BILL TO FUND SCHOOL SPACE : COMMITTEE HEARINGS KICK OFF CAPITOL YEAR.

Byline: Jennifer Kerr Associated Press

One of the first bills the new California Legislature is likely to pass this year could be good news to school districts that want to reduce class sizes but don't have the space.

The Senate Education Committee will hold the first hearing this week on a bill that would shift about $140 million that hasn't been used to hire new teachers into a separate fund aimed at obtaining portable classrooms in which to put the teachers.

The committee hearing Wednesday is one of the first of the new legislative session, which is typically slow in getting under way this winter. The Senate has only had full committees since last Friday, while the Assembly is not expected to name committee members until the end of the month.

Until there are committees, the Legislature can't start the process of holding hearings on the 300 proposed new laws introduced so far or the several thousand more expected to be introduced by the end of February.

In addition, the Legislature will take today off for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Both houses observed the occasion Friday with speeches about the slain civil rights leader, delivered by Sacramento high school students who were such impressive orators that Assemblyman Kevin Murray, D-Culver City, joked nervously, ``I hear footsteps.''

Assembly members' staffs spent the long weekend moving offices. With the change in party power from Republican to Democrat, and with 31 new members, few people are keeping their old offices. In the Capitol, the size and location of a lawmaker's office is as much a status indicator as any title.

The special session that opened last week to react to the New Year's floods in Northern California is also slow in getting started. Lawmakers say they are waiting for final damage figures and reports before beginning to pass any relief bills for individuals, businesses and local governments that suffered damages.

The class-size reduction bill by the committee chairman, Democratic Sen. Leroy Greene of Carmichael, roughly follows a proposal made last month by Republican Gov. Pete Wilson.

Wilson and the Legislature decided during summer to reduce class sizes from around 30 to 20, targeting kindergarten through third grades. School districts must give top priority to first grade, then second.

The current year budget contains two separate funds to pay for the reduction: $771 million for new teachers and other operating costs and $200 million for portable classrooms and other facilities.

However, local districts requested just $631 million from the former fund, but applied for $351 million for buildings. Greene's bill would shift any unused money from the first fund into the building fund.

Another Greene bill before the same committee is likely not to be as eagerly received. It would call a statewide election in June and put before voters a $3 billion school bond. The Legislature and Wilson were unable to agree on putting a school bond on last November's ballot because some Republicans also wanted prison bonds, and Wilson has proposed only a $2 billion school bond on the 1998 ballot.

Another obstacle for Greene's bond proposal to overcome is the opposition of many legislators to the cost of conducting an extra statewide election in June.

The Senate Transportation Committee on Tuesday will consider bills about seismic repairs of bridges and the Smog Check program. Both bills are by the chairman, Sen. Quentin Kopp, I-South San Francisco.

The bridge bill would spend $650 million from the $2 billion seismic bond measure approved by voters last March on seven state-owned toll bridges, most of them in the San Francisco area. Lawmakers tried, and failed, last year, to decide how to pay for the quake repairs for the bridges.

The other bill would change the exemption for old cars from the state's smog check programs. Current law exempts cars older than 1966. Kopp's bill would exempt vehicles that are 25 or more model-years old.

The Senate's budget committee takes its first, preliminary look at Wilson's $66.6 billion proposed 1997-98 budget on Wednesday. The Budget and Fiscal Review Committee will hear from Wilson's Finance Department and the legislative analyst, but won't begin real work on the budget until after the analyst releases a detailed report on the plan late next month.