Montebello

Councilman Art Payan, 47, was named mayor for the second time by a unanimous vote of the City Council at its Monday meeting. Payan also served a year as mayor in 1980. He was first elected to the council in 1978 and is serving his second council term. He replaces William Nighswonger as mayor. Councilman William Molinari, 45, was named mayor pro tem. He was elected to the council in 1982. Both will serve one year in the mayoral posts.

Worldwide Aeros Corp., the Montebello developer and maker of blimps used for surveillance, advertising and transport, opened a 45,000-square-foot engineering facility to house work underway on a mammoth 66-ton rigid airship. The company is expanding in part to build the blimp-like aircraft, which would travel at about 120 mph and could take off and land vertically. The idea is that the airship will ferry multi-ton cargo loads back and forth for the military. The new facility, adjacent to Aeros' headquarters and dubbed the Center of Innovation, opened Tuesday in a ceremony attended by state politicians.

The struggling city of Montebello was hit with another significant setback Wednesday as federal housing officials suspended funding to the city and demanded that it repay a total of $5 million in grants. The news added more financial pressure to a city already facing possible insolvency later this year as well as investigations by state and local agencies into allegations of misspent money and falsified records. In a memo to City Council members Wednesday afternoon, departing city administrator Peter Cosentini said a meeting with Department of Housing and Urban Development officials had reduced him to tears.

Since authorities charged a Miramonte Elementary School teacher nearly a month ago with committing lewd acts in his classroom, the Los Angeles Unified School District has seen a flurry of arrests of school employees accused of inappropriate behavior with children. Over the last three weeks, six employees have been booked on suspicion of sex-related crimes, while several others have been pulled from the classroom amid investigations. The overwhelming media coverage after the arrest of Miramonte teacher Mark Berndt for allegedly spoon-feeding his semen to blindfolded children has intensified discussion among school officials, parents and children about abuse.

Some of Montebello's municipal bonds have been downgraded to junk status, another blow to a city already teetering on the edge of insolvency. The interim city administrator has predicted that the general fund will run out of cash if the city does not secure a loan by the end of September. The move by Moody's, a major credit rating agency, will make it more difficult for Montebello to get a loan, experts told city officials. Moody's downgraded its rating of the city's 2000 series certificates of participation by two notches to Ba1, meaning that the general fund's long-term obligations are no longer viewed as investment grade.

Millions in Montebello city funds have been mismanaged or drained from off-the-books accounts, leaving officials scrambling for explanations and prompting fears about the city's solvency. Fiscal troubles abound in the city of about 65,000 in southeastern Los Angeles County: Federal officials say Montebello misused $1.3 million in federal housing money and want it back; a city official discovered $5 million in debt a few weeks ago; and the city has been sued by a businessman who alleges it illegally borrowed up to $19 million from its redevelopment agency last fall.

The Montebello City Council has approved a new policy that bars the city Fire Department from hiring smokers. The City Council voted unanimously earlier this week to direct the city attorney to draft a resolution to implement the policy, which is similar to ones adopted by several Southern California cities, including Downey, officials said.

An $18-million, 111,000-square-foot medical plaza will be built on Beverly Boulevard. Ground breaking is in June for the five-story Beverly West Health Plaza, which will provide office space for more than 30 medical specialists and family physicians. The building is to be completed in late 1988, said Phillip Sontag, a spokesman for Dr. John Thropay, a principal owner of the project. Thropay is a Montebello cancer specialist and owner of Beverly Oncology and Imaging Centers Medical Group Inc.

The city of Montebello, already facing the prospect that it may not be able to pay its bills by the end of this year, sank deeper into crisis Tuesday after the interim city manager abruptly resigned. Peter Cosentini sent council members a letter informing them that he was stepping down because he was "no longer comfortable with our progress toward a balanced budget. " He suggested that council members hire a city manager "more in tune with your approach to municipal finance. " The move comes two weeks after Cosentini, who had been employed by the city for less than a year, warned council members that they needed to take "immediate corrective action" or the city would not be able to make payroll or pay its bills by the end of the year.

Worldwide Aeros Corp., the Montebello developer and maker of blimps used for surveillance, advertising and transport, opened a 45,000-square-foot engineering facility to house work underway on a mammoth 66-ton rigid airship. The company is expanding in part to build the blimp-like aircraft, which would travel at about 120 mph and could take off and land vertically. The idea is that the airship will ferry multi-ton cargo loads back and forth for the military. The new facility, adjacent to Aeros' headquarters and dubbed the Center of Innovation, opened Tuesday in a ceremony attended by state politicians.

