Assemblyman talks oil at OCC

A California assemblyman who wants to levy a tax on the state’s oil drillers appeared Thursday at Orange Coast College, pitching his bill to a group of student senators and pointing out that California pays $2 billion more a year on prisons than higher education.

The Assembly’s majority leader, Alberto Torrico (D-Fremont), urged the senators to take part in the campaign to raise fees on California’s oil industry, a move that could raise as much as $2 billion a year, nearly a half-million of which would be earmarked for community colleges statewide.

“Alaska has raised $400 million a year by doing the same, and all that money went to higher education,” said Torrico, whose district includes the East Bay area. “Every other state in the country charges some sort of fee for drilling. Why shouldn’t we?”

Torrico, in a 90-minute sit-down with nearly a dozen student senators, painted a grim picture of Sacramento’s fiscal woes and the future of higher education, saying that if something isn’t done in the next two years, 20,000 to 50,000 students will be turned away from the UC or Cal State systems because of budget cuts.

Ultimately, he added, community colleges will bear the brunt of the rejected students, something of a challenge in and of itself, considering that junior colleges are struggling financially as well.

Normally, the hardest-hit population during the recession, he said, is the middle class because they make too much money to qualify for financial aid and not enough to pay their way through college.

However, Torrico’s Assembly Bill 656, which would levy a 12.5% tax yearly on the state’s oil drillers, could help shore up some of the financial woes at the higher education level and put money back into coffers where it belongs, he said.

Besides, he said, California, with nearly 37 million people, deserves more.

“More money is going to mean more classes, more financial aid, but it’s not going to solve everything,” Torrico said. “But when you have a system where the prison system is getting more money than the higher education system, you’ve got some serious problems.”