♪ >> belva: good evening, and welcome to "this week in northern california." i'm belva davis. and joining me tonight on our news panel are josh richman, political and legal affairs reporter with the "oakland tribune." scott shafer, host of "the california report" on kqed public radio. and lisa krieger, higher education writer for the "san jose mercury news." lisa, is raising tuition the only option for the regents? is that why this is happening? >> financing higher education is shockingly simple. you either get the money from the state or you get it from the students. it's not coming from the state, they're hitting up the students. now, the other side of the balance sheet, of course, is expenses. and they're saying -- this week's crisis, unlike every crisis in previous weeks and in previous years, they're saying they would like to increase the salaries of professors and staff and they'd also like to increase the contribution to the pension fund which they need to because it's struggling like a lot. so they made a 6% increase in revenue just to break even. so that's a lot of what was going on this week. but to get back to your question as to where else do you get the money, you can get out-of-state students. you can get international students. they pay $23,000 more. that subsidizes the california students. you can raise taxes. and there are some -- there's a poll this week that suggests people might be willing to do that. these are our future doctors, our future lawyers. i don't know about you, but i would like someone to write my will. and our future engineers and tech. and of course there are other strategies as well. trying to increase efficiencies and reducing costs if you can. >> when you talk about bringing people in from outside, out of state, does that squeeze -- there's only so many students that the school's going to accommodate. >> they say they can still accommodate all the eligible california students and bring students in from elsewhere. in fact, it's interesting. they're arguing this week that the more oust state students you bring in the actual more support you can offer in state, so you can offer more class sizes and -- more sections. so they're actually having empty seats for the first time in years because they have some revenue coming in from these out-of-state students. it's controversial. >> darryl steinberg, the state's senator pro tem, issued a terse statement saying we shielded you, we tried to limit the impact in the budget and you're doing this anyway and we don't approve. >> so there was more money. but it only filled about 50% of their losses over two years. so yes, there was money, but there wasn't enough to make up what's been a real slide in state support. the state's been unwilling -- or an undependable partner. and the question is as we move forward, if the state is increasingly reluctant to support higher education, you know, where do we go with this? there might not be a bright light at the end of the tunnel anytime soon given the structural problems of the state. so how do we address what could be an ongoing issue? >> belva: is raise -- are raises at this point really important to the survival of the university? >> the uc berkeley chancellor said yes, he feels our faculty -- fabulous faculty are being raided by other institutions. he said this week 110 berkeley faculty have received offers from elite east coast private institutions. so in a competitive marketplace salaries matter. to those of us who haven't had a raise for a while i think it's startling to hear. the pension obligation is a big deal, too. it's underwater. and will be unless the state -- i'm sorry, unless the universities pay more into it. >> i know a lot of students were frustrated that there wasn't more talk during the governor's race about higher education. is there any indication from jerry brown what he has in mind? he's talked about going to the voters for a tax increase. might this be a separate ballot measure? >> perhaps. that's a good question. he does seem to care about the issue. that's a good thing. some of his proposals, you know, we'll see. he's discussed increasing transfer rates from community colleges, do more of your educating at the community college level, less -- and save those seats for the upper-level ucs. he's talked about moving more money from the prisons into higher education. but unless you change three strikes or start decriminalizing drugs, that's going to be tough to do. so he's come up with some interesting ideas. the question will be, you know -- they're all -- there's a new commission for the future of uc, and each of these will be looked at very carefully. >> belva: what about auditing uc's expenditures? has there been an attempt to see if there is this normal cry during elections of waste -- >> they've done actually a lot of belt tightening. there may be more to come. they're $1 billion in the hole right now. so you don't dig out of that hole finding waste here and there. and there have been some reductions in middle management. it could be that they'll ask employees to retire later. it could be they'll ask employees to contribute more to their pensions. that was very much the subject of this week's conversation. they're open to all kinds of ideas. >> belva: students protesting really have nowhere to go except to protest? >> correct. certainly they could go to sacramento, and their voices need to be heard. they've been trying. but there is the perception they're being pickpocketed. they're the easy place to go when the money's not coming from anywhere else. their frustration is -- one can clearly understand. >> belva: scott, you mentioned just a few minutes ago the election and how it's -- rather, you did, lisa. why there wasn't more talk about this during the election. well, those elections are still just winding up. so let's get this week's read on where the election results are now. >> well, the one big undecided race is the attorney general's race, belva, which on election night steve cooley, the republican d.a. from los angeles, was ahead. they both declared victory. and as the count has gone on there were about 