Junior college presidents don’t get raises

Deirdre Newman

The Coast Community College District Board of Trustees succumbed

to intense pressure from the teachers’ union Wednesday night and

decided to pull a proposed 14% raise for seven top administrators

from its agenda.

Union President Tina Bruning raised concerns earlier in the week

that the raise was badly timed with the state’s budget crisis and

would violate the public trust after a $370-million facilities

improvement bond was passed last month.

The trustees agreed, unanimously voting to pull the raise from the

consent calendar, a list of items automatically approved as a whole

without public comment.

The board did approve a 5% raise for itself Wednesday over the

objection of Carol Burke, OCC’s president of the academic senate.

Trustee Walt Howald, in one of his last acts as president, said

the administrators’ raise should be removed because the trustees

didn’t have enough information on how their district would be

affected by the mid-year budget cuts. On Friday, Gov. Gray Davis

proposed slashing $215 million statewide from the community college

system.

Bruning breathed a sigh of relief, but she wasn’t finished.

“It means in the short run, they’re not giving raises, but we have

to watch them like a hawk, so they don’t give raises [in the future]

at the expense of students and classes,” Bruning said.

The raises would have benefited the district’s three college

presidents, three vice chancellors and the president of KOCE-TV. The

proposal came after a 3% cost-of-living adjustment given to all

district employees earlier this year.

Vice chancellor John Renley, who with other administrators

proposed the increase, said the raises would be primarily necessary

to find high-caliber candidates for the college presidencies.

The district is having trouble finding a replacement for Margaret

Gratton, the Orange Coast College president who left earlier this

year. The position is being filled by interim president Gene Ferrell.

Renley said administrators had discussed their low salaries for a

while, but it took on new urgency last year when the district began

searching for a president not only for OCC, but Coastline College.

The latter position was filled, but the new president took a pay cut.

For the college presidents and vice chancellors, the annual salary

starts at about $127,000, Renley said. The raise would increase that

figure to about $145,000.

Renley said the vice chancellors also deserve the raise because

they perform responsibilities similar to the president.

Bruning began voicing the union’s concerns last week.

On Wednesday, she received verbal assurances from Chancellor Bill

Vega and trustees Jerry Patterson and Howald that they would remove

the raises from the agenda.

She said the difficulty finding quality candidates for the OCC

presidency is because the trustees started the search process late,

not because of the salary.

After the vote to remove the administrators’ raises from the

consent calendar, Tamar Goldmann, a literature and language teacher

at OCC, pointed out that the $60,000 that would be saved could fund

five freshman composition courses in the spring.

* DEIRDRE NEWMAN covers education. She may be reached at (949)

574-4221 or by e-mail at deirdre.newman@latimes.com.