Street, promoting it as a good deal because the landlord offered two years of free rent plus a generous tenant-improvement allowance.

In June, the district sold the Wilshire building for $5.9 million--a $6.6-million loss on the purchase price alone. By then, the district had spent $5.5 million on principal, interest, insurance and upkeep on a building it never occupied, according to a district report. The district is still obligated to pay off the bonds sold to finance the purchase--payments that, with interest, will amount to $38.5 million over the remainder of their 30-year term.

Even if the entire sale price can be invested at a high interest rate, the report predicts an ultimate loss for the district of $20 million.

The lease wasn’t such a good deal either: The so-called free rent was tacked onto the lease in balloon payments unless the district exercised its option for a 20-year lease within eight years. By the end of 1998, the district will have paid $4.5 million in rent and improvements on its current headquarters.

With its 12-foot-high beveled-glass French doors leading to the board offices, sparkling brass elevator panels and new furnishings, the rented headquarters contrast sharply with the dingy, hot, poorly equipped campuses.

“Leasing that ridiculous building was a tragedy,” Romero said.

As a cost-cutting measure, Romero and the faculty union have proposed subleasing the space and relocating a scaled-back district headquarters on one or more of the campuses, but no action has been taken.

Another decision aimed at saving money--a “golden handshake” consisting of a $50,000 annuity offered to senior faculty who retired during the 1994-95 school year--has also put stress on district finances. It cost the district $12 million up front--money it was supposed to recoup by hiring younger, cheaper full-time faculty to replace the retiring teachers.

But because of complicated state rules regarding the ratio of full- to part-time teachers, the buyout triggered a $2.8-million state fine.

According to state Chancellor Tom Nussbaum, Segura told him that district officials had lost count of its faculty. The census had to be done by hand because the district lacked adequate computer resources. (Segura didn’t return phone calls seeking comment for this story.)

Faculty union President Carl Friedlander said such administrative bumbling and the high costs of a large central bureaucracy--and not higher pay for teachers--are to blame for the district’s fiscal plight.

“The management of the district has been asleep at the wheel,” he said, citing a from-the-top-down, multilayered decision-making process that at times has paralyzed the district. He said the district academic senate’s convoluted flow chart for hiring teachers “out-Dilberts Dilbert.”

Although she has been a trustee since 1993, board President Garfield said the recent dissection of the headquarters’ budget as part of the decentralization study showed her that the district was mired in a “culture of dependency” on the downtown office that left campus leaders passive instead of sparking creativity.

Compared to the poverty of the district’s campuses, Garfield says, “the amount of money spent” at district headquarters “is outrageous.”

*

Monday: The impact of unions and how conditions affect students.

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The District at a Glance

Student Employment

Work Full time: 48%

Work minimally or not at all: 28%

Work part time: 24%

*

Student Ethnicity

Latino: 42%

White: 21%

African American: 17%

Asian: 14%

Other: 6%

* History: First campus, City College, opened in 1929 but operated as part of the Los Angeles Unified School District until state legislation made it an independent entity in 1969.

* Area: 882 square miles, from Sylmar to Wilmington, Woodland Hills and Monterey Park.

* Enrollment: 102,000 students in fall 1997. Of that, 28% are full-time students and 72% are part-time students.

* Fees: $13 a unit, dropping to $12 a unit this fall. A full load of classes is usually 12 units per semester.

* Employees: 5,900, including 3,000 faculty members, 1,400 of whom are full-time teachers.

Campus Locations

1. Pierce College

Woodland Hills

2. Valley College

Van Nuys

3. Mission College

Sylmar

4. City College

Los Angeles

5. West Los Angeles College

6. East Los Angeles College

Monterey Park

7. Trade Technical College

Los Angeles

8. Southwest College

Los Angeles

9. Harbor College

Wilmington

Source: Los Angeles Community College District