AT LENGTH--It has been more than 10 months since Councilman Joe Buscaino held his San Pedro Forum on Homelessness at the Warner Grand Theatre, where he reiterated the commonly held belief that neighboring cities were busing their homeless to the San Pedro area. 

He vowed he would stop this practice and called for greater cooperation amongst local cities to curb the importation of homeless people. Then he appointed a special task force to deal with the issue. The San Pedro Homeless Taskforce still hasn’t reported its findings. The homeless problem persists. Only it’s not what Buscaino expected. 

In Buscaino’s weekly e-news bulletin, he reports that, “In April, the Emergency Response Team met with 145 homeless individuals, 85 percent of whom are from the Harbor Area.” 

The report continues on about the reported results in the month of May that, “the team met with 170 individuals, 88 percent of whom were from the Harbor Area.” 

These reports from his trusted sources are similar to, but higher than national statistics, that show that most people who are homeless live in places in which they were reared and lived in a home.

The reality is that the people whom we have come to call “homeless” in our neighborhoods (at least some 85 to 88 percent) are in fact right at home because this is where they came from. They just don’t have a roof over their heads with a permanent address. 

This fact flies in the face of tightly held prejudices that perceive the homeless in our communities as outsiders. The councilman now must recognize them as his constituents. 

The Cost of Sweeping Homeless-- This is a hard fact to swallow for the indignant Saving San Pedro crowd after shaming the homeless on social media and having consistently called for more encampment sweeps to the tune of $30,000 per action. 

It was reported at one of the recent Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council meetings that there have been 27 such sweeps in the Harbor Area since the end of last summer, possibly more by now. By my estimation, the sweeps have cost the taxpayers of Los Angeles somewhere around $810,000. 

In addition to this expense, the police routinely issue tickets for infractions for any of the 24 municipal codes of which the homeless could be in violation, just by existing in a public space. Most of these tickets go to warrant for failure to appear. This only adds to the public expense and burden to the superior courts­, not to mention the cost to the homeless themselves. 

This criminalization of the poor has become a revolving door with a downward spiral. It’s part of what keeps the homeless, homeless. None other than the U.S. Department of Justice has recognized this vicious cycle for what it is: a civil rights violation that jeopardizes federal housing grants to our city. Enforcement actions such as the ones this city has used do nothing but make city officials look responsive. 

In response to the Los Angeles Police Department’s growing awareness that we can’t arrest our way out of homelessness, the Los Angeles Police Commission and the Los Angeles Chief of Police, Charlie Beck, issued new policy guidelines this week that change how officers approach the mentally ill and homeless populations. This policy change comes after two officer involved shootings of homeless people in the past few years. One of those shootings was judged “out of policy” and the officer is being criminally prosecuted. 

Clearly there must be more creative and effective ways to spend $810,000 in Council District 15 and the rest of Los Angeles. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the estimated $80 million spent on police and fire department to react to the homeless crisis isn’t working either. 

Homelessness itself is not a crime. We as neighbors and as citizens of this city and nation must not continue down this misconceived path. The homeless are our neighbors without shelter. If this were any other kind of crisis that left 46,000 residents countywide without shelter for even a day, someone would call for the Red Cross and the National Guard to step in. 

In Los Angeles, we talk the issue to death at city council meetings. Then we propose three different bond or tax measures, one of which will be voted on in November. Yet, not one new emergency shelter or new low-income housing unit will be opened or built before then. 

If this is how Los Angeles handles a crisis, I’d hate to see how the city would respond to the next major earthquake.

(James Preston Allen is the Publisher of Random Lengths News, the Los Angeles Harbor Area's only independent newspaper. He is also a guest columnist for the California Courts Monitor and is the author of "Silence Is Not Democracy - Don't listen to that man with the white cap - he might say something that you agree with!" He was elected to the presidency of the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council in 2014 and has been engaged in the civic affairs of CD 15 for more than 35 years. More of Allen … and other views and news at: randomlengthsnews.com.)  Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

URBAN PERSPECTIVE--The California legislature and Governor Brown now have all the ammunition they need to do what they should have done years ago. And that’s dump the outdated, outmoded, and grossly harmful Proposition 209. That’s the state amendment passed by voters two decades ago in 1996 that banned the use of race as a factor in college admissions.

The ammunition was supplied convincingly by the US Supreme Court when it strongly upheld the University of Texas’s affirmative action program. Justice Anthony Kennedy rammed the point home that race can be considered in admission to insure broad, and meaningful racially diverse colleges.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris further underscored the critical importance of affirmative action at California colleges in her friend of the court brief.

