Dear Editor,
The California State University has been devastated over the past seven years, as we have lost over $500 million from our annual budget. (Oh, you knew that?) It is just SICK-SICK-SICK that the Trustees have voted to support Proposition 1-A, which will freeze this absurdly inadequate budget situation indefinitely.
Now our own president is apparently endorsing 1-A as well, and asking the campus community in a broadly distributed mailing this week to support it because it will "greatly affect students of SSU." Indeed!
Some K-14 educators and even a couple of educator associations (not all) are supporting 1-A, largely because 1-B (which restores some Prop. 98 funding for the current budget cycle) won't be effective without it. This is a very shortsighted and self-serving position for them to take. We all know that K-14 education is under-funded, but that's not the point.
First of all, these propositions are at best short-term fixes.
Second, education should be supported at all levels.
Do K-14 educators really want to see their students graduate successfully and then have no choice but to go to work for Starbucks because universities cannot accept them? Third, Prop 1-A would devastate a great many state programs in health and human services besides education.
I am shocked and dismayed that our own leaders are supporting a ballot proposition that will lock in the disastrous budget of the California State University FOREVER. As a member of the faculty of the California State University I have good reason for opposing 1A. The CSU (the nation's largest public institution of higher learning, and the engine that produces the college graduates our state needs for its economic prosperity) has been devastated by recent budget cuts. Our annual budget has been slashed by over half a billion dollars since 2002 and that has left us way below rock bottom. PROP. 1A WOULD LOCK IN THIS OBSCENELY INADEQUATE BUDGET FOREVER! If it fails, at least we have the prospect that when the State recovers we'll finally begin to get some of our essential funding back.
There's also a provision in 1A for a "rainy day fund," meaning some portion of the State's revenues must be diverted into a fund for use in emergencies. Governor Schwarzenegger talks about the virtues of a "rainy day fund," but for the CSU it's already been raining for seven years and we are well under water.
This is the time to make withdrawals from, not deposits to, a rainy day fund. I agree that such a reserve would be a great idea for the State, especially given that our tax base (since Prop. 13 made property taxation so difficult) is so volatile.
But the time to build a reserve is in flush times, not now when times are so tough. In fact, these are precisely the times that a rainy-day fund is for. So the provision to start a RDF now is another factor in diverting funds away from badly needed State services.
The State has an undeniable Budget Problem, but it also has a clear obligation to fund education (at ALL levels) and other essential government services better than it has. A NO vote on Prop 1-A will send Sacramento a clear message that their proposed Rube Goldberg solution is unacceptable and we expect them to do better.
~Rick Luttmann, Professor
of Mathematics
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