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The newly reconstituted Peralta Board of Trustees faces an old controversy—facilities bond money spending—when it meets for the first time in the new year tonight (Tuesday) in the library of the College of Alameda. But one of the trustees who helped delay close to $15 million in Measure A material and equipment requests during a contentious December board meeting believes that the matter will now go more smoothly this time around. 

“We’re making improvement in the process,” Trustee Nicky Gonzalez Yuen said in a telephone interview this week. “It’s just going to take us a while to get on track” with what the trustee called “proper planning and documentation of spending requests.” 

District voters approved the $390 million Measure A bond last June. 

On Tuesday night, trustees are being asked to approve $14.8 million in Measure A money spread out among the district’s four colleges and “for the procurement of instructional equipment, furniture, computers, ADA-compliant equipment, and library materials.” 

Tuesday’s request is some $1.2 million less than was requested last December, with the significant reduction coming from Berkeley City College’s request (now down to $700,000 from the $1.6 million requested last month). All of the other college requests have been slightly reduced except for Merritt College, which slightly increased its request by $1,600 to $5.3 million. 

When the four college presidents and district administrators put in their request for $21 million in Measure A equipment money last December, trustees turned down all but $5 million of the request on a 4-3 vote, with trustees on the prevailing side requesting more documentation before releasing the remaining money. The issue sparked one of the sharpest trustee meeting debates of the year, with Marcie Hodge accusing fellow trustees of “micro-managing,” Laney College Faculty Senate President Shirley Coaston saying that faculty members at her college “have cynicism about how this money is going to be spent,” and both Hodge and trustee Linda Handy walking out of the meeting before it ended. 

Hodge, Handy, and Bill Riley supported allocating the full $21 million, while Yuen, Cy Gulassa, and newly installed board president Bill Withrow supported the motion to send back the remaining $16 million for further documentation. The swing vote in the decision was provided by Abel Guillen, who defeated two-term incumbent trustee Alona Clifton in last November’s elections. 

Yuen, who recently replaced Riley as head of the board’s Facilities And Land Use Planning Committee, now downplays the controversy. 

Referring to the 73 pages of staff-generated backup documents that he had cited as “inadequate” last December, Yuen said this week that he believed it was “nobody’s intention to deceive or hide the expenditures. Staff is overworked, and they’re perpetually trying to catch up. They’re busy plugging all of the leaks in the system, so when you ask them for documentation and information, they often simply don’t have time for it.” Yuen also said that district staff may also have been reacting to past district policies where extensive reports and recommendations were written, but then shelved. “There’s a reticence to working on new reports when staff members think those are going to be ignored, as well,” Yuen said. 

Yuen, who was a persistent critic of the way Peralta spent the Measure E construction bond money that preceded the Measure A facilities bond, and who criticized the Measure A project list as “a slush fund” when it was approved by trustees last February for placement on the ballot, says while he doesn’t “want to hold up bond money spending for immediate and critical needs, I don’t want us to do a whole lot of spending until we develop a proper spending plan integrated with an overall policy plan.” 

The district has been working on an Educational Master Plan which Yuen says is expected to come before trustees sometime in the fall, and is expected to guide the overall development of the district. Trustees and district officials hope to that the Educational Master Plan process will turn debate within the district from financial affairs and various controversies to setting educational goals for the district. 

“Once that plan is in place,” Yuen said, “the board can begin setting bond spending priorities that are tied to the district’s strategic goals, rather than simply coming to us as individual expenditure requests.” 

Meanwhile, glitches in the public information process continue to plague Peralta. Backup materials for the request were not included in the regular trustee meeting agenda packet mailed out to reporters prior to the meeting. A memorandum on the Measure A request signed by Peralta Vice Chancellor for General Services Sadiq Ikharo noted that “detailed backup information to this report is available at the Peralta website. Though “Measure A Instructional & Furniture Needs Allocations 2006-2007” appears on a link from Peralta’s General Services Department webpage, no documents were available online as of Monday afternoon. 

A list of Measure A bond projects was pulled from the General Services website last year after the Daily Planet reported significant discrepancies in the list. Peralta trustee meetings are currently being held in colleges throughout the district while the district’s boardroom is undergoing extensive renovation work.