An Age of Diminishing Returns in City Government : Recession: It could be a new era of leaner--and perhaps meaner--municipal budgets. The choice comes down to more taxes or fewer amenities . . . and the worst may be yet to come.

Recreation centers darkened and locked every Saturday in two West Covina parks.

Nearly empty shelves in the new-books section in Pasadena’s main library.

No Pioneer Days parade, a 50-year tradition, in El Monte.

“Closed” signs posted at 2:30 p.m. in Covina City Hall.

No fireworks at the July 4th, South El Monte city picnic.

The “good life”--created and paid for by city-sponsored amenities--is being sucked out of the San Gabriel Valley by the recession and state budget cutbacks. And the worst is yet to come, state budget experts predict.

“The period from 1990 to 1992 is just the start of a new era in public financing,” said Peter Detwiler, a consultant with the State Senate Local Government Committee. “It’s the beginning of a downsizing in government.”

The prospect of a new era of leaner--and some predict meaner--municipal budgets has city officials buzzing. Over coffee and in hallways, the talk is of uniting, organizing and lobbying Sacramento politicians in one voice for a guaranteed piece of the state fiscal pie. Murmurs of “ballot proposition” fill the air.

Baldwin Park City Manager Don Penman even suggests a system akin to the way public schools are funded, wherein state monies for individual schools are based on pupil attendance.

“Maybe this would be heresy among cities, but school districts are equalized in funding,” Penman said. “Why not cities?”

Still, it’s just talk.

For now, city officials say the reality facing residents in most cities boils down to a hard choice: more taxes or less services.

“We’re not messing around and playing,” said Ed Szynaka, director of Pasadena’s budget-crunched library. “There are just so many dollars that translate into so many people who can do so many things.”

For many cities, the cuts began five years ago when they lost federal revenue-sharing money. Then, the state began tugging at the purse strings. State legislators pecked away at cigarette taxes, traffic fines, prisoner booking fees, and this year they took 9% of property taxes.

The drain, or “mugging” as some city managers call it, came just when city sales taxes were spiraling downward due to the recession. Cities pared desperately to make ends meet. But many say the cuts struck the heart of services and amenities that define a city and add to the quality of life.

Some local examples:

Alhambra residents are digging into their pockets to help pay for the city’s Tournament of Roses Parade float. In flush years, city officials spent up to $90,000 to boost civic pride with a flower-bedecked behemoth to roll down Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard. This year, the council capped the contribution at $50,000. Residents are being asked, via contributions in city water bill payments, to donate another $10,000. Funding is uncertain next year, officials said.

Meanwhile, the city has lost 26 employees in the past two years via retirement and hiring freezes and has had to nip and tuck its services, said Director of Finance Derek Hanway.

“It’s noticeable, it’s definitely different,” Hanway said of city amenities. “Fewer library hours . . . only one library open at times, different hours at the gym, pools not being opened. . . . It’s a list of little things and services that add up over time.”

Azusa voters approved an advisory measure two years ago to replace its nearly 70-year-old, leaky city pool with a $6-million, indoor aquatic center. But with budget cutbacks trimming the city work force by 24 jobs and repeated postponement of street repairs, the new plunge remains just a watery dream. With a newly installed $33,000 fiberglass liner, city officials hope to coax a few more years out of the old pond.

But, said recreation supervisor Randy Noriega, “It’s got very, very old plumbing. . . . Every time we fire the pump up, we just kind of hold our breath and pray that the plumbing holds together.”

Every afternoon, and all day Friday, Covina City Hall closes shop. After laying off 25 employees last year, the city lacked enough people to do the work--and still remain open to the public. So, after 2:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, workers pull the blinds, close doors and rush to catch up on paperwork.

That means people like Gloria Smith, 49, of Glendora, who came to Covina on a recent Monday afternoon to inquire about a job as a part-time clerk, are turned away.

“Oh well, maybe I’ll come back tomorrow,” Smith said as she stood uncertainly in front of the locked personnel office, afraid to knock. “I want a job here. I don’t want to get them mad at me.”

When she came back early the next day, the post had been filled, Smith said.

In Glendora, the Christmas Parade, the Lion’s Club Fourth of July celebration and the merchant craft fair--the Great Glendora Festival--are endangered after the City Council vetoed police overtime for the events.

The Police Officers Assn. and Police Management Assn. have rescued this year’s Yule parade by picking up the $3,000 tab. But as for the other affairs, “It’s up to each sponsoring organization to be able to pay the costs and . . . we don’t know what they’re going to do,” City Manager Art Cook said.

