4 Legislators Make Public University Top Priority

Although each has a New Year’s list of chosen pursuits and personal causes, Ventura County’s legislators have a group project this year: securing the millions of dollars needed to launch a long-delayed public university in the county.

Four of the five members of the county’s delegation to Sacramento favor turning Camarillo State Hospital into a Cal State University campus, vowing to help scrape together the money to make it happen.

“It is my highest priority for this term,” said Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo), who is expected to move into a key role as chairman of the Senate Budget subcommittee on education.

“I grew up in Ventura County, and to continue your education, you have to leave,” said O’Connell, a Cal State Fullerton graduate. “We are the largest county in the state that doesn’t have a public university.”

Republican Assemblymen Nao Takasugi of Oxnard, Brooks Firestone of Los Olivos and even Tom McClintock of Northridge, a notorious fiscal tightwad, support converting the hospital into a four-year campus--even if it costs millions of dollars.

“We have an institution that can be a standing university with very little modification,” McClintock said. “We have a lot of students. I see that as the most cost-effective option to provide for these students.”

Only Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) opposes the proposal--recently endorsed by a governor’s task force--to convert the hospital into Cal State University’s 23rd campus.

Although Wright agrees that Ventura County needs a university, she is skeptical about how Cal State can afford to take over the hospital’s 85 buildings scattered across more than 600 acres.

“The buildings have to be made compatible for the university,” Wright said. “I don’t know where [university officials] are going to get the money. When they come before that subcommittee on education, they better have a well-rounded program before I’m going to vote for it.”

Wright remains concerned about the fate of Camarillo State Hospital’s patients, who are scheduled to be transferred to other mental hospitals. But like her colleagues, she has other goals on her legislative agenda for the coming year. Following is a look at their top priorities:

Sen. Cathie Wright

The state senator, whose district includes Simi Valley and most of Ventura County, vows to resurrect her legislation designed to allow Ventura County to overhaul its welfare system. The pilot program would give local officials more control over how they spend welfare dollars and manage social projects.

Wright managed to shepherd a bill through the Legislature in the final days of last year’s session, only to have it vetoed by Gov. Pete Wilson, who is working on his own welfare-reform initiatives.

She plans to reintroduce the bill, but only as a backup measure. Instead, she thinks she can coax the governor’s staff into administrative changes that would give the county the flexibility it seeks to steer welfare recipients back to the work force.

“We are trying to work the [state] Department of Health and Welfare, and it is my understanding this could be a demonstration project. It is the same as a pilot program, but again it will give the county the ability to do what it wants.”

Wright, a member of the Senate Budget Committee, plans to use her position to make sure that state-funded mental health programs are not shortchanged this year.

She will also continue her crusade for statewide expansion of the successful Ventura Project, which establishes a higher level of cooperation among agencies that aid seriously emotionally disturbed children.

Wright said the program reduces recidivism among juvenile offenders by providing some of them the help they need before they slip deeper into the criminal justice system. So far, 19 of California’s 58 counties have adopted the Ventura Project model.

“I won’t give up until all of the counties are on board,” Wright said. “The way we are going, I’ll be in my grave before it is done.”

Sen. Jack O’Connell

Trying to get a jump on the upcoming session, O’Connell has already introduced several bills to improve public education and preserve the environment--causes he has long championed.

One bill builds on his successful effort to reduce class size in public schools throughout California.

Last year, the former high school teacher coauthored legislation that provided $971 million to cut class size to 20 pupils per classroom in first through third grades.

This year, he wants to expand the program, with another infusion of money, to include kindergartens and fourth grades in the class-size reduction program.

O’Connell also has introduced a bill asking the Legislature to place a $4-billion school bond measure on the November 1998 statewide ballot.

The measure, if approved by voters, would provide $2 billion to build and modernize public schools and $1 billion to build new classrooms to accommodate the class-size reduction program.

The final $1 billion would go toward construction and maintenance of buildings on community college, Cal State and University of California campuses.

“Part of that money,” he said, “will assist the conversion of Camarillo State Hospital into a state university.”

O’Connell said conversion dollars should be forthcoming before then, predicting that money will be added to Gov. Wilson’s budget in May to assist the university with the transition.

“I’m going to push for this as hard as I can,” he said.

In addition, the senator has reintroduced a bill that would rewrite the tax law to encourage conservation of wildlife habitat, open space and farmland. The legislation would provide up to $200 million a year in tax credits to landowners who contribute their land to the state.

“It’s another tool to provide open space for endangered species,” O’Connell said.

Assemblyman Nao Takasugi

Beginning his third and final term in the Assembly, Takasugi said he hopes to renew his push for tax cuts.

But the lawmaker said he is unsure of his role next year on the Assembly Revenue and Tax Committee, given that he was stripped of his chairmanship by the Democrats who regained majority control of the lower house in the November election.

“It’s frustrating that I cannot continue on with the work in a position of leadership,” said Takasugi, who loses three staff members allotted to chairmen. “But at this point, I’m resigned to take what is coming and make the best of it.”

Takasugi, like many of his Republican colleagues, expects to learn of his new committee assignments within the next week or so. He hopes to be appointed vice chairman of the Revenue and Tax Committee, just as a Democrat was appointed to the No. 2 position when he was chairman.

