Villaraigosa Wants to Increase Urban Schools’ Share of Bond

SACRAMENTO — State Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa on Tuesday called for changes to a $9.2-billion school construction bond approved by voters in 1998 so that urban districts can receive more of the money.

He has introduced legislation that would make it easier for schools to use the money to clean up toxic sites for new campuses and to replace single-story schools with multistory buildings.

Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), a mayoral candidate, supports the Los Angeles school board’s recent decision to abandon construction of the Belmont Learning Complex due to environmental concerns. But he said that state leaders must find new ways to address classroom shortages and that the school bond, which he spearheaded and considers his top accomplishment as speaker, is not helping as much as he wanted.

More than one-third of the bond has yet to be spent, a situation Villaraigosa attributes to the problems city districts have had tapping the money--including lack of available sites. He hopes to change that by amending the 1998 law that makes the bond money available to school districts.

“Los Angeles has a real difficult time accessing this money,” Villaraigosa said. “But [the bill] is not for L.A. only. It’s for San Francisco and San Diego and Anaheim and San Jose. This is a comprehensive act that begins to make it easier to build schools in urban environments.”

Currently, school districts can expand upward, but can receive the bond money to pay for only a portion of that construction. Villaraigosa’s bill, AB 1743, would allow more of the bond money to be used for such projects.

The bond called for school districts and the state to split construction costs 50-50, and part of it was set aside as “hardship money” for districts unable to match the state funds or with other special problems. With the new legislation, Villaraigosa seeks to add environmentally tainted real estate to the “hardship” list.

And the bill would create an “urban option” to accelerate the construction of city schools by allowing the state to purchase all the land for a new school site. That would jump-start construction, and the two sides could split overall costs later, Villaraigosa said.

The Los Angeles Unified School District supports the bill, said board member David Tokofsky.

“This grows out of the hardships we have found ourselves in, and the situation Antonio finds himself in for being the author of this bond,” he said. “He brought the bacon home, but we have been unable to get our bite.”

By changing the definition of how the bond money can be mined to favor cities, Villaraigosa and some education leaders conceded that he is bound to raise the ire of rural lawmakers and school districts.

“That could be a problem, I am not going to avoid the issue,” said Wayne Johnson, president of the California Teachers Assn, a powerful union that supports the bill. “But the urban school districts enroll 70% of the kids. We are not abandoning the rural districts here. The crying needs of urban districts are so bad, I think this will not be seen as some sneaky attempt.”

Nevertheless, Villaraigosa said he had no qualms about changing the rules after the public has voted on the bond.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “Voters in Los Angeles and other urban areas voted for this bond because they thought they could access it. Due to a lot of constraints, that’s not really happening, so we need to make some changes.”