CAMPUS NEWSPAPER WAR MOUNTS : THEFT PRODS POLICE REPORT.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

A long-brewing campus snit between the student government and the student newspaper, already embroiled in a small-claims lawsuit, escalated another notch Wednesday with the filing of a police report.

Officers of the Associated Student Government, which publishes a biweekly newsletter called The Truth, and editors of the Canyon Call, the College of the Canyons paper published every Wednesday, have been bickering in print for a few months now.

The dissent involves an issue being decided this week in a special campus election - whether to levy a mandatory $5-per-semester student registration fee to help pay for improvements to the campus Student Center.

The Canyon Call published editorials against the proposed fee Nov. 20 - the same day a flier of anonymous rebuttals was inserted in each copy of the newspaper - and on Wednesday, Canyon Call staffers reported about 800 copies of the paper were stolen off campus newsracks.

In each instance, Canyon Call staffers pointed the finger of suspicion at the Associated Student Government, which endorses the proposed fee and the upgrades to the Student Center.

Last month, Canyon Call editor John Woods filed a small-claims lawsuit against ASG President Allison Korse. The suit, filed Feb. 3 in Newhall Municipal Court, seeks $660 because that is the advertising rate the newspaper would have charged to put flier inserts in the Nov. 20, 1996, edition of the Canyon Call.

The newspaper sent the Associated Student Government a bill, due Dec. 2, for the insert, which was titled ``Rapid Response.'' When the bill wasn't paid, Canyon Call faculty adviser Jay Berman sent Korse a letter Dec. 12 advising her of the bill and formally requesting payment for the insert, which he said appeared in ``several hundred copies of the Canyon Call.''

On Wednesday, Korse said that neither she nor any member of Associated Student Government placed the inserts in the Nov. 20 newspaper. The small-claims case is scheduled to be heard March 14 at Newhall Municipal Court.

Korse, 23, has been ASG president since June. She said architects' estimates put the cost of refurbishing the Student Center at between $3 million and $6 million - a range that ``depends (on whether) we build a second floor.'' California law, she noted, prohibits community colleges from using state funds to pay for student centers, and that's the reason behind the proposed student fee.

For the proposed fee to pass, 20 percent of College of the Canyons' 6,500 students would have to vote in the election - and of that number, two-thirds of the voters would have to favor the fee, Korse said.

Meanwhile, Canyon Call managing editor Heather Ramsey filed an incident report at 9:45 a.m. Wednesday with the campus police, stating that about 800 issues of that day's paper had been removed by unknown individuals from the college's newsracks.

Ramsey reported that a half-hour earlier she had placed the papers in the newsracks at the A Building, the S Building, and next to the campus cafeteria, the police report stated.

In the police report, the Canyon Call staffers said they had no proof who took the papers, but that they stated a suspicion that the student government was responsible because of the editorial against the Student Center fee that ran in Wednesday's edition.

The gist of both editorials was that the students who will pay the fees will have graduated, transferred or left College of the Canyons by the time enough money is raised and the Student Center refurbishments are complete.

Proposed additions to the remodeled Student Center, the newspaper wrote, have ranged from a beauty salon to a movie theater to a bowling alley to a weight room.

``If the proposal were passed, and 6,000 students paid the $5, it would raise only $30,000 per semester. By the time enough money was raised, the students who voted for this fee would be long gone from COC, and unable to benefit from the upgrade,'' the Nov. 20 editorial said.