Costa Mesa City Council drops several objectives

Deirdre Newman

Councilman Gary Monahan succeeded in ferreting out what he considered

fluff from the City Council’s community objectives.

On Tuesday, Monahan convinced his colleagues to remove a host of

items from the city’s priority list to save precious city funds. The

state faces a $35-billion deficit, and Costa Mesa, like cities

throughout the state, can expect a loss of millions of dollars when

the 2003-04 budget is adopted later this year.

Gone are objectives such as pursuing funding and construction of a

compressed natural gas facility and the expansion of after-school

programs to the middle and high schools.

Financial officials have yet to tally the savings to the city, but

the biggest allocation freed up was $500,000 intended for Costa Mesa

Cares and other after-school programs, said Marc Puckett, director of

finance. The funds will now enter the general fund for other purposes

as needed, Puckett said.

While some residents commended the council for reducing its

priorities to prepare for shrinking funds, they emphasized the

obvious importance of including the community in the community

objectives.

“It’s mostly a council wish list,” resident Doug Sutton said.

“They may get their information from their community supporters, but

there’s no real process to go out and work with the community and

prioritize what the community would like to see.”

The allotment for Costa Mesa Cares was supposed to come out of the

Gas Tax Settlement Fund. Newport-Mesa Unified school board member

Dave Brooks, an advocate of after-school programs in the city, said

losing the funds will not be significant immediately, but could have

an adverse effect eventually.

“It’s not going to make a big difference in the short term because

of the fact that there wasn’t a method to access that money,” Brooks

said. “In the long term, it may have a real effect, and obviously it

means the ability to expand is now really curtailed.”

Councilwoman Libby Cowan dissented the most on removing some of

the priorities, including the natural gas facility and leveraging no

less than half of the anticipated revenues from IKEA to float a

20-year bond to form an underground utility district.

“The undergrounding of utilities is a very expensive [project],

and the only way we can do it in a wholesale manner is to do some

kind of bonding,” Cowan said. “Why not do it against monies that will

be there, but won’t affect, and aren’t already in, the general fund

flow?”

The city is working to create a different process to tie the

community objectives in with long-term goals, Cowan said.