Affirmative action also assures the fair and equitable use of tax dollars for public education. This is a point missed or deliberately distorted in the affirmative action wars. That is that African-American and Hispanics pay taxes, lots of taxes, and are vital public stakeholders. Yet when colleges and universities shut the door or severely limit the number of African-American and Hispanic students at public institutions this means their tax dollars’ amount to de facto support of modern day quasi Jim Crow education. They are forced to pay for educational services and advantages in higher education that white students get and their children are denied.

Studies on college admissions to California colleges and universities have repeatedly found that there was a big plunge in the number and percentage of Black and Hispanic student enrollment after the passage of Prop. 209. This downward trend has remained agonizingly steady over the years. 

The studies also found that colleges and university administrators have done everything they could to devise policies and strategies employed to deftly skirt around Proposition 209 to ramp up the low numbers of black and Latinos on the campuses. The efforts have failed to boost the numbers. The problem of stagnant or declining Black and Hispanic student enrollment is made even worse by the widening gap between the percentage of underrepresented minority students graduating from California high schools and the percentage enrolling at UC. 

In 2014, the California senate took a big stab at trying to roll back Proposition 209 when it passed theConstitutional Amendment 5. This would have given voters another chance to consider the use of race in college admissions. The bill was pulled after some Asian-American constituent groups claimed that reinstituting affirmative action would do major harm to Asian-American students' chances of getting admitted to state colleges and universities. The charge that Asian-Americans would and are getting the short end of the admissions stick from affirmative action doesn’t hold up. 

Asian-American students already make up a disproportionate number of students at many public universities. According to university figures, at the University of Texas they make up 16 percent of the university enrollees though they are only 4 percent of the state’s population. 

The figures there are typical of their enrollment at many public universities where Asian-American students make up double digit numbers of the student population. 

The other old argument is that affirmative action is just another way of imposing quotas that would admit a lot of unqualified, poorly educated Black and Hispanic students to the colleges. This is nothing more than a rehash of the old quota or reverse bias argument that’s been used for years by conservatives to thwart affirmative action.

Quotas have long since been ruled illegal. Despite popular myth even before the imposition of Proposition 209 in California there was never a quota system that mandated a set number of Black and Hispanic students be admitted at any California university or state college. Race, then, was simply used as one of several factors that could be considered in a student’s admission. 

The brutal reality is that Proposition 209 is a relic of a time past when the relentless attack on affirmative action was a sneaky, and malicious way to maintain a racially discriminatory, two tiered education system that blatantly excluded Black and Latino students. It was bad public policy then, and in the two decades that Proposition 209 has been on the books, it still is.  

Now that the Supreme Court has spoken, there’s absolutely no reason why California lawmakers shouldn’t speak too and dump Proposition 209. Their swift action on this can and will serve as a model for other states that followed California’s lead and imposed bans on affirmative action in higher education to make affirmative action a reality again. We’ll all benefit from that.

(Earl Ofari Hutchinson is President of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable and an occasional contributor to CityWatch. For more Hutchinson insight.) 

-cw

DEEGAN ON LA-What’s the difference between an 18-unit apartment building at 1850 N. Cherokee Avenue in the heart of Hollywood that has a long history of providing rent-stabilized housing for working class tenants, and a trendy 24-unit boutique hotel that may replace it? How about the potential of a one-quarter-billion dollars gross for developer David Lesser over a 25-year life span of the new enterprise? And over $6 million in “bed taxes” to the City of Los Angeles over the same period? 

The conversion from rent-stabilized (RSO) apartments to hotel is an economic model for both developer Lesser and the City that may be too good to pass up. Most evictions and redevelopments hinge on what’s in it for the developer, and that usually means big profits. Incumbent rental occupants often become collateral damage and worse in the process. In this case, as in many others, some former tenants evicted by Lesser using the Ellis Act  have become homeless. 

If the boutique hotel is approved by the Planning and Land Use Management committee (PLUM), and then the full City Council, there will be no more fixed 3% annual rent caps on the formerly Rent Stabilization Ordinance (RSO) building. The new hotel’s room rates can fluctuate with the economics of supply and demand and LA will receive a 14% per bed, per night Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) that, in itself, could eventually bring the city one-quarter-million dollars annually.