2 million ballots uncounted on election night. so they've been slowly getting those ballots counted. and now harris is ahead. the lead reversed during this past week. and as of late this afternoon she had increased her lead to about 43,000 votes. so it's been steadily growing. and they're pretty confident now that they're going to maintain that lead, but they're certainly not going to declare victory anytime soon. >> belva: do you know how many more ballots are still out there and how -- i mean, what is the speed on which this could be resolved? >> well, they're pretty quickly whittling them back down now. there's probably i would say between 300,000 and 400,000 ballots. the counties don't have to report the results until november 30th. some of them have been reporting them on a daily basis. it varies a great deal. the "l.a. times" did an analysis of looking at all the county registrar's websites and seems to think that most of the outstanding ballots are from counties where kamala harris did really well. so that would bode well for her ultimately winning. >> belva: and locally there's -- well, there's been count finally in san francisco. >> finally done counting. there are some outstanding district supervisorial races. in district 2 mark ferrell edged out janet reilly, who was kind of a favorite of the democratic establishment. ferrell a little bit more conservative. then in potrero hill, district 10, bayview po terrello hill, maya cohen after about 20 more rounds of ranked choice voting snuck in even though she didn't get very many first place votes at all. and that sort of fuels some of the controversy around ranked-choice voting. but all this is related because if kamala harris wins she will leave as district attorney. who gets to appoint her replacement? the mayor. but who is the mayor going to be? and when does she resign? does she resign the same day gavin newsom resigns to be lieutenant governor and if so who replaces her? or could her replacement be part of a deal to line up enough votes to get one person or another to fix -- >> belva: nothing is uncomplicated in san francisco. >> it is so complicated. i mean, you really -- >> how does newsom feel about this? how is he playing on -- >> well, of course there's no love lost between him and the current board of supervisor. there's been a lot of bad blood. especially with people like chris daly and gavin newsom would like nothing more than to deprive them of the appointment to replace gavin newsom. but he's got a problem because he's supposed to step down and become lieutenant governor january 3rd. the new board doesn't take office until the 8th. so there's a gap there of four or five days. there's been some talk of maybe he would wait until january 8th and then step down so the new board could get to vote. but that creates other problems. they're not quite sure, would that leave a vacancy in the lieutenant governor's office and might there -- there's even discussion that perhaps that would require confirmation because it would suddenly become like an appointment -- >> we haven't spent enough time trying to confirm the lieutenant governor in the last couple years. >> there are so many moving pieces -- >> any opinion on what his -- >> he is a key player because if no one gets six votes to become interim mayor by default he becomes, david chiu, the board president, becomes the interim mayor. but he's only board president until january 8th. and there's no guarantee that he'll get another term. so it could be the new board president could become interim mayor. there's a bit of -- definitely some potential turbulence in the mayor's office. and it comes at a time when the city's facing some very serious problems. >> belva: we didn't finish the supervisorial results. so we have two more positions. >> jane kim in district 6, south of market, she won fairly early on. either election night or a couple days later. and scott wiener in district 8. he won pretty handily. that's the district of the castro and noe valley. he'll be replacing bevnan dufty. all those folks a little more modern than the folks they're replacing. might be more in line with gavin newsom's politics than the current board. that said there's a wing that desperately wants to get one of their folks in the mayor's office. and so they're going to try to get six votes for whoever it might be, whether it's a member of the current board, somebody like david campos or david chiu or someone like max gonzales who ran for mayor and lost narrowly to newsom. art agnos. there's two schools of thought. do you want a air caretaker who will just be mayor and run the ship until january of 2012 when the new mayor would be elected and take office or do you want somebody who's going to be a candidate in november and have a leg up? there's different schools of thought. if you want a caretaker art agnos has come up, aaron peskin, though he might run for mayor also. mike hennessy, the sheriff, his name has come up. so there's just a -- it's really -- there's a lot of balls in the air. ed harrington also being mentioned. somebody who's a steady financial guy, not a politician. so they have to decide what kind of person they want and who can get six votes. >> belva: ideologically how does the board balance out, do you think? now that we know the four people -- >> it's going to be -- it's san francisco. it's liberal. but that said, it's a little more -- or a little less liberal, i guess you'd say, a little more moderate than the current board of supervisors. but by any reasonable spectrum in any other city in the country it's still pretty liberal. >> belva: okay. so we have the liberals in san francisco. we have the governor up in sacramento making proposals during these last days of his that are pretty controversial about selling off state buildings. where is that now? >> this is a proposal that actually was made a while back and is on the verge of being consummated. and whether it makes any sense depends on who you ask. like with most things that are done to try to plug our budget hole. the state based its current year budget on the governor's plan to sell and