Community College Budget Cuts Offer Davis a Refresher Course in Reality

“People don’t get it,” Gov. Gray Davis loudly exclaimed, chopping the air with both hands. “We’re taking in $3 billion less in revenue this year. But they want to keep going like it’s business as usual.”

The time was September 2001 and despite popular myth, Davis was ahead of the curve, at least for a Democrat. He saw a budget crisis bubbling. And the governor was trying to explain to me -- a Ventura College grad -- why he had just whacked community colleges with a $126-million funding cut.

But it didn’t make sense. He had only vetoed $554 million from all state programs, and community colleges had suffered the single hardest blow.

After he got smacked around himself by the colleges, legislators and news media, Davis backed down and restored $98 million.

Now he’s at it again, this time cutting much deeper, into the muscle and bone. And, again, he’s inflicting pain disproportionately on community colleges.

There are all kinds of figures floating around the Capitol, but any way they’re toted up, community colleges wind up on the short end. They’re at the bottom of the education barrel.

In the budget game, numbers change constantly. But the governor’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year shows the state cutting community colleges by 6.2% -- $404 million--while the California State University system and University of California each get boosts of 2.5%.

The latest figures of the nonpartisan legislative analyst peg total community college cuts this fiscal year and next at 9%, while CSU loses only 1% and UC gains 2.2%.

One problem for community colleges is that in Sacramento’s eyes, they’re neither fish nor fowl.

Because they’re governed by locally elected boards and funded with property taxes and state Proposition 98 money, community colleges are treated as an extension of high school. But in reality, they’re a key part of California’s historic system of affordable higher education.

They’re for poor kids who must live at home before transferring to a university, high school goof-offs asking for a second chance, laid-off adults seeking new job skills.

“I could tell you 100 success stories by students I’ve watched who didn’t have terribly good high school grades but went to community college, got turned on and later earned their PhDs,” says Sen. Jack Scott (D-Altadena), a former president of Pasadena City College and Cypress College.

But community colleges must compete with K-12 schools for funding, and the contest isn’t even close. K-12 is everybody’s top priority. Money that’s legally supposed to be set aside for community colleges is routinely shifted each year to K-12 schools.

The two-year colleges lack the prestige and political clout of CSU and UC.

“In Sacramento, there are winners and losers,” notes Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, who once attended Fresno City College. “And the community college system always is a loser.”

Says Scott: “There’s elitism involved.”

It’s exacerbated by governors who listen a lot more to major UC alum political donors than to community college worker bees.

There’s also another problem with this governor, insiders say. He’s still smarting from his pasting by the community college lobby two years ago.

But now there’s a new wrinkle no politician should ignore. Some of California’s 1.6 million community college students are organizing and protesting. They’re angry at the course reductions caused by funding cuts, and also the governor’s proposed doubling of student fees, from $11 to $24 per unit.

“Those fees are untenable,” says Assembly Majority Leader Marco Firebaugh (D-Los Angeles), a Citrus College grad.

An estimated 10,000 students showed up in Capitol Park recently; 4,000 turned out for a downtown L.A. rally last Friday.

“Students are starting to scream,” says Mark Drummond, chancellor of the L.A. Community College District. “They’re going to scream a lot more if some policymakers don’t get straightened out. If they organize as a political entity, it’ll be something nobody’s going to want to mess with.

“They’re becoming offended. Many are students of color saying, ‘We want a piece of the pie.’ ”

One thing that offends these students is that the fees they pay -- unlike the fees of UC and CSU students -- wind up, in effect, being seized by the state instead of helping their schools.

Assemblywoman Lynn Daucher (R-Brea) has a good idea. Her bill would require all student fees to be spent on the students’ education. Right now, even without a fee increase, that would boost community college funding by $170 million.

Maybe make up for it in the state treasury, she suggests, by cutting CSU and UC.

In all likelihood, this mugging of community colleges won’t be tolerated by either Democrats or Republicans in the Legislature. The governor ultimately again will have to back off.