Publications

Spring 2004 Newsletter

Hertzberg On California's $25 Billion State School Bonds

Long a champion of smart infrastructure investment and, in particular, the need for adequate and equitable K-12 and University school facilities funding, Robert Hertzberg authored California's recent school bond ballot measures. The first bond for $13 billion, passed in 2002. The other, for $12.3 billion, was approved this March. Responding to NSBN, Hertzberg included $100 million in joint-use funds in the state school bonds -$50 million in each of the two ballot measures. We are therefore pleased to present this interview with Assembly Speaker Emeritus Hertzberg, in which he addresses the pressing need for new school facilities, as well as the challenges faced by advocates of building joint-use schools designed to serve as the vital centers of their neighborhood.

Bob, as the state's legislative author of California's now voter approved $25 billion school facilities bonds, elaborate on the bond's need and the approach to school facilities planning that you have advanced through the bond's provisions.

The bond addresses two key needs: first, there's obviously a tremendous need to build schools in California, with the growth that we've had in the student population and the fact that most of our existing schools were built before World War II. Less obvious is the need for a new model for school construction: one built around the vision of joint use, around the development of schools as integrated parts of their communities, around the co-location of child care centers, health clinics, libraries and the like. I think community-centered schools are the future of California, and the part of the bond I'm most proud of is the inclusion of $100 million, $50 million in each traunch of the budget, dedicated to joint-use planning and construction. I'm trying to promote the concept in local school bonds, in Los Angeles and throughout the state--it's an important priority for school facilities and a great way to maximize the impact that new schools have on their communities.

You were in the legislative trenches trying to write a new vision into the largest state school bond ever approved. Highlight the challenges faced when a legislator tries to change the school facility funding and policy paradigm?

Extraordinary. You'd think that from a common sense standpoint, it would be simple, but it's not simple at all. Everybody's got this silo-like approach, where all of the rules are written based upon the current structure. These entrenched bureaucracies are experts at protecting their turf, and experts at not doing anything new. Working with them to plan collaboratively is just gigantically difficult, and so much harder than anybody coming in from the outside could imagine. It's very, very difficult to inject new ideas into the process and move the gigantic bureaucracy--it's very difficult, but necessary, and we can't accept "no" for an answer.

Well let's just take it one step further. You've been fully engaged in the First 5 LA's Countywide $600 million effort to advance the concept of universal pre-K for 4 year-olds. Talk about that initiative and how it might relate, or could relate to the state school bond on the March ballot and to the matching local school facility bonds which are on the same or future ballots.

I've been working with Nancy Riordan and the other members of the First 5 LA UPK Advisory Committee to try and craft a preschool system for the County. I think there's a perfect marriage between the initiative for universal preschool and the joint-use idea of co-locating facilities on school sites. It's a perfect example of the advantages of joint use. What could make more sense than co-locating where you've got existing facilities, co-locating a pre-school facility with an elementary or a high school? You might have kids at school who have their own children or parents who have children in elementary and pre-school. How beneficial would it be for these uses to be co-located at one facility? It is exactly the way we should be organizing these governmental institutions to work together and maximize the effect they have on people's lives.

Bob, you were also on the board of MALDEF, and MALDEF has been very active on the education facilities issues in California, and very interested in the health care challenges, noting that the largest epidemic among Hispanic youth in California is diabetes and obesity. What does that have to do with this facilities bond and the issues you've been addressing in this interview?

I think that we're all on the same page. We want to co-locate facilities so that it's easy for parents to take their children after or before school to a doctor, and make sure that during school, children of whatever background can have access to health care. We should make sure they can sign up for the Healthy Families program and have the Healthy Families facility at the school.
We want to co-locate schools with open space, to make sure that children have access to recreational areas and exercise. We want to build new schools, integrated into their communities, that reduce or eliminate the need for busing and make it possible for kids to walk to their neighborhood school.
We can also design computer learning centers that engage both children and their parents on the school campus. We live in a society where all of us continually have to engage in life-long learning--with the right planning and investment, we can make neighborhood schools resources for adults as well as kids.
We just have to fundamentally change the paradigm of how we view the school site. It is just, in my judgement, not thoughtful or good policy to build a school that is sitting in the middle of a neighborhood, and at 3 o'clock lock up the doors and deny the community the benefit of that facility. There are so many overlapping opportunities to increase schools' impact, and health care is one of the big ones.

You were Speaker, and you are an expert on what incentivizes and disincentivizes collaboration. Explain to us what we have to overcome to break out of the silos – to have the housing and library and health care dollars merge with and take advantage of the school facilities dollars. What are the real lessons here that have to be applied?

The real lessons are that: (a) We have to make the commitment to have the money available for joint-use projects; (b) We need to establish a system so we can understand what the best practices are so we can all adapt them; (c) We need to establish processes where we sit down with all the various players--whether it's the library people, the health care people, the universal pre-school people, the school district people and so on--and collaborate on a plan rather than have each group in their own little silos. I think that's got to be real, and it's got to be dramatic, and nobody gets a dollar unless that process gets approved by all players in order to put it together. That's how you've got to do it.

There seems to be a virtual line of demarcation that never is crossed separating local government from school boards and school districts. Neither testifies about the other's bills, neither works in the Capitol to collaborate about funding. What can be done to change that dynamic, given that the public relies on both for services?

In California, we're exponentially larger than most states and school districts. We therefore need even more cross involvement between municipal governments and schools so that both sides understand how the other works and how the projects the schools are pursing affects the city, and vice versa. We need to pull together all of these jurisdictions and develop the leadership for people to work together--just literally make collaboration a top priority. Because if we don't, we're going to continue to move in a direction where everybody's singing their own song, but the tax-paying public hears an orchestra which is out of tune.

Bob, lastly, many have commented over the last few years about the absence of any true public planning at the local level – that we've stripped our city planning departments of their capacity to give communities/neighborhoods the chance to be the architects of their own future. In these times of fiscal constraint, ought we expect much public planning, or should we just learn to live without the prospect of thoughful integration of uses?

I think it's all attitude. I joined the board of Century Housing because even though they are a non-profit dedicated to creating affordable housing, they understand that housing is only one component of the solution. When I was in the Legislature, I saw that there were all the separate pots of money, and everybody was an expert in their pot but not an expert about the whole. I was able to work on hundreds of different areas at once, and help bring it all together.
The same approach can work for planning: as we promote a collaborative approach and encourage the many, many groups investing in communities out of their silos, we can dramatically increase our planning capacity. It's imperative that we combine the library funds with health care funds and matching federal dollars, and we combine the education dollars with the universal pre-school dollars that are coming down. As we bring everyone to the table and work together, we'll find new ways of maximizing our impact in communities--there are all sorts of ways to be successful with the leadership to think and work holistically and to take off our blinders.