Dan Troy, California Vice Chancellor for Finance. (Source: Community College Chancellor's website).

Dan Troy

Celebrate might be too strong a word, but, in the electric current fiscal context, community colleges accept reason to at least raise a modest drinking glass as they caput into summertime.

The upkeep bill passed Friday by the Legislature brings the upkeep for the 112 community colleges upwards to $half dozen billion for the 2013-fourteen financial year. That'south up by more than $200 million over this twelvemonth, and begins the process of restoring the $809 meg hit community college accept taken during the past three years.

The 2 large-ticket items include funding to start bringing back students and a price-of-living increase. The budget provides an boosted $89.4 million to rebuild enrollment. That will fund about 40,000 additional students; nevertheless, it nonetheless accounts for less than 10 percent of the 470,000 students customs higher officials said the system lost during the bad years.

There'south also $87.v million COLA increase, about 1.57 percentage, the kickoff since 2007, said Dan Troy, Vice Chancellor for Finance at the statewide customs college office. How the COLA is distributed is upwards to each community higher district. While some of it volition go into salary negotiations for professors and staff, information technology will also help cover the rise costs of everything from the electric bill to supplies.

Other budget increases include:

  • $50 million to implement the Student Success Act of 2012, which includes counseling and advising services, orientation for every student, and helping each student blueprint an didactics programme with a path to a degree or certificate or to transfer to a four-year college.
  •  $47 1000000 to implement Proposition 39, the November election initiative that creates a fund for energy efficient projects. Instead of allocating that money based on the number of students in each customs college commune, the budget beak lets the Chancellor'due south office make up one's mind which projects to fund. Troy said they'll probably exercise that through a grant program and classes to train the workers who will exist needed to piece of work on those construction projects.
  • $30 one thousand thousand toward the $i billion needed for deferred maintenance on the campuses, plus new books, lab equipment and engineering to modernize classrooms.

"Information applied science improves exponentially every year," Troy said, "and as much as colleges are trying to keep up with those changes, it can be difficult when y'all don't have specific line items in the upkeep to do that."

One budget item that declined between Gov. Brown's May revise and the trailer bill is the amount put into paying downward deferrals, the coin borrowed from hereafter years' community college budgets to help cover deficits during the recession. Brown proposed paying off $64 meg in 2013-14, but the Legislature reduced it to $30 million.  But the  rationale is a good i, Troy said.  Lawmakers are putting the residue of the money into student services for disabled, low-income and at-chance students; those services had been seriously diminished in recent years. Before Proposition 30, which raises temporary taxes to pay for teaching, the community college higher deferral was $961 1000000; the deferral will fall to just under $600 million next year.

Overall, Troy said customs college officials are pleased with the upkeep, which raised the per-student circulation to $4,637, up from $four,565. Despite the increment, funding hasn't been keeping footstep with needs, Troy said.

"I think I can say we've been going in the wrong management in recent years, and not just take we not kept step with the cost of inflation, we've gone backwards," Troy said.

The new budget, he said, not only boosts the number of students community colleges tin educate, but besides helps restore the quality of that educational activity.

The upkeep now awaits Gov. Jerry Brown's approval.

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