Democrats Take Stand on Colleges

SACRAMENTO —  Determined to score at least a modest victory as lawmakers begin hammering out a final state budget, majority Democrats think they have a winner in higher education.

On Wednesday, top Assembly Democrats vowed to reject any budget that denied thousands of qualified students admission to public universities. It marked the first time the leadership had taken such an unequivocal stand since the governor unveiled his revised spending plan earlier this month.

“This is going to be priority No. 1,” Assembly Budget Committee Chairman Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said at a news conference.

Higher education is among a few issues on which Democrats think they can beat the governor. They believe they can do it without holding up the budget process past the July 1 start of the 2004-05 fiscal year. Polls show that chronically late budgets have angered voters, which in part led them to oust Gov. Gray Davis from office last year.

Democrats, who hold a majority in both houses, say the math is on their side. For only a few hundred million dollars -- what they call a relative “drop in the bucket” for a state with a $103-billion budget -- the University of California and California State University systems could reopen their doors to the thousands of qualified students recently redirected to community colleges as a result of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget cuts.

The strategy of staking out a few hot-button issues on which to make a stand -- as opposed to rejecting the bulk of the governor’s cuts, demanding new taxes and appearing obstructionist -- is emerging as lawmakers ready for a week of budget hearings. Democrats also are preparing to block some deep cuts to social services and welfare programs.

Next week’s hearings will be complemented by a marathon of backroom negotiations between the administration and legislators that probably will go on until a budget is approved.

“The governor knows what our priorities are, and I think he knows where we are headed,” said Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles).

Administration officials say the lawmakers’ arguments are disingenuous. They point out that many of the Democrats now rallying around college students voted to freeze enrollment in the system last year, as well as to impose tuition increases totaling 40% over two years.

“Are they suddenly having a case of freezer’s remorse?” asked H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the Department of Finance. Palmer said Schwarzenegger had no plans to back off his higher education proposal.

In recent weeks, the governor has won victory upon victory in his march to sign a budget on time, without new taxes. Schwarzenegger did it by negotiating a series of side deals with school groups, city and county officials and others in which they agreed to accept cuts now in return for protection later.

His success even forced Steinberg to concede Wednesday that “new taxes are off the table.”

But Democratic leaders believe that the governor went too far in his most recent deal -- with administrators of the UC and Cal State systems. The agreement calls for deep cuts this year, including turning away about 7,000 qualified students, in return for a commitment to modest funding increases in future years. A 14% tuition hike for undergraduates, and increases of up to 25% for graduate students, are included in the deal.

For UC, this year would mark the first time in four decades that the system had been forced to deny admission to academically qualified, in-state freshmen.

UC officials said that if the cuts were restored, the system could accommodate the qualified students who face being turned away in the fall. At Cal State, however, students still might have to wait until January to enroll to allow the campuses enough time to add faculty and classroom space, according to officials there.

Some of those students -- and even one parent -- stood with Nunez and other Democrats as the lawmakers announced at the news conference that they would take on the governor.

“I was devastated to know I had been rejected,” said Erin Yee, a Sacramento high school student with a 3.5 grade point average who received letters from UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC Irvine saying that she was qualified but that there was no immediate room for her.

Said Yee’s mother, Susan: “She’s disappointed. I am also disappointed.... We are going to fight very hard.”

Palmer reminded Democrats, however, that the university administrators who signed on to the deal with the governor said they did so because nobody else could guarantee them future funding increases.

“The notion that the heads of these systems or Gov. Schwarzenegger would sign on to a pact that would damage higher education over the long haul is laughable,” he said. “Those gentlemen recognize the depth of the fiscal crisis the governor inherited. They want to be partners in helping us get our budget in balance.”

But the governor has staked his reputation on passing a budget before the start of the new fiscal year. And doing so might require him to give a little -- as he did to meet deadlines in closing big deals with legislative Democrats on a balanced-budget amendment and workers’ compensation reform.

At a state Republican Party fundraiser Monday in Los Angeles, the governor left himself little room to get bogged down in a budget standoff.

“People will accept nothing less than a responsible, on-time budget. This is a big deal for me, let me tell you,” he said. “This is a big deal for me, because missing the constitutional deadline became a symbol of the partisan rancor and the paralysis in Sacramento. The people are tired of the failure by the politicians and the failure of Sacramento. And for me, failure is no option.”

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Times staff writer Rebecca Trounson contributed to this report.