Schools
Negotiations on Joint Powers Agreement Off to Slow Start
There is little movement so far in reaching a consensus on how much money the city will give to schools in the 2012-13 school year.
Talks between the City Council and the Beverly Hills Unified School District to renew the Joint Powers Agreement (JPA) have gotten off to a slow start.
Mayor Barry Brucker and Vice Mayor Willie Brien met with BHUSD Board of Education President Lisa Korbatov and Vice President Brian Goldberg last week for a city/school liaison meeting in which the JPA was topic one of the agenda. The JPA is a long-term agreement in which the city pays the district for access to school facilities, and it provides almost 20 percent of BHUSD’s current $52 million budget.
As Patch readers know, and a have resulted in a $2 million shortfall for BHUSD’s 2011-12 school year. The Beverly Hills Education Foundation and the district are in the midst of a to try to prevent teacher layoffs.
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The current JPA expires July 1, 2012, but BHUSD asked the city to begin negotiations because the district must provide the Los Angeles County Office of Education with budget projections for the next three years. BHUSD is expected to file this information with LACOE in June.
“There is no way we can project by June our commitment” to the next JPA, Brucker said at the liaison meeting. Both he and Brien said that the city is committed to a JPA, but they declined to offer a rough estimate for what they expect the next JPA would total.
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Brucker noted that next year’s city budget is under such pressure that for the second year in a row, there will be furlough days for city workers. He asked Deputy City Manager Mahdi Aluzri to look into various scenarios for budgeting for the JPA in coming weeks and then moved to other topics on the agenda.
“I was disappointed,” Korbatov told Patch after the meeting. “I would have liked to have gotten some more specifics. We didn’t even set a date for the next liaison meeting.”
This columnist was disappointed too. Speaking at the liaison meeting, Deputy Superintendent Alex Cherniss made it clear that it would be difficult for BHUSD to comply with its LACOE requirements without confidence about the amount of the future JPA.
The last JPA agreement was negotiated in 2008 by Brucker and board member Myra Lurie. Observers have suggested that tension with Board of Education members over the city’s approach toward to tunnel under the high school is affecting Brucker’s views on the JPA.
The issue came to a head at the April 26 board meeting, when member Steve Fenton said that he had asked Brucker to resign from the liaison committee, urging his board colleagues to do the same. Brucker said he has no plans to resign.
“This is not personal and my relationship [with the other negotiating party] does not affect my judgment,” Brucker told Patch. “2008 was a different time for us—the city was flush with cash.”
Brucker said he expects the next JPA to again be a four-year agreement, and he expects it to be “generous.” But he suggested it would come with conditions.
“There should be accountability matrixes in store with clear goals and objectives outlined,” he said. He said he hopes to hold another liaison meeting toward the end of May but that the meeting needs to be scheduled among many parties.
For now, I give Brucker the benefit of the doubt. I hope that the next liaison meeting will soon be scheduled and that it will be more productive than the last one.
