Racial Issues Creep Into Bond Battles

Schools: Tax opponents turn to potentially explosive ballot language in Huntington Beach and Santa Ana

With school bond passage rates soaring statewide, anti-tax activists in Orange County are adopting a new, and potentially divisive, strategy to defeat two November measures.

Bond opponents, in keeping with the county’s strong Libertarian tradition, continue to criticize district administrators for dipping into taxpayer pockets. But for good measure, foes of multimillion-dollar school bond measures in Huntington Beach and Santa Ana are also tossing in critiques of district stances on hot-button racial issues in their ballot pamphlet statements.

Opponents of the Santa Ana Unified School District’s bond proposal are using their ballot statements to blast the district’s policy on bilingual education and the involvement of school board President Nativo Lopez in the Latino rights group Hermandad Mexicana Nacional. In the Huntington Beach Union High School District, more understated complaints against a student transfer policy that considers race mingle with concerns about overspending.

The phenomenon is uniquely Orange County, education watchers agree. Depending on whom you ask, the development can be construed as an appeal to racial prejudices or an outgrowth of pervasive frustration with overtaxation and illegal immigration. Either way, both school districts have successfully sought relief from the courts–getting some phrases deemed irrelevant or unfounded excised from ballot arguments filed by opponents.

Oakland-based bond election consultant Larry Tramutola said it’s very rare for bond opponents to make overt appeals to ethnically sensitive issues such as immigration or bilingual education. A veteran of more than 80 school bond campaigns over the last five years, he can recall only one other instance of the phenomenon, when the Anaheim City School District lost its April 1998 bond race.

“Race is always under the surface the farther south you go in California,” said Tramutola, who is not involved in either Orange County bond campaign. “If you talk about needing new schools, there is always the sentiment, ‘If we didn’t have these kids, or if we sent them back to where they belong, we wouldn’t need these new classrooms.’ It’s always under the surface. What’s rare is when it bubbles to the top.”

The bond opponents in both cities, who are working separately but share the same anti-tax philosophy, say playing to prejudice has no part in their campaigns. They contend that school districts do not deserve more taxpayer cash until they can be more prudent in management of existing funds.

“Taxes are colorblind,” said Timothy R. Whitacre, a real estate consultant and neighborhood activist opposed to Santa Ana’s bond. He says is isn’t worried about offending some people: “It’s going to happen anyway.”

In Huntington Beach, homeowner activist and school-bond opponent Denis Fitzgerald said, “It’s not about race.” The real issue, he said, is the school board’s decision to consider race in student transfers.

“I don’t even bring up race,” he said. “For the school board to say, ‘We have to have racial quotas’–that’s the problem.”

Anaheim Union High School District trustee Harald Martin, now leading an effort to bill foreign governments for the education of illegal immigrants, may have christened the nascent trend in 1998. That’s when he campaigned against an Anaheim elementary school bond, citing concerns about bilingual education.

Martin credits the development to pocketbook issues: Not only are residents concerned about borrowing for new school construction, they also resent paying for enrollment growth they attribute to illegal immigration.

“People are really tired of being taken advantage of,” said Martin, who is not affiliated with opponents of either current bond proposal. “They’re saying: ‘I am no longer going to be the money tree educating the rest of the world.’ “

While the bond campaigns in Santa Ana and Huntington Beach are distinct, the needs in both districts are similar.

Santa Ana’s $ 145-million bond, slated for Nov. 2 consideration, would help build 11 new elementary and two new high schools, add libraries to schools that lack them, decrease class sizes and improve electrical systems.

Bond opponent Whitacre said in his original ballot statement that Santa Ana trustees–specifically Lopez–are “too irresponsible to manage this new tax.” He criticized the board because it allowed parents to waive children out of English-only classes and back into bilingual programs, as allowed under the anti-bilingual education Proposition 227.

“Instead of asking taxpayers for more money to build new schools, we want to see this board set English instruction as a priority,” he wrote in his ballot argument against the bond. A judge later deleted the reference, as well as one to Lopez’s involvement in Hermandad, which was ordered last year to pay back $ 4.3 million in federal adult education funds it could not properly account for. Hermandad officials have long denied any wrongdoing. Lopez did not return calls seeking comment on the ballot statement.

In Huntington Beach, residents will be asked on Nov. 9 to tax themselves $ 123 million over 30 years. In return, the school district pledges to add new classrooms to replace aging portables, mend sinking buildings and cracked foundations, add computer wiring, improve campus security and repair drainage and heating systems.

Huntington Beach bond opponent Fitzgerald, along with his son, originally wrote in their ballot argument that bond money would be diverted “into administrative salaries and . . . perks that have little or no benefit for our students.”

The Fitzgeralds further asserted that bond proponents wanted “racial quotas for student transfers,” a reference to a district policy that considers whether a school is racially segregated before allowing pupils to transfer between campuses. A judge deleted those references as well.

“In Santa Ana you bring up race, in Huntington Beach you bring up race, to detract the voters from the real need for the bonds,” said Santa Ana attorney Mark Rosen, who helped bond proponents get the statements excised from the sample ballot pamphlet. “The courts said you have to focus on the real issues.”

In both districts, bond proponents say their measures ensure that bond money would be well spent by mandating that citizen oversight panels would be formed. Officials say they also would sock away some future revenues to pay for building maintenance.

The bond issues have been endorsed by wide cross-sections of their respective communities, including business groups, parent organizations, teachers unions and elected officials. If the bonds pass, both districts would be in line to receive millions more from the state in matching funds. With that kind of support and the recent history of success in winning voter approval for bond issues, backers of the two measures believe the public will be willing to scrape together a few dollars a month to enhance education.

That has been the case in California, even in tax-averse Orange County, in recent years as the economy had rebounded and attention to public education has intensified. In 1998, 60% of the 118 school bond measures placed on ballots statewide won the necessary two-thirds approval to pass, according to EdSource, a nonprofit, nonpartisan state education monitoring group. The comparable pass rate in the early 1990s was 40%.

Orange County, a school-bond no man’s land for more than two decades, has been home to two successful bond campaigns in the last year: in the Brea Olinda Unified and the Buena Park school districts. Neither of those bond proposals faced formal opposition.

The growing popularity of bonds may well be what is driving this new style of opposition, said Mark Baldassare, a pollster and professor of urban planning at UC Irvine.

What remains to be seen is if voters will be swayed one way or the other by bond opponents in Santa Ana and Huntington Beach, who say they lack the cash to wage extensive campaigns against the measures.

“We’re in a period of time in which, generally speaking, the public has turned very positive about the passage of bonds,” Baldassare said. “In some ways, what you see going on is that the anti-tax people, in the realm of bonds, are being hard-pressed to make their usual arguments about taxes and government waste. So they could be looking for a new wedge issue. Or a new way to use a wedge issue to help defeat bonds.”

Santa Ana school board President John Palacio said he believes voters will focus on facilities needs and set aside other issues.

“The use of children as political pawns is not appropriate,” he said. “Let’s begin to debate the merits of whether Santa Ana needs to build more schools as a way to improve property values, increase academic excellence through class-size reduction and a way to improve the quality of life. I’m not swayed to enter any other debate.”



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