City Says It Pays a Lot but Receives Little Back : Thousand Oaks: Leaders grow angry at their role as a ‘donor community’ amid dwindling state aid. The county says the town still gets plenty of services.

The county took our money and all we got was a lousy tree.

That’s how Thousand Oaks Councilman Frank Schillo felt a few years ago when county supervisors presented a scrawny pine tree at the grand opening of the city’s multimillion-dollar center for community service groups.

The waist-high pine represented the sum total of the county’s contribution--indicative, Schillo said, of the supervisors’ longstanding indifference toward their wealthiest city.

“We shouldn’t send money to the county if we’re not going to get it back,” Schillo argued. “The county has always looked at Thousand Oaks and said, ‘You can take care of yourselves, but we’ll take your money.’ There’s got to be something wrong (with that).”

Plenty of Thousand Oaks officials feel the same way. As state aid dwindles and local businesses falter, Thousand Oaks leaders have grown increasingly incensed at their city’s role as a “donor community.”

It is unfair, they contend, for their tax dollars to subsidize Camarillo’s parks and Oxnard’s social services when the city of Thousand Oaks has no county-supported parks and few welfare recipients of its own.

Thousand Oaks, they say, gives more than it gets.

At its heart, this protest challenges what county budget Manager Bert Bigler described as “the whole basis of our government--redistribution of money from one area to another.”

In some respects, he said, “the citizens of Thousand Oaks are getting a lot more services than other cities.” As an example, he cited Thousand Oaks’ $63.8-million Civic Arts Plaza on the former Jungleland site, financed by property taxes that the county has rebated to the city’s redevelopment agency.

“To my mind, there are other services much more necessary than (the auditorium),” Bigler said.

Some Thousand Oaks officials, such as Councilwoman Elois Zeanah, also believe that affluent communities have a moral obligation to help the less fortunate.

But increasingly powerful voices--including Schillo, Mayor Judy Lazar and City Manager Grant Brimhall--suggest Thousand Oaks is ill-served by this formula. They offer an alternative philosophy: Especially in tough economic times, a city’s first responsibility is to care for its own.

“We’re paying for services that people on the west end of the county are receiving,” City Atty. Mark Sellers complained. “It’s been a continual source of irritation.”

During the past 13 years, for instance, the Conejo Parks and Recreation District has poured $2.9 million in property tax revenue into a special county fund--and received only $1.8 million back, according to the district’s manager, Tex Ward.

The missing $1.1 million in property taxes went to subsidize parks or other services elsewhere in the county, even though the money had been earmarked for local recreational facilities when Thousand Oaks residents voted in 1963 to establish the parks district and pay for it with higher property taxes.

“I don’t think that’s what people had in mind when they created the park district,” Ward said.

Because of its high property values, Thousand Oaks has long topped the list of contributors to county coffers. Last year, property taxes to the county’s general fund from Thousand Oaks totalled $249 per capita, 20% more than residents in neighboring Camarillo paid and three times more than taxpayers in Fillmore.

It is impossible to precisely quantify the city’s return on that investment. The statistics available present a mixed picture.

Thousand Oaks received substantially more than its share of fire protection services in 1990, the latest year for which information was available. Firefighters devoted 66% more time to each resident in Thousand Oaks than to citizens in nearby Moorpark, according to an analysis of staff deployment.

On the flip side, Thousand Oaks demands far less from the county’s social services agency. Oxnard has 13 times as many residents on welfare, and neighboring Simi Valley has twice as many. And Thousand Oaks is home to just 3.5% of the county’s food stamp recipients.

Although federal and state governments cover the welfare and food stamp payments, the county picks up 15% of administrative costs. The county also pays the full $100,000 tab for its general relief program, which supports impoverished residents who do not qualify for state or federal aid. Only 17 recipients, or 4% of the total general relief caseload, live in Thousand Oaks.

The reason for these disparities is clear: Only 4.2% of Thousand Oaks households fell below the poverty line in 1990, contrasted with 12.5% in Oxnard and 13.2% in Fillmore, according to census figures.

For some, that’s reason enough to reach out and help.