An activist community is fighting City Hall over this conversion, and now has a second chance at a PLUM hearing on Tuesday, centered on a CEQA-based argument on homelessness that has apparently caught the attention of the PLUM members. It seems that the city has no overall screening process to consider the cumulative impacts of how Ellis Act evictions add to homelessness, especially the loss of RSO housing units, even though they are required to under CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act). 

Recently, Governor Brown declared that CEQA, a state law, that may get in the way of progress and hinder developers should be minimized or eliminated altogether. Brown wants it diluted or removed from the planning process. 

The full council file for the Cherokee Hotel (CF 09-0967-S1) project is now available online. The public hearing will be held on Tuesday, June 28 at 2:30pm in Hearing Room 350 at City Hall. 

The transcript of an eye-opening conversation between Director of City Planning Vincent Bertoni and Councilmembers Jose Huizar (CD14) and Gilbert Cedillo (CD1) sheds some daylight on a City Hall where departments and council offices are not in sync. It shows us how an operational dislocation hurts occupants of RSO housing that are being evicted by the Ellis Act and becoming homeless as a result.

In the transcript of the PLUM meeting, the City Planning Director and two of the 15 City Councilmembers -- Huizar and Cedillo -- admit they do not know what the cumulative impact their constant approval of Ellis Act evictions has had in creating homelessness. Most likely, the other 13 Councilmembers are equally unaware that when they say “yes” to developers wanting to build in their districts, often with favors attached, they are also saying “no” to tenants who are also constituents. 

This shocking admission was reported by Jill Stewart and Miki Jackson in their expose published on June 24 in CityWatch, detailing how the “LA City Council and City Hall are clueless about their role in fueling homelessness.” 

In a stunning turn of events, PLUM will reconsider this matter on Tuesday, June 28. This reflects how far the community will go to try and preserve affordable housing in a rapidly densifying Hollywood that many consider ground zero for much of what’s wrong with city planning. It also highlights the influence that developers lord over politicos relying on them to fuel their election campaigns. 

Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell (CD13), who holds sway over development projects in central Hollywood, is up for re-election next March. So is his mentor, former CD13 councilman and now Mayor, Eric Garcetti, who many credit or bedevil, depending on your point of view, with getting the development wrecking ball rolling into high gear in Hollywood. 

The developer has said he does not intend to tear down the two existing 1929 buildings on Cherokee, but to repurpose them, retaining the character that adds to the neighborhood. No word yet on the fenestration (the arrangement of windows and doors on the elevations of a building) but it’s likely that that will not change and, to the eye, the building may look pretty much the same as a hotel as it did as an apartment building. At least there is no longer the intrusive threat of the original plan that included a 69-unit condo building that could have looked something like this.     

We will never know if the prospect of the 69-unit condo project was a bluff, a threat or a tactic by the developer to make a 24-room hotel look better by comparison. But one thing’s for sure: the current tenants will be the big losers. A few of them have already become homeless and need to move far away to obtain affordable housing. This is yet another result of the citywide reduction in affordable housing exacerbated by Ellis Act evictions initiated by developers who are intent on tearing down pre-1973 rent stabilized (RSO) housing. 

Removing affordable housing from inventory is the opposite of providing supportive housing for the homeless and lower-wage-earning residents. While the City may think it can support evictions that result in more homelessness and then ask taxpayers or the Governor to fund homeless housing, in truth, it really can’t. 

This schizophrenic approach is hurting the neediest, and slowly works its way up the food chain to damage the many politicos that are starting to be seen for what they are: the creators, not the solvers, of the homeless problem that comes from Ellis Act evictions. 

This is a variation of the well-established pattern of dislocation and gentrification throughout Hollywood and other communities, with some unique twists, explained by community activist Sylvie Shain, saying, “the tenants of 1850 N. Cherokee were vacated in 2013, under the Ellis Act, per a prior project approval for this site to build a condo complex, which was approved in 2009 but never moved forward. Half of these tenants did not receive relocation assistance because the owner benefited from the applicability of a waiver in the Los Angeles Municipal Code (Chapter 151.09G), provided for in the following circumstance: “The tenant received actual written notice, prior to entering into a written or oral tenancy agreement, that an application to subdivide the property for condominium, stock cooperative or community apartment purposes was on file with the City or had already been approved.” 

This is another example of how Hollywood is rapidly changing people’s lives and bank accounts. This hotel conversion project shines a spotlight on the politicos that have helped to shatter the dreams of everyday people who have been living in Hollywood in redevelopment projects; and there are dozens more on the books. These are tenants who, under the politico’s pro-development addiction, are now unable to afford living in Hollywood once they have been “Ellis-Acted” out. 

