Bustamante Urges Speedup on Plans for UC Campus

Assembly Speaker Cruz Bustamante on Wednesday urged the University of California regents to jump-start “stalled” plans to build a UC campus in the San Joaquin Valley, calling it one of his top priorities.

Bustamante, a Democrat from Fresno, said he made the unusual trip to the regents’ meeting to show his determination for a new campus in a region where high school graduates attend UC schools at less than half the statewide rate of 7%.

Bustamante already has formed an Assembly select committee to focus on the issue and appointed fellow Central Valley Assemblyman Dennis Cardoza (D-Merced) as its chairman. He brought Cardoza with him from Sacramento to introduce him to the regents.

“Coming here was just the opening salvo,” Bustamante said after his brief pitch before the regents. “Today was a softball, a slow pitch, so hopefully they will respond.”

The speaker said he also has held “fairly aggressive meetings” with UC President Richard C. Atkinson and his staff. As a result, Atkinson has directed his planners to pin down the costs of accelerating construction for a new campus on the 2,000-acre site, about six miles northeast of Merced, selected by the regents in 1995.

Under the current timetable, UC administrators do not plan to open the campus--dubbed UC San Joaquin--until 2005.

“For the past couple of years, it has been in a holding pattern,” Bustamante said. “We are going to get out of the holding pattern. . . . Sometimes you have to put your finger in someone’s chest to get their attention.”

Like the governor, the Assembly speaker is an ex-officio member of the Board of Regents. But it is rare for either to attend its meetings.

The last appearance by either was in 1995, when Speaker Willie Brown and Gov. Pete Wilson joined the debate over affirmative action in admissions.

“His message came through loud and clear,” said UC Regent Roy T. Brophy. “What he’s saying to us is that he intends to give us legislative support for the money to build a new campus.”

The nine-campus UC system has not built a campus since 1965, when it added UC Santa Cruz and UC Irvine.

UC administrators have been under pressure for more than a decade to build one in the San Joaquin Valley, where community leaders battling double-digit unemployment view a campus as a spur to economic renewal.

“We’ve got a brain drain in the valley,” Cardoza said. “The young people have to leave to go to school and get settled in other areas. If we are going to turn around our high unemployment rates, it is very important that we keep the best and brightest in the valley.”

Atkinson said he sees the campus as “absolutely necessary” to accommodate the anticipated surge of students between 2005 and 2010 when many children of baby boomers reach college age.

But in the interim, he said, the university system should focus on completing expansion plans at UC Riverside and UC Santa Cruz before adding a costly new campus. Preliminary estimates put the price at $600 million for a campus for 5,000 students. About half that money would have to come from the state.

Atkinson said he directed his staff to revisit the campus plans and come up with specific dollar figures that Bustamante could take to the Legislature.

Bustamante, who will be forced from the Assembly in two years because of term limits, said he realizes he will not be able to get funding in that time. But he said he wants to push the campus now so it will gain momentum.

“I have a 4-year-old daughter,” the speaker told the regents. “I sure would like her to attend a UC campus in the valley. I don’t think that’s impossible. I think that gives you plenty of time.”