Tech Firms Pledge Funds to Prop. 26

Some of Orange County’s high-tech businesses Tuesday endorsed the March 7 statewide ballot initiative aimed at school improvements, pledging about $200,000 in corporate funds to the campaign.

If passed, Proposition 26 would lower from two-thirds to a simple majority the number of votes needed to pass local school bond issues.

“Since the 1970s, only a handful of school bonds have passed in Orange County,” said Marilyn Buchi, president-elect of the California School Boards Assn.

Recent bond measures in Huntington Beach and Anaheim garnered a majority but fell short of the required two-thirds, Buchi said. One bond proposal in Kings County failed by just four votes, she said.

“Proposition 26 can make it easier to upgrade facilities,” Buchi said. “Students’ environments do affect their ability to learn.”

Local business leaders said at a press conference at the Orange County Business Council’s Irvine office that preparing children adequately involves not only building classrooms but educating them for an increasingly computerized work environment.

“As shocking as it may be, California is dead last in availability” of personal computers in public schools, said Ted Smith, chairman and founder of FileNet Corp., a Costa Mesa-based provider of World Wide Web content, management and E-business applications. “And this in the state where the computer revolution began.”

Other executives said the regular audits of school bond projects, which the proposition would require, made it easy for them to support the initiative.

“We appreciate the clear and strict accountability that has been built into this program,” said Dwight Decker, chairman and chief executive officer of Connexant Systems Inc., a Newport Beach-based corporation that is the world’s largest provider of semiconductor products for communications electronics. “We hope that our support for the proposition will convince voters to do the same.”