The state controller's fourth and final audit of financially troubled Montebello found the city's internal controls severely lacking, opening the door to waste and possible malfeasance. Controller John Chiang said the lapses in Montebello were so severe that he compared them to those in Bell, a city that has become synonymous with mismanagement and allegations of public corruption. The audits didn't allege criminal wrongdoing in Montebello but did find serious lapses. "While the roots of Montebello's problems are different from Bell's, they both share the common trouble of having little or, at times, no accountability in their spending of public dollars," Chiang said.

The 60 Freeway near Montebello will be closed at night through Tuesday so workers can finish demolishing the Paramount Boulevard overpass damaged by the massive tanker explosion last week. The California Department of Transportation also plans nightly lane closures on the 5 and 405 freeways for scheduled repairs and maintenance over the next few weeks, probably leading to scattered traffic snarls during the holiday period. All westbound lanes of the 60 between the 605 interchange and the 710 will be shut down from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. for three consecutive nights, Caltrans said.

The Eastside's version of "Carmageddon" came to an end Saturday when Caltrans reopened the 60 Freeway in both directions. The freeway, which normally carries about 225,000 cars a day, had been closed since Wednesday after a tanker truck carrying 8,800 gallons of gasoline caught fire. It exploded in a fireball under the Paramount Boulevard overpass in Montebello. The ferocious flames took hours to extinguish. No one was hurt in the fire, but the closure of a key traffic artery clogged highways and surface streets for miles around and made for nightmarish commutes.

A decade ago, Shyima Hall was smuggled into the United States as a 10-year-old slave, forced to cook and clean inside the home of a wealthy Irvine family and, at night, sleep on a squalid mattress in a windowless garage. On Thursday, the Egyptian-born 22-year-old stood before a federal judge in Montebello with nearly 900 others and was sworn in as naturalized U.S. citizen. The ceremony capped a hard-scrabble journey that began with Hall's rescue, wound through the foster care system and ended with her living on her own, working, and with ambitions to become a federal agent.

A tanker truck filled with thousands of gallons of gasoline exploded on the 60 Freeway in Montebello early Wednesday afternoon, damaging the roadway and overpass and shutting down a major transportation artery in one of the busiest vehicle corridors in the nation. The 60 was closed in both directions between the 710 and 605 freeways. Late Wednesday, the California Highway Patrol said the freeway would remain closed at least through the Thursday morning commute. State transportation officials said Wednesday night that it was unclear when the stretch would be reopened.

An engineering firm at the center of a federal bribery investigation awarded about $2 million in contracts to itself under an arrangement with the city of Montebello that state auditors found to be improper. Montebello hired AAE to serve as its city engineer, with the power to pick outside firms to do various engineering jobs for the city. But state Controller John Chiang's office found in an audit released Tuesday that AAE awarded all the work to itself and then approved its own invoices and oversaw its own compliance, which Chiang called "a potential conflict of interest.

State auditors found Montebello improperly handled $31 million, including instances in which officials used funds meant to improve blighted neighborhoods on fancy dinners in Las Vegas, golf, embroidered polo shirts and other "frivolous" items. The two audits, released Thursday, mark more bad news for the city of 65,000 east of downtown Los Angeles. Montebello is seeking a private loan to avoid running out of cash this fall and is the subject of an FBI investigation into allegations that it misused federal housing money.

It was just after sunrise on Dec. 23, 1941, when the tanker Montebello was hit by a torpedo from a Japanese submarine just off the Central California coast, taking 3 million gallons of crude oil with it as it sank. All 38 crewmen aboard the Union Oil Co. of California vessel survived and rowed their way ashore. But since the World War II attack just weeks after Pearl Harbor, the tanker has rested 900 feet below the ocean surface off the coast of Cambria. In recent years, worries have mounted that if crude began to leak from the 440-foot vessel it could foul the state's waters and shoreline, creating an environmental catastrophe.

Dismayed by one City Council member's repeated whistle-blowing about the embattled city, Montebello City Council members are slated Wednesday to discuss rules on how council members communicate and use city letterhead. The move comes after some city officials expressed outrage that Councilwoman Christina Cortez used city letterhead to ask the Los Angeles County district attorney and the state controller to investigate the city. One rule would call for council members to provide for the printed agenda "a brief general description" of what they plan to discuss during public comments, "expressed in complete sentences.