Bertoni, Huizar and Cedillo now admit to being complicit in creating an increase in homelessness through their constant approvals of tearing down affordable housing, throwing people onto the street. More of their colleagues need to turn the corner away from denial and into the reality of taking solution-based actions. 

While everyone is scrambling for up to two billion dollars in funding to help the homeless, there’s an easy non-monetary first step available: place a moratorium on Ellis Act evictions. Get the facts and a perspective on how this directly and cumulatively impacts our homeless crisis.

(Tim Deegan is a long-time resident and community leader in the Miracle Mile, who has served as board chair at the Mid City West Community Council and on the board of the Miracle Mile Civic Coalition. Tim can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

LATINO PERSPECTIVE-Julie Watson from The Associated Press wrote and reported that California this month has become the latest state to allow the terminally ill to legally choose to end their lives, raising worries among some people in the state’s large Latino and African-American communities that poor people with serious illnesses could be pressured to take lethal drugs as a cheaper option to long-term care. 

Concern has surfaced across the Golden State, from primary care physicians and administrators of large hospital systems, to ethics professors and clergy. 

Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, the highest-ranking Hispanic bishop in the nation, called the new law “a failure of solidarity” in a society where loneliness and isolation already prevail. 

But those fears were found to be unsubstantiated in a recently released study conducted by UCLA professor Cindy Cain with the department of health policy and management. 

Cain found that in states such as Oregon, which began implementing the law in 1997, the number of those who died with prescription assistance rose gradually each year, from less than 20 in 1998 to 105 in 2015. 

Most of those who chose to end their lives were 65 and older, white, had some college education; and more than 60 percent of them had private insurance. 

The data doesn’t support the idea that the passing of the aid-in-dying law will disproportionately affect the poor or vulnerable groups, Cain said. 

This spring, the national right-to-die advocacy organization Compassion & Choices named Latina, African-American and Filipina-American women to reach out to minority communities. The group also set up a bilingual hotline explaining the law and held meetings in largely Spanish-speaking areas such as California’s Central Valley. 

“We knew we would need to learn to talk about the issue around death and dying in a way that was not just recognizable to the white community,” said Toni Broaddus of Compassion & Choices. 

In an April 14 column in the Chicago Tribune, cancer patient Miguel Carrasquillo called on his fellow Latinos to “break the cultural taboo of discussing death and medical aid in dying.” 

He called himself the “Latino Brittany Maynard,” a reference to the 29-year-old California woman who was dying of brain cancer when she moved to Oregon to access the lethal drugs in 2014. Her story galvanized support for the proposal that became the California law. Carrasquillo’s mother supported his fight for the option, but his father saw it as intervening in God’s work. 

Carrasquillo died of cancer in his native Puerto Rico, lacking the funds to move to a state with a right-to-die law. His mother promised him she would keep pushing for the practice so others do not have to suffer as he did. 

In California, before a doctor can prescribe lethal drugs, a patient 18 or older must make two oral and one written request. The law also requires a diagnosis that the person has less than six months to live and that the person can take the drugs without help from anyone. 

Life-ending drugs will be covered under MediCal, the state’s public insurance plan, but it limits coverage of outpatient palliative care consultations unless the person has stage IV cancer.

(Fred Mariscal came to Los Angeles from Mexico City in 1992 to study at the University of Southern California and has been in LA ever since. He is a community leader who serves as Vice Chair of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition and sits on the board of the Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council representing Larchmont Village. He was a candidate for Los Angeles City Council in District 4. Fred writes Latino Perspective for CityWatch and can be reached at: [email protected].) Los Angeles Daily News staff writer Susan Abram contributed to this report.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TRUTHDIG-Amid Donald Trump’s vicious attacks on immigrants, it’s refreshing to take a look at Asian-Americans, who braved great hardship to come to the United States. In the face of racism, they began life in a hostile land, raised families and have made a significant contribution to the nation’s social, intellectual, economic and political life. (Photo above: Mayor Eric Garcetti at podium, Councilman David Ryu front row right.)

I’ve been intrigued by their lives, which mirror the experiences of other Americans of immigrant stock. I’ve watched the transformation of the Asian-American community from powerlessness to political office and clout. From my perch in Los Angeles and its suburbs that surround the city, I got to know a lot of the people who made it happen. Theirs is a great American story, one that offers hope in a time of gloom and cynicism.

