O’Connell Predicts Full Funding for CSU Channel Islands

Calling the creation of the new Cal State Channel Islands campus the most important achievement of his political career, state Sen. Jack O’Connell said Friday that he is confident the campus will get most--if not all--of the $10 million it has requested for next year’s operating budget.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Times, the chairman of the Senate budget subcommittee on education said that while he is proud to have had a major role in making the university a reality, he is only one of many who made it happen. He praised Gov. Gray Davis and others for their commitment to Ventura County’s first public four-year university.

He also criticized state education officials who tried to force the county to accept a campus atop Taylor Ranch a decade ago, despite local resistance. He said that heavy-handed approach was the wrong way to go and said he was thrilled the project had survived long enough to take shape at the site of the former Camarillo State Hospital.

O’Connell, 47, said he will consider running for state superintendent of public instruction after term limits force him out of the Senate in 2002. Term limits will also prevent incumbent Supt. Delaine Eastin from running again. O’Connell, who walks a moderate line in a district split between Democrats and Republicans, also hasn’t ruled out a run for Congress, although he said it is unlikely in the near future.

But for O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo), whose district includes Ventura and Ojai, there isn’t much time right now to think about life after the Legislature.

Between now and next spring, he said, he will focus most of his attention on an uphill battle that has been lost once already: persuading California voters to approve a ballot measure that would make it easier to raise property taxes to finance local school construction bonds. The ballot initiative would allow the tax increase with a simple majority vote, rather than the current two-thirds requirement.

Passage of the measure would be “the most fundamental reform we’ll see in a decade,” O’Connell said. Already, state school officials have assessed a need for billions in construction and improvements in the coming years.

Voters rejected the ballot measure in 1993, and O’Connell said he expects the vote to be close again next March.

But he thinks several factors may sway voters in his direction this time around.

With the economy strong, he hopes voters won’t be as leery of spending more money. Also, this time, teachers unions won’t have to fight a school voucher initiative that was also on the ballot in 1993, so they may be able to devote more attention to swaying the public on the bond issue.

Meanwhile, O’Connell believes that Californians are less skeptical of the public school system than they were in 1993. “People today believe education is on the right track,” he said.

Overall, O’Connell said, the Legislature passed many measures that will be good for public schools, including a spending increase, incentives to reduce the size of high school English classes, school and teacher accountability measures and a mandatory high school exit exam that will be administered for the first time statewide in 2004. (The test will be administered in Oxnard high schools beginning in 2003.)

He said he believes the test will be difficult and that perhaps as many as half the students won’t pass on their first try. That shouldn’t worry parents, he said. Students can take the test an unlimited number of times until they pass.

O’Connell’s daughter, 13-year-old Jennifer, will be in the first class of high school seniors statewide to take the exit exam. After high school, her father hopes she will be attending college at the Channel Islands campus.