then lease back 24 state-owned buildings at 11 sites around the state. they're hoping to generate about $1.2 billion so that they can pour into this budget hole that we've got. sought state public works board on monday voted to do what it has to do to retire the debt on those buildings to free them up for sale. they're in escrow, supposed to close next month. on tuesday two former building authority appointees filed a lawsuit to try to block this sale because they say a lot of these buildings contain court facilities and they never ran this by the judicial council for permission. so this could throw a monkey wrench into things. if the sale doesn't go through at all, we have -- there's a $1.2 billion hole in the current budget. if it does go through and we get that money, we still have a $6.1 billion hole in the budget for other reasons. so it's not like we're out of the woods either way. but there's been a lot of controversy about this plan all along. people like treasurer bill lockyer and controller john chiang have been saying it makes no sense to do this because what you're doing according to the legislative analyst office is you're taking a 10% interest rate loan over 35 years that's going to cost the taxpayers $1.4 billion over time in order to get $1.2 billion now in immediate cash for your budget crisis. they're saying these are going to be paid off in a couple years if we just keep them, so why don't we just keep them? >> it depends how desperate the state is for cash. what they're willing to trade -- >> absolutely desperate for any penny they can scrape up without having to go to the legislature or the people to raise revenues in some other way. >> i was going to say also there's not much of a constituency for courthouses whereas if you're looking at cutting education, cutting health care, programs for kids, i mean, there are real constituencies for those things, so they probably see it as being relatively easy -- >> there are some indirect constituencies because we'd still be leasing back the buildings but we wouldn't be maintaining them, which means perhaps getting rid of some of the public employees who have worked on maintaining and keeping these buildings up. i'm sure that probably has something to do with some people's desire to keep these in the state's hands officially. but it's just -- it's another sign of this very, very short-sighted let's get through this year and make the sheet balance if we possibly can. and we'll worry about 10, 20, 30 years out in 10, 20, or 30 years. >> but the governor openly advocated for this? >> oh, yeah. this comes out of his administration. he thinks it's a great plan. the question is what does jerry brown think of it? because if indeed they can't close on this next month, if it gets pushed into the new yeah, it gets pushed into his administration. and we're not really sure -- you know, he's in the midst right now in doing his gubernatorial transition of trying to figure out what he's going to propose right after he's sworn in in terms of closing the current year budget gap and moving forward with subsequent budget gaps. and it's not at all clear that he's on board with this. >> if closing escrow is delayed -- >> it could conceivably be something he could try to throw a monkey wrench into and call off. there is a partnership waiting in the wings to buy these buildings. and they certainly would like to go through. >> so as it gets sold, could it conceivably -- could the owner sell the naming rights? we could have like the facebook courthouse or -- >> i don't think that's part of the plan necessarily. we may be losing property. we won't necessarily be losing that much dignity. >> the buildings we're talking about in san francisco are the tuc, right? >> the tuc. the building over in civic center. the l.u. harris building over in oakland. there's a building in santa rosa, a whole slew of buildings in sacramento and los angeles. these are prominent, prominent properties for sure. >> belva: but i think the supreme court is located in one of those? >> yes, it certainly is. hence the interest in having the judicial council have some sort of say in whether this should happen or not. >> belva: and who is the purchasers? >> the purchasers are a partnership called california first llc, which is basically a texas real estate firm and an irvine-based private equity firm in partnership. they're actually buying it for about $2.3 billion, but a billion of that goes to retire the debt on the buildings and the rest is supposed to be left over for the budget. >> belva: okay. we'll see where that one goes. it's still alive. well, my thanks to all of you for joining us here tonight. >> thank you. >> belva: well, coming up, mayor-elect jean quan talks with me about what's ahead for oakland. ♪ ♪ ♪ well, after oakland's first ranked-choice election and nine days of uncertainty, two-term a surprise winner. she won with just under 51% of the vote, ahead of front-runner, former state senator don perata, who had just over 49%. her victory is historic as she becomes oakland's first woman and asian-american mayor. she has a big job ahead of her. jean quan, we congratulate you and welcome to the program. while you're out campaigning, you're the mayor now of this beautiful city, oakland, that has a ton of problems. what did you promise oakland voters that you would do that convinced them to vote for you? >> well, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me. and it wasn't a total surprise to us. we had thought that we were very close to victory. and unfortunately, as you know, ranked order results don't get reported in a way other results do, and they just do the raw numbers and don't do runs as you go along. and san francisco now has the same issue waiting still for one more election. i promised two kinds of things. i promised to be a different kind of mayor than we've had recently. i'm someone whose family's lived in oakland for over 100 years. i'm sort of a home girl. i've been working on the front lines of education reform, community safety for a long time. i know the city. there's no part of the city they'ven that i haven't