“Last year, we concentrated on tax relief to businesses large and small,” Takasugi said. “This year, I hope to provide that relief to individuals.”

For now, Takasugi plans to reintroduce his bill to reduce taxes paid on capital gains from the sale of a house. His proposal is to allow homeowners to factor in inflation when calculating what capital gains are taxable.

On the local front, he will resurrect his bill to extend the academic year for Oxnard high school students by three weeks. The pilot project came close to passing the Legislature last year, but was lost in the last-minute scramble to pass dozens of bills.

U.S. schoolchildren generally attend classes 180 days a year, he said, while their counterparts in Japan and Europe attend classes 240 to 250 days a year.

“Our competition is global and our children are falling behind,” Takasugi said. “This pilot project would provide us with a golden opportunity to see if lengthening our school year would help our students improve their scores.”

Takasugi also plans to seek state funding for a new gymnasium at a junior high in El Rio, and vowed to help line up money for a four-year university for Ventura County. His district, which includes Camarillo State Hospital, reaches from Oxnard and Port Hueneme to Thousand Oaks.

“I will join forces with Sen. O’Connell and [Assemblymen] Brooks Firestone and Tom McClintock to see if there is something we can do to make this possible,” he said. “I would hope that Cathie Wright will help us in that effort as well.”

Assemblyman Tom McClintock

After a four-year hiatus from the Assembly, McClintock has returned raring to go.

On his first day on the job, the gung-ho budget cutter introduced legislation to set up an independent Bureaucracy Realignment and Closure Commission that would target various government agencies or offices for elimination or consolidation.

McClintock said he modeled his proposal after the nation’s military base-closing commissions, which have successfully closed hundreds of unneeded Army, Air Force and Navy bases across the continent.

“The fun part of it is that it works,” he said. “Everyone agrees that there are obsolete and duplicative bureaucracies. But no one can agree on which ones because of political pressures. This takes the issue out of the political realm and places it in the hands of an independent commission.”

As the head of a conservative think-tank in Sacramento, McClintock has developed other notions on how to save tax dollars by realigning state government. Those ideas will emerge as bills in the coming months, he said.

McClintock, a former Thousand Oaks assemblyman who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1992 and state controller in 1994, picked up the seat held by Assemblywoman Paula Boland (R-Granada Hills) in the November election. He now represents Simi Valley, Fillmore and portions of the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys.

He has also picked up Boland’s fight in the Legislature to remove the Los Angeles City Council’s veto power over any San Fernando Valley attempt to secede from the city.

McClintock was particularly eager to rejoin the Legislature last year, when the Republicans controlled the Assembly for the first time in decades. But now he said he is “fatalistic” about toiling away in the minority party.

“The majority has a responsibility to govern,” he said. “The minority has just as important of a responsibility to propose a better alternative. The system cannot function unless both of those are fulfilled.”

As such, he plans to weigh in on a number of weighty issues, including reforming the state’s welfare system, juvenile justice system and the judiciary.

McClintock is considering legislation that would pluck violent youths from the overall pool of juvenile offenders and make sure they are locked up during their violence-prone years.

Picking up an idea from former state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita), he would like to see the courts routinely compile and disclose the sentencing records of judges, so the public could determine whether any particular judge has a tough or lenient record.

“As a voter, I’m continuously frustrated when asked to vote for judges about whom I know nothing,” he said. “This would provide a uniform standard for reporting on their sentencing records.”

Assemblyman Brooks Firestone

Unlike last year, Firestone is not chairman of the Assembly Higher Education Committee. But that has not dampened his enthusiasm for legislation on education-related matters.

As his No. 1 priority, the second-term assemblyman has reintroduced his proposal to set up a tax-free savings plan for parents setting aside money for their children’s college education.

Modeled after the popular Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), Firestone’s “Scholarshare” proposal would give parents higher returns on their money than other accounts and thus help them afford the ever-escalating costs of higher education, he said.

“There are precedents in other states and this would be truly good for California,” Firestone said.

The assemblyman and noted Santa Ynez winemaker also plans another run at reforming bilingual education programs in the state’s public schools.

In a bipartisan effort, Firestone teamed up with Assemblywoman Dede Alpert (D-Coronado) last year to push a reform bill that would draw support from both native-language advocates and supporters of English-only instruction. The proposal was to give individual school districts the flexibility to teach students in their native tongue or place them in English-speaking classes.

“It gives school districts the right to devise their own school programs, as long as they show it is being productive,” Firestone said of the recently reintroduced Firestone-Albert Bilingual Education Reform Act of 1997.

Firestone has also introduced legislation designed to force high schools to make sure college-bound graduates meet a certain level of competence in math and English.

Under his Academic Warranty plan, Firestone hits public schools where it smarts: in the pocketbook.

His legislation would give California’s public colleges and universities the power to charge high schools for the costs of providing remedial math or English classes to any college freshman who graduated from high school with a 3.0 grade point average or better.

Firestone, who represents Ventura, Santa Paula and Ojai as well as much of Santa Barbara County, said he is eager to help turn Camarillo State Hospital into the long-planned Cal State Channel Islands campus.

“This is my No. 1 issue in the district,” Firestone said. “The students are there and so we need to make sure the money is there. When a bargain comes along for state government, we have to figure out how to make it work.”

* A LOOK BACK

In 1996, education was a vital issue, and violent deaths were numerous. B2-B3