But first some numbers to put this in perspective. More than 18 million Asian-Americans live in the United States, more than 5.5 percent of the population. Chinese comprise the largest group, more than 4 million, followed by Filipinos, Indians, Vietnamese, Koreans and Japanese. They are the fastest-growing ethnic minority and are expected to play an increasingly important role in elections.

There were many turning points in the history of Asian immigrants to the United States. All of the immigrant groups treasure theirs. To record them all would fill a book. This is just a column, so I’ll write about the ones I saw.

The Korean-American moments of history are the most recent. An important one was the wrongful conviction of Chol Soo Lee, a Korean immigrant accused of a 1973 murder involving Chinese-American gangs in San Francisco’s Chinatown. A Korean-born journalist, K.W. Lee, then with the Sacramento Union, investigated the case. K.W., as everyone knows him, was the first Asian immigrant to work as a journalist on an American newspaper, starting out on the Kingsport Times-News in Tennessee. It took him more than 100 stories and five years before Chol Soo Lee was retried and acquitted. During this time, K.W. helped organize a grass-roots campaign by Asian-Americans, the Free Chol Soo Lee Defense Committee, one of the first Pan-Asian justice defense organizations.

I met K.W. while he was editor of the English-language edition of The Korea Times.   He was my gracious teacher and guide through Koreatown in the months preceding, during and after the biggest turning point for the Korean-American community, the 1992 Los Angeles riots.  It devastated Korean businesses and was forevermore known in the community as Sa-I-Gu, Korean for 4-2-9, the day in 1992 the riots began.

Los Angeles City Councilman David Ryu, (see photo above.) then a teenager, remembers the helplessness felt by Korean-Americans. He was one of the young Korean-Americans inspired by K.W. to become a community activist.  

Ryu was elected in 2015 in a historic demonstration of growing Korean-American power, beating a candidate backed by the City Hall establishment. He immigrated to the United States at age 5 with his parents. “The family was on food stamps,” he recalled. “There were six of us in a two-bedroom, 700-square foot apartment.”

Ryu was in the 11th grade when the riots began after a jury in suburban, mostly white, Simi Valley acquitted the white Los Angeles Police Department officers of the videotaped beating of Rodney King, an African-American who had been stopped for a traffic violation.

The riots were a multiethnic event for a multiethnic city. African-Americans in South Los Angeles began looting and burning stores. Latinos joined in. Korean-American immigrants owned many of the small grocery and liquor stores, buying them as a way to begin the climb up the U.S. economic ladder. The stores tended to be family affairs, with the parents and children working to keep them open seven days a week. Most of the adults didn’t speak English well, and relations with the African-American customers were tense, just as they had been when Jews ran those stores before the 1965 Watts riots. Flames and rioting spread north of South Los Angeles. Too often, police and firefighters were not around. Korean-Americans armed themselves, and one, an 18-year-old college freshman, was shot to death.

After watching the riots and observing people fighting fires with their garden hoses, I attended a mass meeting of several thousand Korean-Americans in a Koreatown park. People were angry, feeling they had been neglected by the city’s political and law enforcement powers.

“It showed the Korean-Americans that you just couldn’t be quiet, knowing your place. You were shooting yourself in the foot,” Ryu told me.

Younger people like him were long put down by their elders, but no longer.

“We got to speak out,” he said. “We started organizing, registering voters, [believing] we cannot let this happen again. We need access. Connections.”

There were other examples of mistreatment of the Asian-American minority by politicians and law enforcement.

Back in 1871, 17 Chinese were lynched in Los Angeles’ Chinatown in a massacre that historians found was widely supported by the town’s white powers. 

All Asian-American immigrants were targeted by the 1913 California Alien Land Law, which had the effect of barring landowning by Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Korean farmers.

Japanese-Americans suffered the worst when, during World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved imprisoning 110,000 Japanese-Americans in “relocation” camps. Their long fight for reparations and recognition for the injustice was the beginning of Japanese-American political organization.

A governmental and political outrage of another kind spurred the political organization of the largest group of Asian-Americans, the Chinese. It began in the 1980s in Monterey Park, a small suburban city east of Los Angeles with a movement called “English only.” White merchants and politicians tried to ban Chinese-language signs from stores in a city that was becoming home to many Chinese-Americans. 

That’s when I met a young member of the small Garvey School District Board, Judy Chu, who taught psychology at East Los Angeles Community College. She and others organized a coalition of Asian-Americans, Latinos and whites against English only. She was elected to the Monterey Park City Council, the state Assembly and then to Congress, where she was the first Chinese-American woman to become a member of the House. She is chair of the Asian Pacific American Caucus. English only, by the way, disappeared when Monterey Park became a majority Asian-American city.