worked in for some time. so i promised to be first of all a more visible mayor. i plan to have town hall meetings in every part of the city. in our first 100 days we'll do one in every district. i promised to put my schedule on the internet so people can be very clear and transparent of what kind of work the mayor is doing. i promised to cut my pay and to work with the community. and because my campaign was such a grassroots campaign, i promised to do mostly things in working with the community. i don't think a mayor changes a city overnight. and oakland is one of the most beautiful cities in the country, as you noted. it's also one of the most diverse. that's our blessing and our curse. so a lot of what i think a mayor does or any good community leader does is bring people together. the two main things i think that we'll address right away will be community safety. that's community policing. so to do that i have to do a couple things. i have to get our police union to pay its share of the pension so i can bring back my officers. and we did pass bb also on november 2nd. >> belva: bb -- >> bb allows us to keep $20 million that goes to a combination of community beat officers who are deployed to specific neighborhoods and work with those neighborhood groups and prevention and intervention programs, gang intervention programs. oakland's crime has come down about 28% over the last three years. our murders are down by a third. even with the bad economy we continue to make some progress, and i think that's because the community is working with police officers on sort of a beat-by-beat level. >> belva: listen to this spokesperson for the oakland police officers association. his view's totally different. he thinks that oakland's one of the most dangerous cities in america and that things are pretty bad. and you're saying that things are improving there. and getting the police officers union to pay more into their pension fund is no small feat. how are you going to do that? >> well, let's talk about that. clearly -- i'm not saying that everything is wonderful. oakland in general is not like some of the east coast cities i've lived in. and yes, we do have high crime rates. but it's coming down. and particularly the violent crime is coming down. and i & that's important. and i think you have to give that -- credit goes to the neighborhoods who have been working with the police officers. you know, most police officers in this state, including in san francisco, pay their share of the pension fund. the new governor, jerry brown, our former mayor, says that the state pension fund, it's the same fund for the prison guards union as it is for our police and the firefighters, is unsustainable. and that is absolutely true. and it's more unsustainable in oakland because our union doesn't pay into the fund. >> belva: so do you expect to work closely with governor brown on trying to do things -- he is still a citizen of oakland. >> he's actually my constituent. he lives in my district. and he's complained about the trees. >> belva: do you plan on working closely with him on trying to solve some of oakland's problems? >> i would hope to. i thought i had a good working relationship with jerry. i think he has a lot on his plate. but quite frankly, i just came back from the league of cities conference of the executive board, and we put pension reform as one of our top three priorities. it is just because particularly the police and fire and prison guards union pension is just unsustainable for us. >> belva: well, education, you know a lot about that. >> that is the second priority. brpts t >> belva: so the second priority. >> the other thing -- i'd like to tell you everything i promised. but i promised to work with the community to be what i call a real education mayor. you may know when i was on the school board i chaired the california school board association. i chaired the national urban association. of the 100 largest districts. i got to see what other cities were doing. and i saw that other many other cities were much more proactive with their schools, sort of literally put their arms around the schools. and i plan to do that, work with our superintendent tony smith, try to coordinate with him as much as possible. i've made a personal pledge. so this is probably one of my most important pledges and we're going to start recruiting people on inaugural day. i plan to recruit 2,000 volunteers to work with oakland's toughest kids. the 500 public school kids who get arrested and put in juvenile hall every year. the 1,200 kids who miss about 20 days of school. i'm an old school board member. why is 20 days important? because if you miss 20 days of school you're not likely to keep up with your grade. you're likely to drop back. and kids who drop back often drop out. and lastly, about 300 young people age out of foster care and become homeless. luckily now we've changed the law so it's not necessarily age 18. but those are some of the most vulnerable kids, particularly for young women. they're often the women who are sexually and commercially exploited, who are the kids who get into gangs. >> belva: well, finally, you're a historic woman and an asian elected to this office. can you just comment about how you feel about crossing those barriers? >> you know, my husband and i were founders of asian american says at berkeley. history has been sitting on my shoulder the whole way through. my great grandfather came from this city after the 1906 earthquake, took the ferry across san francisco and sat on h street on the family association. that association still stands. and we're going to start our inaugural march from there. >> belva: i want to thank you so much. very good of you to come and join us. >> thank you very much. >> belva: and of course we wish you the best. >> thank you. >> belva: that's all the time that we have. visit kqed.org/thisweek to watch episodes and segments of our program, and you can share your thoughts about the show there as well. well, we'll be off next week for the holiday and wish you a happy thanksgiving. thank you for joining us. i'm belva davis. good night.