School Bond Initiative to Be Retooled

Business leaders who helped bankroll a failed March ballot initiative to ease passage of local school bonds have reached an agreement with the governor to try again in November.

But instead of reducing the vote needed for local construction bonds from the current two-thirds majority to 50%, as the rejected Proposition 26 attempted, the second go-round would shoot for a more modest 55%.

That compromise gained a pledge for active support from Gov. Gray Davis, who was criticized for not throwing his political weight behind Proposition 26. That initiative lost by fewer than 165,000 votes.

Burt McChesney, executive director of California Business for Education Excellence, said the only remaining snag is logistical: whether the printed version of the ballot measure can be completed in time to gather the nearly 700,000 signatures needed by the mid-May qualifying deadline.

“There’s agreement on what we’re going to pursue, but now we have to make sure we can get it done,” McChesney said, adding that the group should know for sure within days.

The governor’s spokesman, Michael Bustamante, defended Davis’ participation in the Proposition 26 campaign--pointing out that he held a news conference about it on election eve. But Bustamante also said Davis would be more involved this time.

Davis had balked at trying again for the 50% level, suggesting that perhaps 60% would be better. At 50%, about 92% of recent local school bond measures would have passed; at 55%, the proportion would drops to about 80%.

“We need to pass this thing,” Bustamante said. “To go back to voters with the same number just didn’t seem the most effective way to get this done.”

Involvement of the California Teachers Assn., which spearheaded the $22-million Proposition 26 effort, is expected to be somewhat less intense this time around.

Union President Wayne Johnson said he is “sure that CTA will be 100% supportive.” But the state’s largest teachers’ union has two other campaign distractions for November: its own initiative to raise state school spending to the national average and its expected fight against an initiative to allow public money to pay for private schools.

Instead, wealthy charter school advocates--who were top contributors to Proposition 26--are expected to pay for most of the new effort. Supporters of the independent public schools signed on to back Proposition 26 after the union agreed to language that guaranteed a share of school bond funds for charters.

Chief among them are two Silicon Valley venture capitalists: John Doerr and Reed Hastings.

And the campaign will be expensive. Just gaining enough signatures to qualify the initiative for the ballot at this late date could cost $5 million.