FACILITIES CRISIS STILL UNSOLVED

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Pete Wilson, accompanied by law enforcement and victims
rights representatives, launched an advertising campaign Tuesday to warn
Californians of a new law that will sharply toughen penalties for those who
use guns in crimes.

The program - television spots and printed notices to inmates, probationer
and parolees - is dubbed "use a gun and you're done." Wilson said he wants
to "put gun-wielding criminals in jail for a very long time."

Few law-abiding Californians would argue the concept of hammering those who
use guns in crimes. That's why lock-'em-up measures are so popular with
politicians.

Likewise, the single most popular thing that Wilson and lawmakers of both
parties have done in recent years is to redirect sate school aid into
reducing class sizes in elementary grades. Wilson will propose another
expansion of class-size reduction when the Legislature reconvenes next week
and wants to engrave the program permanently into law via an education
reform ballot measure next year.

There is, however, another facet to such trendy political actions as
locking up more criminals and putting school kids in smaller classes:
finding space to do both.

While Wilson and lawmakers have catered to the public, they have abjectly
failed to come to grips with the prison and school facilities crises that
have resulted. And when the Legislature returns to Sacramento, the
politicians will have only a few weeks to reach agreement on prison and
school construction programs if measures are to be placed before voters at
the June primary election.

Secretary of State Bill Jones is warning Wilson and lawmakers that bond
issues need to be enacted no later than Feb. 9 to be included in the June
voter's pamphlet - which is a virtual impossibility, given the serious
political conflicts that remain unresolved. But even if Wilson and
lawmakers want to push the envelope by authorizing a supplemental voters'
pamphlet, Jones says, they would have only another month.

The state has completed its last authorized prison, but Wilson and
lawmakers of both parties have been deadlocked for several years on what to
do next as prison populations continue to expand and approach the point
when even double-ceiling of inmates will be insufficient.

Although inmate populations have expanded slower than previously forecast
after the "three strikes and you're out" law was enacted, the state still
will run out of prison space around the end of the decade. Given the
three-year lead time needed to construct new facilities, the real deadline
for action may already have passed.

Class size reduction, meanwhile, has imposed new demands on a school system
that was already overcrowded, thanks to rising enrollment from a new baby
boom that began in California in the mid-1980s. Cafeterias and libraries
have been converted into emergency classrooms - mirroring the steps being
taken in the prisons to warehouse inmates - but a school housing crisis
grows worse by the moment while Wilson and lawmakers remain stalemated on
how to deal with it.

Educators want more state bonds and a lowering of the vote requirement on
local bond issues, but the building industry is demanding curbs on school
construction fees, and no one has found a magic formula that will also
garner the required two-thirds vote in the Legislature.

Locking up more violent felons and putting kids in smaller classes are fine
policies to pursue - but only if we're willing to shoulder the
multibillion-dollar costs that result.