June 14, 2012

The Legislature is still on track to approve the state budget on a partisan vote tomorrow, although the differences between the Democratic leaders and the governor have yet to be reconciled.

For community colleges, there are a couple of differences to the budget approved by the Senate Budget Committee on Tuesday:

• If the tax measure passes, the deferral buy-down would be only $213 million (rather than the $313 million).
• If the tax measure does not pass, the "trigger cut" would be increased to $338 million (rather than $286.5 million.

These two changes overnight were after a recalculation of the proceeds of the tax measure and distribution of resources between K-12 and community colleges. Obviously, this is very disappointing news, and would increase the workload reduction if the tax measure fails to about 7.5%.

The good news is that we have received full backfill guarantee on both the current and budget year proceeds of redevelopment agency wind down.

I have updated the e-mail sent out Tuesday night with these new figures.

We'll be updating the scenarios on the website after the budget is adopted, and will post developments leading up to the budget's passage on the League's twitter stream.

Sincerely,

Scott Lay
President and Chief Executive Officer, The League
Orange Coast College '94