A national training center for legislative employees is leaving its longtime home at a Minnesota university and moving to California.

The Legislative Staff Management Institute was created 14 years ago by the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures and has been housed at the University of Minnesota.

But the conference has signed a five-year contract to move the institute to the University of Southern California's center in downtown Sacramento next summer. USC and the Center for California Studies at California State University, Sacramento, offered a combined bid to host the program, which draws experienced legislative staff members from statehouses around the country.

They defeated bids by the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and by the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, which has hosted the program since 1990.

USC and CSUS faculty members, as well as current and former state lawmakers, will be among the teachers, but the classes will be geared to helping legislative aides from every state.