Features

Peralta Candidates Get Facts Wrong on Key Issues

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday October 24, 2006

With two weeks to go in the hotly contested Area 7 Peralta Trustee race, two predominant issues have emerged. 

The first is over procedures and priorities for spending the Peralta Community College District’s recently passed Measure A facilities bond. The second is over the aborted proposal by Oakland developer Alan Dones to put together a development plan for Peralta administration and certain Laney College lands. 

In both of these issues, both two-term incumbent Alona Clifton and her challenger, Abel Guillen, appear to have gotten significant facts wrong. 

The West Oakland/North Oakland-based area 7 also includes the Lake Merritt and Chinatown areas, as well as small portions extending into East Oakland to 14th Avenue. Laney College is the only Peralta college within its boundaries. 

Last June, area voters overwhelmingly passed Peralta’s facilities bond Measure A, giving the district authority to issue $390 million in bonds to construct and upgrade facilities at the district’s four colleges, as well as the district’s project at the Alameda Air Facility, the district headquarters and districtwide services and projects. 

At candidate forums at Laney College and at Oakland City Hall earlier this month, Guillen questioned how that bond money will be spent, and said that the community and Peralta staff and students should be brought in to set priorities. 

At the Oct. 17 Laney College candidates forum, where questions came directly from an audience made up primarily of Laney faculty, staff, and students, Guillen said that Peralta “doesn’t have a plan for the spending of that bond money, just a laundry list of projects.” He added that even though the district is in the process of setting up an oversight committee to oversee the spending of the Measure A monies, “the oversight committee doesn’t have the power it should have. It doesn’t set priorities. I want to involve students to decide where that money goes.” 

At the Oct. 13 League of Women Voters forum at Oakland City Hall, where questions were screened by the League leadership, Guillen was more specific, saying that “before we spend that [Measure A bond] money I want to conduct an open community process where we invite alumni, students, staff, and community members to ask them what is their vision for the community college district and let them have some input into the decision-making of how we spend that $390 million.” 

In fact, other than deciding which projects go first, neither the Peralta Board of Trustees, the chancellor’s office, or the Measure A Oversight Committee has any discretion in deciding where the Measure A bond money is spent. 

Unlike past Peralta bond measures, Measure A was passed under the authority of California’s Proposition 39, passed by voters in 2000, which requires that projects using the bond money be limited to those projects listed in the ballot language and approved by voters. 

And, in fact, as it appeared on the June ballot, Peralta’s Measure A listed the projects for which the bond money must be spent. In addition, Proposition 39 sets up the state requirements for oversight committees for bond measures, like Measure A, set up under its authority, limiting them to reviewing actions approved or taken by the district trustees or administration, and charged only with making sure that the bond money spent is in conformance with the projects listed on the ballot. Based on the Proposition 39 guidelines, the seven-member Measure A Committee will consist of one representative apiece of local business, senior citizens, and taxpayers organizations, one enrolled student, one individual active in an organization supporting the community college district, and two members selected at-large. All of the members will be recommended by the chancellor and approved by the trustees. 

But despite the fact that she voted along with other trustees to approve the Measure A projects before they were put on the June ballot, Clifton appeared unaware at the Laney forum how the bond projects had been divided. 

After Laney students and faculty members asked repeated questions indicating they felt Laney had been shortchanged in Peralta’s facilities budget, Clifton gave the impression that the Measure A bond money had to be spread evenly across the district’s four colleges. 

“We have to work on the basis of an economy of scale,” Clifton said. “The board has the responsibility of making sure that all colleges operate at the same level. I appreciate the fact that Laney wants the lion’s share, but we have to have equity in our spending practices. We have to work on behalf of all of the colleges.” 

In fact, Laney is scheduled to get the lion’s share of the Measure A bond expenditures. 

Last summer, in a list of $518.6 million in Measure A projected capital improvement projects (the figure included the $390 Measure A bond money plus matching state and federal funds), the district noted that 44.5 percent of the amount ($234.9 million) would go towards Laney building renovation and modernization projects, including $22 million for the Administration Building, $22 million for the college library, $22 million for the student center, $15 million for the college theater, and expenditures between $15 million and $27 million for the college’s A, B, F and G buildings. 

Berkeley City College, on the other hand, will get less than 1 percent of Measure A facilities funds, with Merritt and the College of Alameda getting 28.2 percent and 16.5 percent, respectively. 

During the campaign for Measure A last June, Peralta Chief Financial Office Tom Smith justified the project expenditures, saying that Berkeley City College (formerly Vista College) had taken the bulk of Peralta’s previous construction bond money in the building of the college’s new downtown facilities, and that Laney had the district’s oldest facilities, with the greatest need for renovation. 

Peralta has spread the bond measure money evenly in its first round of expenditures, scheduling roughly $50 million apiece for projects at Laney, Merritt, and the College of Alameda in its recently-released five-year construction plan. That money includes funds still left over from Measure E, the construction bond measure passed by local voters in 2000 under the pre-Proposition 39 bond allocation rules. 

In both the League of Women Voters and Laney College debates, challenger Guillen said it was the proposed 2004-05 Alan Dones deal that first gave him the idea of running for the trustee board against Clifton. 

“The reason I got involved in this election was that I was opposed to the sale of nine acres of land by the Peralta Colleges,” he said at both candidate forums. 

The reference was to the controversial exclusive negotiating agreement with Oakland developer Alan Dones, which was authorized by the board of trustees in November of 2004 and that was voluntarily withdrawn by Dones himself in May in 2005 of the next year after intense media criticism and heavy lobbying against the proposal by Laney faculty and students. 

The Dones proposal, however, never spelled out the sale of any Peralta administrative or Laney College property, but only involved authorizing Dones to present a proposal for the development of that property. Both the board and the office of Chancellor Elihu Harris reserved the right to approve or disapprove the actual development proposal, which was never produced by Dones. 

“In the eight years I have been on the board, there has never been a proposal before the board to sell any educational land,” Clifton said at the League of Women Voters forum. “The proposal was only for district administrative land and for the [Laney College] parking lot next to [the Peralta administrative headquarters].” 

However, although Dones eventually indicated that he was only interested in preparing a development proposal for the lands that Clifton indicated, the original November 2004 agreement—for which Clifton voted—was ambiguous about which Laney lands it referred to, and Dones himself offered various interpretations at various times. At the November 2004 board meeting he indicated that he would prepare a proposal for the development of the Laney College athletic fields, but after fierce opposition emerged to that idea, Dones backed off, saying that he had been misinterpreted, and only wanted to ehance the athletic field land for athletic uses. Under the authority of the exclusive negotiating agreement, Dones met with Laney college faculty, staff, and students in February of 2005, urging them at one point to call for the delay of the pending construction of the Laney Art Annex so that the land could be included in Dones’ development plans. Laney representatives present at that meeting refused to call for such a delay, and the Art Annex was eventually built, completed in the summer of 2006. 

For his part, at the League of Women Voters debate, challenger Guillen criticized the board procedure under which the Dones contract negotiations were originally authorized. The item had been on the agenda as an information item, which would not have resulted in action, but trustees voted at the November 2004 meeting to move it to an action item and immediately voted to approve the Dones negotiation agreement. 

Clifton defended that decision, saying that it had been “passed under the rules of the board [that were in existence] at that time.” 

Guillen said that if elected, he “won’t be a proponent of switching an informational item to an action item where the public didn’t even know they had the chance of coming to speak on an item. That’s the policy of the board. I would change that policy.” 

Trustees have already instituted that reform, changing Peralta board meeting policy so that action cannot be taken on information only items.