On Election Day, Feb. 5, Butte College students had a chance to see their tuitions lowered from $20 to $15 and the state’s community college system could have realized an increase its overall budget. It didn’t happen. Proposition 92 failed to capture the simple majority needed to see these things come true.

Les Jauron, an assistant to the president at Butte-Glenn Community College District, said that lack of education in California coupled with higher inflation has led to a lower per capita income here than the national average.

“The state needs to look at the long term when it comes to education,” Jauron said. “We need to get this right, and junior colleges help us get it right. With the proper funding junior colleges could really initiate the changes needed to make California competitive on the new global market.”

Opponents to Prop. 92 say the legislation had no funding written into it and that it would cost the state nearly $1 billion in the first three years alone. The problem they said was without further taxation there is not enough money in the general budget to pay for it.

“It’s not time to be going after this initiative,” said Lester Sanchez, president of the California Teachers Association, the largest teachers union in the state. “If something like this were to pass at this time, I’d be very concerned about what other programs would suffer.”

Scott Lay, who heads the Community College League of California, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the timing could have been better.

"It is disappointing; we have been working on this for 3 1/2 years,” Lay said. “You don't pick which election you are going to be on and we got caught up in the state's budgetary morass."

The CCLC is a nonprofit association of the state's 72 community college districts that was part of a coalition sponsoring the measure.