AFT 1493 E-News – July 12, 2006
Dear Colleagues,
We want to give you a brief
update on our negotiations with the District and on the State budget.
Negotiations
Due to the fact that the
mediation process requires both parties to keep all discussions confidential,
we unfortunately cannot provide any specific negotiation information at
this time, but we can tell you that an all-day mediation session took place on
June 23 and we made a small amount of progress. Our next meeting is another all-day session on July 31st with the state-appointed
mediator. We know faculty
are looking forward to a resolution and both sides are eager to reach a
satisfactory settlement as soon as possible. (The AFT wanted to meet in early July, soon after the Governor's
budget was signed, but scheduling conflicts and previously-planned
vacations made it impossible.)
State Budget
While progress has been slow
locally, we can report promising news at the state level. Governor
Schwarzenegger signed the 2006-07 State Budget on June
30, including a historic increase in funding for community colleges of $680
million and a student fee reduction to $20 per unit, effective the spring
semester of the 2006-07 academic year. (The full budget is available
online at: http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/.)
While the community college
budget picture was mostly positive, Schwarzenegger vetoed augmented funding for
part-time faculty office hours by $4 million (cut from $11.17 million to $7.17
million) and part-time faculty health insurance by $5 million (cut from $6
million to $1 million.) His veto message said that these funds were
“established to provide incentive grants to districts to increase their
investments in part-time faculty benefits and were not intended to require
additional state contributions. Given the significant increases in
general purpose funding in this budget, districts have more than adequate
resources to support these programs at local discretion.” We hope our
District will use their “more than adequate resources” to properly fund our
part-time faculty programs.
We will send out another
E-News message as soon as we have more information to report.
In unity,
Ernie Rodriguez
AFT 1493
President
and
the AFT 1493 Negotiating Team:
Joaquin Rivera, Katharine Harer and Victoria Clinton