Pasadena was proud when, in the past, such prominent authors as Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove”), Tommy Thompson (“Blood and Money”) and horror writer Stephen King spoke at the library’s author series.

But those glory days are over. The lecture program is gone, along with the free Wednesday afternoon movies and the stacks of meeting agendas from the City Council and other boards and commissions kept in the city’s eight branch libraries. Hours for children’s storytelling were cut back, some branch libraries are staffed by only one person and money to buy new books has been slashed by 60%.

Overall, the city staff, pared by 61 employees over the past two years, now lacks many auditors, researchers, analysts and planners.

“It’s the elimination of the idea of forward planning,” Director of Finance Mary Bradley said.

Finally, beginning in January, City Hall will close two Fridays monthly, saving $250,000 that would otherwise be paid in employee ride-sharing and public transit commuting incentives, Bradley said.

In South El Monte, Santa Claus Inc. will close shop in April after 20 years of Christmas gift-giving to the area’s poor children. The nonprofit toy-recycling agency pays rent with funding from both South El Monte and El Monte. But when South El Monte cut funding this year, agency founder Lee Bollen said she will not be able to pay the $1,000 monthly warehouse rent.

Standing last week in the midst of mended and washed old toys stacked to the ceiling in boxes--Christmas gifts this year for more than 2,500 needy kids--Bollen stood mute and teary-eyed, her lips trembling as she looked over her soon-to-vanish program.

These budget cuts are typical of measures taken statewide by many cities, which bore the biggest burden in the recession, said Jim Harrington, assistant director of the League of California Cities in Sacramento.

State and county governments, plus school districts, increased their personnel rolls by nearly 59,000 employees over the past two years. But the state’s 458 cities lost about 10,000 employees and $1 billion in revenues during the same time, Harrington said.

The reason? Cities occupy the bottom of the political totem pole.

“We never can quite get our act together,” said Monrovia Mayor Bob Bartlett, the league’s president-elect. “We have big cities of over 100,000 people and cities of less than 10,000, rural and urban, and their needs are totally different.”

In contrast, officials from the state’s 58 counties, which also absorbed state budget cuts, united during the recession and won from legislators permission to chop city funding to help offset those cuts and balance county budgets.

That meant cities got hit three times: by their own declining sales taxes, by the state and by the counties.

But now, cities are fighting back, Bartlett said.

In July in a special meeting in Monterey and, in October, during the league’s annual conference in Los Angeles, city officials discussed, among other ideas, placing a constitutional amendment on the state ballot to guarantee steady funding for cities. A third meeting is scheduled in December, Bartlett said.

The battle, however, may be uphill, if not impossible. Ballot initiatives typically cost $4 million to sponsor and cities cannot use city money to defray the expenses, Bartlett said.

Meanwhile, political allies for the initiative may be hard to come by, Bartlett said. Groups supporting the idea might not want to endanger their own relationships with the Legislature.

Already, public utilities have begged off, insiders say. And labor groups, another possible source of support, might want concessions, such as compulsory arbitration, that cities might not be willing to give.

But something has to be done to guarantee city funding, officials say, because more state slashing is on the way. State analysts predict that even with the brutal cutbacks enacted Sept. 2, the state will still end up $2.4 billion short in June.

That worries Baldwin Park’s Penman, who said the recession has made obvious the have and have-not status of cities. Those like Arcadia, with income from the Santa Anita racetrack, and cities with strong retail bases, such as shopping malls or gambling clubs, have not made major cuts like those in poorer cities, Penman said.

A recent study of 50 Southland cities prepared by South Gate city officials found that, even with the budgetary hard times, 12 cities still found money to grant employee salary increases. While some had yet to take their first money-saving measure, others had instituted half a dozen, such as tax and fee hikes, hiring freezes and program cutbacks.

“Everyone’s in a different boat,” Penman said. “Some cities are really looking at this for the first time and others cities, like Baldwin Park, have had to look at this for the two- to three-year period.”

The gap between the have and have-not cities will widen over time, Penman predicts, as cities able to hold on to their amenities become more desirable locales, attracting more businesses, more upscale residents and more revenues.

Thus, he suggests a cooperative approach, such as ending costly tax giveaways to lure car dealers and other businesses from one city to another. Bartlett suggests cities and school districts begin sharing services, such as hazardous-waste collections, fueling of vehicles and grounds maintenance.

Although some sharing has already begun, the tactic may simply be a stop-gap measure to forestall what some say could be major changes in city services.

Without tax increases to continue current services, many city officials said, city governments will have to re-examine their roles.

“California is basically an invented place,” Detwiler said. “Maybe, just maybe, we have to reinvent a California in the ‘90s that is different from the California of the ‘80s.”