Berkeley's Vista Community College, which has taught students for more than three decades in cramped, rented office space, will finally build its own campus in a vacant downtown lot after college and city officials last week resolved disputes over funding and parking.

The $65 million modernist edifice, to be built at 2050 Center St., comes after years of complaints from Berkeley leaders, including Mayor Tom Bates, that Vista has received fewer resources than three other campuses in the Peralta Community College District.

The 160,000-square-foot structure, featuring a glass-covered atrium at its center and a 400-seat auditorium, will be a far cry from the 40,000 square feet that the school rents on 2 1/2 floors of a building at 2020 Milvia St., which lacked many of the amenities available at other campuses.

While officials involved in the effort to build the Vista campus are pleased about the impending start of construction, the fight to secure funding for the new building has been long and bitter.

"It's kind of like I can't believe it. I'll believe it when I see the building,'' said Bates, who spearheaded a 1998 ballot measure that would have allowed Vista to secede from the district. Then a state Assemblyman, Bates said Vista was collecting more money than it received from the district, had shabby facilities and relied too much on temporary teachers.

A judge blocked Bates' ballot measure, but the district agreed to build Vista a campus and hire two full-time teachers a year for it between 1998 and 2008. Also in 1998, district voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that is providing the bulk of the money for the building.

Despite Bates' past activism in favor of a campus, he recently found himself refusing to issue permits for builders to block streets because he was trying to get more money from the district to mitigate the loss of the parking lot.

Bates said the district was inept for not working something out sooner, but district Chancellor Elihu Harris, a former colleague of Bates' in the Legislature, said the problem was that Berkeley had no clear plan for using the money to mitigate the project's parking impacts.

"We're still awaiting a plan," Harris said. "We certainly have to know what it is.''

The district already had promised $3.6 million to the city, and while the amount did not change, the district last week agreed to put the money into escrow to appease Bates. As a result, construction can now start.

"We're going to have a beautiful vertical campus right here in downtown Berkeley,'' said John Garmon, Vista's president. He extolled the virtues of the school's future location, which is a half a block from both the downtown Berkeley BART station and a transfer point for AC Transit bus lines. The building is scheduled to open in fall 2005, he said.

The school now serves about 4,200 students with 31 full-time and about 130 part-time faculty members and about 50 administrative personnel.

The Peralta district, which serves six Alameda County cities, was formed in 1965, when voters approved a $47 million bond to purchase property and buildings for four college sites -- two in Oakland and one each in Alameda and Berkeley.

But the district ran out of money after building Laney College near Lake Merritt in Oakland, the College of Alameda and part of Merritt Community College in the Oakland hills. Vista is now spending about $1 million a year on rent.

Now that construction is set to begin, Bates is co-chairman of a campaign to raise more than $2 million for furniture and other equipment for the new building. He suspects the college is still getting short-changed.

Peralta Trustee Darryl Moore agrees, citing a Western States Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation survey last year that concluded the district needed a system for equitably distributing resources among its campuses.

District spokesman Jeff Heyman, however, said current numbers showed improvement. "I think that we have taken steps and are taking steps to ensure that there is a more equitable funding model,'' he said.