In the on-going battle over student fees and the California budget, a Northern California state senator has introduced two bills to the California State Senate, one asking for a 15 percent decrease in student fees, the other the formation of a Campus Closure committee.
Sen. Nicholas C. Petris, D-Oakland, introduced Senate bills 1300 and 1301 on Feb. 24, the last day that legislation could be introduced for this session, Gary Adams, consultant for Petris, said.
Senate bill 1300, proposes a 15 percent fee decrease that could possibly take affect as early as next year.
The decrease would be offset by the use of revenue created by maintaining a personal income tax, the revenue from which Gov. Pete Wilson had planned to use to fund a separate tax cut for individuals and corporations, Adams said.
Petris agrees with the governor that the personal income tax should continue. He disagrees, however, about who should benefit from the tax cut, Adams said.
"Senator Petris feels that the category of voters that has seen the greatest tax increase is the students," Adams said. "Students and their parents have been taxed over $620 million since Wilson took office in 1990." This is the issue that Senate bill 1300 confronts.
Maintaining the personal income tax would mean state revenue totaling an additional $800 million a year, Adams said. In the last 15 years, prison spending has doubled while spending on higher education has dropped over 25 percent, Adams said.
By the year 2002 ,with three strikes initiative percentage of the budget that goes towards prisons will double from 9 percent to 18 percent, while the percentage that goes towards higher education will go from 12.3 percent to zero, Adams said.
The second bill, Senate Bill 1301 focuses on a Campus Closure Commission, Adams said.
The Campus Closure Commission is patterned after the federal government's military base closure committee, Adams said.
If S.B. 1301 is approved, the commission would decide which universities should be shut down when a new prison is built if need be, Adams said.
Petris wants the public to know that if a new prison is opened, a campus will have to close, Adams said.
"When people talk about fee increases from this day forward, (students) are actually paying for prisons, not higher education," Adams said, "because the money for prisons comes out of higher education."
Adams said that the government will probably have to build a minimum of 15 new prisons in the next five years because of three strikes, which would mean that there would have to be two to three prisons built every year, which has never been done.
California currently has 28 prisons, and only had 12 back in 1980, Adams said.
Adams said he doesn't believe that there is a possibility of classes being cut because there will be no loss of revenue to the Cal State University system, he said.
The California State Student Association is a strong supporter of Senate bill 1300, Christina Harper, legislative director of CSSA said.
There have been a lot of broken promise made by the government, Harper said. These promises include going over a 10 percent fee cap, which limits the amount student fees can be raised, she said.
Another broken promise has to do with the 1992 California Budget, which stated that student fees would go back to the fees of 1991 by the 1995-1996 school year, Harper said.
Adams confirmed that statement, but said he was not sure if there was a loophole.
"Fee increases were seen as temporary at the time," Harper said, adding that it is hard to take away funding.
Forty-thousand students have dropped out since 1991, Harper said. A large impact of why students have dropped out of school is because of fee increases, she said.
Harper also said that one out of every five students who are eligible for a Cal Grant actually receive one.
"CSSA believes that the bill is a step in the access of higher education," Harper said. "It is a step in direction to amend broken promises."