Stanton Ca Finances

The City Council this week tabled a discussion on the fate of the 20-year-old Stanton Neighborhood Center pending a request for state funds to help operate it. The center, on Santa Paula Street, is in need of money for upgrades and to pay for programs, director Stella Cox said. She said the center has no hot water, some exposed electrical wiring and worn siding.

The Government Finance Officers Assn. of the United States and Canada has honored the city with a certificate for excellence in financial reporting. The certificate was given to Stanton administrative services director Mark Uribe for compiling the city's financial report comprehensively and clearly.

The county-run library will soon be open an extra day each week, thanks to an infusion of $5,000 in city funds. The City Council unanimously agreed this week to spend city reserve funds to keep the library open four days a week for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends June 30. "The importance to our community of the municipal library well supports the expenditure of that money," Councilman David John Shawver said.

Designating nearly all of the city a redevelopment area, the City Council cleared the way for the collection of additional property tax revenue. Unlike other redevelopment areas in the state, Stanton's redevelopment project does not aim to attract businesses. Also unlike other redevelopment plans, it will not use eminent domain to achieve its goals.

City Councilman David John Shawver said he is prepared to cut police and fire services by a third if the city's June 3 ballot initiative on public safety services fails. The ballot measure calls for a public safety services fee that would raise about $2.9 million a year to pay for police and fire services. The fee is needed, Shawver said, to offset losses from Proposition 218. That measure, passed by voters statewide in November, limits how cities may levy taxes and fees.

The city's budget for the new fiscal year will give Stanton employees a 2% raise and set aside about $20,000 from the general fund to pay for a youth development program that had previously been funded by federal grants. The $9.54-million budget passed by the City Council on Tuesday for fiscal 1996-97 varied only slightly from the original spending plan proposed and is leaner than budgets of previous years.

The city faces the prospect of a leaner budget for the upcoming fiscal year and will have to get by on about $61,000 less, City Manager Terry Matz wrote in his budget report to the City Council. "The current and future general fund revenue picture is not a bright one," Matz wrote, because of continuing declines in property, sales and utility taxes and development fees. The council is set to vote on a 1996-97 fiscal plan tonight. The $9.

At a cost of more than half a million dollars, Stanton agreed this week to join a new countywide communications system for police, firefighters and other emergency workers. The City Council unanimously approved a joint agreement with the county to build the 800-megahertz communication system that is expected to be fully operational by 1999. The new system will upgrade the current 400-megahertz system, which has been described by law enforcement officials as dangerously obsolete.

Hoping to reduce the city's crime rate, the City Council this week approved spending $75,130 to pay for increased sheriff's patrols. The money, which came from a state grant, will be used to pay for 1,800 hours of overtime this year for deputies who patrol Stanton. The grant will also cover the increased cost of bookings that are likely to occur from more arrests. "The crime rate in the city is down, but why not make it go down more since the money has been made available to us?"

The neighboring Orange County cities of Stanton and Westminster are set to become the first in the state to take an old tactic to a new extreme--raising revenues by declaring virtually their entire towns "blighted" redevelopment zones. Instead of using redevelopment to restore dying city centers, officials in Stanton and Westminster voted Wednesday night to designate their cities redevelopment areas in an effort to keep hundreds of millions in extra tax dollars over the next 30 years.