When voters go to the polls next week and consider the merits of Proposition 111, they may be familiar with its gas-tax provisions and with the highway projects that California so desperately needs.
But there is much more to this measure than how to deal with California's transportation problems. It also addresses larger questions affecting California's future, thequality of life its people would enjoy and the prospects for its nationally respected public universities.
California confronts a grave financial dilemma that can be corrected only by voter approval of Proposition 111. The unanticipated effects of three propositions voted by the people over the last 10 years are responsible for the dilemma: Proposition 13 in 1978 shifted substantial funding for public services from local governments to the state; Proposition 4 in 1979 capped state spending according to a formula driven by population increases and the national Consumer Price Index, and Proposition 98 in 1988 locked up an ever-growing percentage of the state budget for schools and community colleges, without respect to the effect on funding for every other state service.
The cumulative effect of these three propositions is to protect some state programs by sacrificing others. Moreover, they leave only a shrinking fraction of the budget for the governor and the Legislature to act on, thus effectively dealing the people's elected officials out of the game. What this means is that programs not enjoying some kind of constitutional or statutory protection, such as the University of California, will be competing for a smaller and smaller share of the state budget every year.
There is no light at the end of this tunnel for unprotected programs, as their share of the state budget loses ground every year to the protected programs. This is occurring at the very time public higher education is seeking to accommodate thousands of additional students as a result of the exceptional population growth that California is experiencing. UC alone expects growth averaging 3,000 to 4,000 students a year between now and the year 2005.
If the state's financial dilemma is not resolved by the enactment of Proposition 111, the alternative is for UC to tailor its size and academic programs to an inexorably shrinking resource base. This would lead, among other things, either to a curtailment of enrollment or to a slow but certain erosion in UC's quality as overcrowded classrooms, inadequate libraries, laboratories and clinics, outdated equipment and lagging faculty and staff salaries take their inevitable toll on the university's excellence.
