Interview with State Senator Josh Becker (D-San Mateo)

by joshua D. Picazo editor-in-chief

State Senator Josh Becker, an advocate for innovative education funding in California and author of SB 893, took time to answer questions with The Skyline View about housing, transportation, and community colleges.

SB 893, which allows for a tuition-free accessible community college in San Mateo County, is now seeing similar bills across the state, including Santa Clara County.

The Skyline View: You were the author of SB 893, which waves most fees for community college students in San Mateo County. Do you plan to advocate for an extension of this once it expires in about five years?

yeah, so far, it’s working great.

TSV: Another thing you’ve advocated for is prioritizing California’s students being admitted into UC and CSU campuses. Are there any ways you envisioned future legislation, maintaining or increasing that prioritization?

We’ll continue to look at it. Right now, we don’t need any additional legislation. It’s really the budget funding, priorities from that and it’s really about a budget, making sure that we have sufficient dollars for these efforts. But we don’t need additional legislation at the moment.

train is going to connect with the bus and all this sort of stuff. So there’s a lot that even though this issue didn’t pass, it got the conversation started. So we can still work on seamless Bay Area right now.

As you know many of our transits are in crisis. Cal-Train particularly had a very high fair box recovery. It was 80%, which is a lot for [transit], because they have such a high community worker ridership.

But now, this is where people are working from home and commuting less. It’s really taken its toll.

But all the agencies are suffering greatly and they’re all coming us to get efforts to try to help save them and get them additional funding. And we’re working on it.

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Senator Josh Becker: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we wanted to prove that it could work and so far, the results are excellent. We have thousands of students benefiting, our enrollment is up 15% because of SB 893. So the results are excellent and that’s what we need to do: prove that it works.

TSV: Yeah. That was something that was very well received by the students, particularly in our county and SMCCCD, so we’re all very happy about that.

Sen. Becker: I mean, you know, [the] proofs in the pudding. But

TSV: Another issue is the price of gas, a lot of students have been looking into alternative methods of transportation. As a member of the Senate Transportation Committee. Are there any legislation or efforts to increase funding for public transportation?

Sen. Becker: Yeah. I had a bill last year called the Seamless Bay Area Bill, trying to make sure that we have better coordination. So, without even spending additional money, if we have fair coordination and schedule coordination we would greatly improve public transit as well as better signage and better data.

So people know where the

Strong winds lead to power outages across county, temporarily closes Cañada College

of the storms.

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by joshua D. Picazo & Grahaam breithbarth editor-in-chief & multimedia editor

Windstorms have swept across the Bay Area in the last few days, knocking out power, downing trees and causing major incidents for the residents of the bay.

The Bay Area is no stranger to high winds or large scale storm destruction. The latest series of weather events to hit the Bay has left some interesting damage in its wake. The storm knocked out over a hundred thousand residents’ power across the Bay Area.

PG&E says it has been hard at work trying to repair the damages

They’ve managed to restore about half of the residents power.

Cañada College also saw power outages caused by the winds. The community college, located in Redwood City, cancelled evening classes on Teudsay the 21st and finally opened on Wednsday at 5 p.pm. after power had finally been restored.

The winds are expected to calm down with the addition of rain coming in the next few days according to The Weather Channel. San Bruno will likely see rain beginning Thursday and last until next week.

And then on the longer term you want to see new priorities. Things like Dumbarton Rail [bridge]. We need to get east-west transit going. Those are the people that are commuting hours into the Bay Area and this is not a good way for them right now in most cases. So that’s what we’re working on.

TSV: And one last question. Housing is of particular im portance, especially for the students and the faculty in the county. Would you like to see this be addressed by the Senate and the local government?

Sen. Becker: Well, that’s a big issue everywhere in the Bay Area. The thing is colleges, and our community college in particular often have land that we could build. San MateoCounty has been a leader in our community colleges of building staff housing, but we could look at doing more as well, and to do that we need funding from the State. And so we actually passed last year about 1 billion dollars for housing on the campuses of our community colleges. The governor, I believe, delayed that his first recent budget. So that is one of the things we’ll be discussing with him. But we have to now really go out and fight for those dollars.