Passage of $1.25-Billion Prop. A Lifts Spirits at Community Colleges

Los Angeles community colleges finally got their big break.

Leaders of the nine-campus district have watched two bond measures go down to defeat in the last decade. But on Wednesday, at last, they had something to celebrate: the easy victory of Proposition A.

The $1.25-billion construction bond issue will fund an ambitious renovation of the district’s mostly beige and often shabby college buildings, where teachers make do with 40-year-old equipment and office space so crowded that they can’t meet privately with students.

“People are just sort of pinching themselves,” said Carl Friedlander, head of the district’s faculty guild, one of the lead players in a campaign waged from campuses and classrooms. “This really is thrilling.”

The measure needed 55% of the vote to win. It received 67%, becoming by far the largest local bond measure ever passed for a community college district in California.

Its passage shows that despite recent hard times, Los Angeles community colleges still enjoy considerable support, said Darry Sragow, a campaign consultant for the bond campaign.

Sragow said the vote also reflects a new trend in California politics: an unexpected inclination among Los Angeles voters to embrace the city’s diversity and see their self-interest as aligned with that of the whole.

The change first became apparent in focus groups and polls conducted for the campaign, Sragow said. Strategists initially had considered running separate bond measures in each of district’s nine college service areas, reasoning that Los Angeles voters are deeply divided along ethnic and economic lines.

That bit of conventional wisdom seemed particularly applicable to the community college campaign. After all, the colleges serve disproportionately poor, immigrant and minority youths, while voters tend to be disproportionately better off, older and white. Similarly, Valley voters might not support a measure for South-Central and vice versa.

But to the strategists’ surprise, “in every part of the city, voters rejected that option,” Sragow said. “That’s very different from the early 1990s. There’s been a marked progression. . . . People said to us, ‘Hey, we are all in this together, this is a very diverse place, none of us are going anywhere, and we going to have to live together.’ ”

Chancellor Mark Drummond predicted that the passage of the bond would mark a radical change for the district, improving the appearance of campuses as well as college programs and morale.

For a long time, the poor condition of many buildings had seemed an immutable fact of life, providing routine fodder for union grievances. “The facilities issue has just been sort of wearing people down for years,” Friedlander said. Faculty members have even been known to dismiss classes early because of unbearable temperatures, he said.

The bond issue may be paid off over 40 years and could cost homeowners as much as $25 per $100,000 of property valuation annually. But depending on a variety of factors, district officials say the real cost is more likely to be about $14 per $100,000 valuation annually.

College trustees had hoped the bond measure would benefit from Proposition 39, last year’s initiative changing the requirement for passage of bonds from two-thirds to 55% of the vote. But in the end, the measure would have passed anyway.

Not everyone was pleased. Kris Vosburgh, executive director of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., said the 55% threshold encourages bureaucrats to include a lot of fat in bond measures.

Proposition A “contains a lot of nonsense that wouldn’t have been included if they had to get a two-thirds vote . . . racquetball courts, a sports stadium,” he said.

But even Vosburgh tempered his criticism with comments about the need for improvements at community colleges.

The mood among district faculty and students Wednesday was jubilant. Mobilizing the district’s small army of 115,000 students, staff and faculty was one of the main thrusts of the campaign.

Olga Shewfelt, a part-time political science professor at West Los Angeles College, and a group of her students were part of the grass-roots effort. They staffed phone banks, conducted voter registration drives and talked to community groups.

“The students were changed throughout these two months,” she said. “These were students who were just taking a class, Political Science 1. . . . Then all of sudden, they got . . . a real lesson, not just in politics, but life skills.”

In addition, the district raised about $650,000 from a variety of sources, including local business owners and politicians. The faculty union contributed $100,000, and secured the critical support of the county Federation of Labor.

Tuesday’s election also gave the district a new trustee: public affairs director Michael D. Waxman, son of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles). He beat contender Dan Rosales Jr. for an open seat. Incumbent Kelly Candaele ran unopposed for his seat.

A runoff will be held to determine the winner of the final open seat between Samuel J. “Joey” Hill, aide to state Sen. Kevin Murray, and college instructor Nancy Pearlman.