I talked over the history with Mike Woo, dean of the College of Environmental Design at Cal Poly Pomona and the first Asian-American elected to the Los Angeles City Council. He later ran unsuccessfully for mayor.   

Woo’s election is part of the history, as is an action he took as a councilman. He was the first member of the council to call for the resignation of the influential police chief Daryl Gates, whose leadership of the department was blamed for police failures to control the 1992 riots and protect residents. The action by the Chinese-American councilman created a bond with African-Americans at a time when their relationship with Asian-Americans had been bad.

Today, more than 4,000 Asian-Americans hold local, state and federal offices. In a paper published by the Center for American Progress in 2014, scholars Karthick Ramakrishnan and Farah Z. Ahmad found that the number of Asian-American voters nearly doubled from more than 2 million in 2000 to almost 4 million in 2012. They are projected to constitute 5 percent of the electorate by 2025 and 10 percent by 2044.

This should be good news for the Democrats in this presidential election year, if they can take advantage of it. Most Asian-Americans favor Democrats and don’t like anti-immigrant politicians. The biggest number of Asian-Americans live in the West, where California, Oregon and Washington are Democratic. But their numbers are increasing in Arizona and, combined with the large number of Latino Arizonans, could deliver that usually Republican state to Hillary Clinton. In Florida a small minority of Asian-Americans, centered in Orlando, could combine with Latinos and take the state away from Trump.

The rise of this immigrant community in politics and its growing participation in the political process are a refutation of Trump and his portrayal of immigrants as an alien body invading the United States.

“The trend toward Democrats by Asians will continue,” Woo told me. “It might be accentuated by what Asians see as anti-immigrant bias.”

In a close election for president, that could make the difference.

(Bill Boyarsky is a columnist for Truthdig, the Jewish Journal, and LA Observed. This piece was posted first at Truthdig.com.)

-cw

EDUCATION POLITICS--Globalization and technological change have shattered many of the economic models that have prevailed since World War II. This rapid change has driven justifiable concern about income stagnation and the prospects for this and future generations. Fortunately, there is a positive path forward through higher education, if we don’t take our eyes off the road. 

California continues to boast the finest public higher education system in the world. Our community colleges, California State University and the University of California comprise the three pillars of the Master Plan for Higher Education that has served us well for more than half a century. These campuses have energized our economy and fueled the innovation and creativity that are hallmarks of the California Dream. They are a big reason why California has the world’s sixth largest economy. We can’t afford to take public higher education for granted when the State sets its Budget priorities. 

Over the past several decades, there has been an unfortunate pattern of raiding higher education funding when the State gets into a fiscal jam. During the Great Recession, California’s community colleges lost $1.5 billion in State funding from 2008-09 to 2011-12. That lost revenue forced a 25% reduction in course offerings and shut 500,000 students out of the classroom. Fortunately, in the last few State Budget cycles, the community colleges have received healthy increases and it is imperative that this trend continues. 

Often overlooked, the community colleges provide the foundation of training and preparation that enable hundreds of thousands of Californians to embark on productive careers with solid incomes. Students with a degree or certificate from California community colleges nearly double their earnings within three years. Attending a community college gives students twice as good a chance of finding employment as those who fail to complete high school. Community colleges train 70% of our state’s nurses and 80% of firefighters, law enforcement personnel and emergency medical technicians. California community colleges are the largest provider of workforce training in the country. 

The community colleges also play a key role in readying students for four-year institution. Half of CSU graduate and almost a third of UC graduates started out in the community college system. Almost half of the UC graduates in science, technology, engineering and math started out at community colleges. 

All of the numbers underscore the importance of fully funding all three branches of California’s public higher education system. Californians with a college degree will earn an average of $400,000 more in their lifetime than those with just a high school degree. For every dollar the State invests in students who graduate from college, it will receive a $4.50 return on that investment. 

There has been some progress in restoring higher education funding in recent years, but much more needs to be done. It is essential that we accelerate State funding for all three branches of our higher education system and it is critical that the State resists back-peddling when the next economic downturn occurs.

(Dick Ackerman and Mel Levine are Co-chairs of the California Coalition for Public Higher Education. Ackerman is a former legislator who served as State Senate Republican Leader. Levine is a former Democratic member of the State Assembly and Congress.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.