“I don’t think we should be selfish and think every dollar we spend has to come back to us,” Zeanah said. “We have a humane responsibility to help those who are less affluent. We don’t live in isolation.”

Longtime Thousand Oaks businessman Jack Caine agreed: “I’d prefer our money to stay local, but if Simi needs a new fire station and it doesn’t have the wherewithal to fund it, what are we going to do? Let the people burn?”

The county offers a similar perspective. Instead of quibbling about who gets what, cities should worry about “how we can provide the best services for all citizens,” said Richard Wittenberg, the county’s chief administrative officer.

Yet Thousand Oaks officials cannot shake the feeling that such an approach cheats their citizens.

Even setting aside social services, they point to a handful of other areas where they feel the county has shortchanged them. Their favorite examples: the library system and the flood-control district.

For years, Ventura County collected library fund money from Thousand Oaks and annually distributed $800,000 of it to other cities, all the while pledging to build a new facility in the Conejo Valley, according to City Manager Brimhall.

When it became clear in the late 1970s that the county could not afford to fulfill that promise, Thousand Oaks withdrew from the library system and put up the funds for its own building. The city now spends $4 million a year to run its two branches; the county contributes $120,000 to support service for residents of nearby unincorporated land.

A similar situation occurred with flood control, as Thousand Oaks’ taxpayers ended up subsidizing multimillion-dollar improvements in Simi Valley after having been promised vital upgrades in Newbury Park.

“The county’s view is that we’re a sanitary community with cookie-cutter houses and without any significant social needs or problems,” Brimhall said. “Well, the need is there, but it’s not being met.”

Frustrated by the conventional wisdom that Thousand Oaks is problem-free, Supervisor Maria VanderKolk has had a tough time winning support for increased services in her district. Despite hard lobbying, she has not been able to garner funding for a public medical clinic in her district. So indigent patients must find their way, without public transportation, to the county hospital in Ventura or to county clinics in Moorpark or Simi Valley.

“Traditionally, when supervisors from this district have fought to bring up those issues and (demand) services to address them, they’ve run up against a brick wall from staff and other supervisors, who say: ‘We’ve got more serious problems--look at Oxnard, look at Ventura, look at any other part of the county,’ ” said Doug Johnson, an aide to VanderKolk.

As a result, Thousand Oaks taxpayers are hit with a double whammy, Brimhall said. They pay the county, but they often don’t receive the services they need. So the city picks up the slack by dipping into the general fund, siphoning off money that could have been used for discretionary programs.

Just this year, for instance, Thousand Oaks elected to buy into Los Angeles County’s animal-control program at an annual cost of $84,000.

Brimhall insisted his city is still paying, through contributions to the general fund, for the Ventura County animal-control program, even though it no longer uses the services. But Wittenberg said he does not believe Thousand Oaks’ money supports animal control.

The latest, and potentially most volatile, flare-up in Thousand Oaks’ relationship with the county centers on the Ventura County Fire Protection District, which also serves Camarillo, Moorpark, Simi Valley and some unincorporated areas.

To fund construction of four new fire stations, the fire district has asked its members to collect higher fees from commercial and residential developers. The other cities and Ventura County have all approved the increased levies, but Thousand Oaks is balking.

Only one of the four new stations would serve Thousand Oaks; two are in Simi Valley and one in Camarillo. Although fire chiefs argue that any improvement indirectly helps Thousand Oaks by boosting the number of trucks available in an emergency, several City Council members have expressed skepticism.

Furthermore, they said Thousand Oaks should not be required to demand new fees when the city has already extracted $680,000 from the developers of North Ranch and earmarked it for a fire station in that part of town. Construction of that facility will cost about $1.2 million.

“We’re giving them half a pie, and now they’re saying we have to pay for the full cost of our pie, plus the other pies,” Mayor Lazar complained.

The City Council is scheduled to consider the fire district’s request on March 16.

Arguing that Thousand Oaks is once again subsidizing services for other communities, Councilmen Alex Fiore and Schillo have suggested that the city consider breaking away from the district to form its own fire department. Such a move would save the city $1.5 million to $5 million a year, analysts estimated.

But it might also scuttle a system that has worked for more than 60 years, based on shared contributions and shared benefits, Assistant Fire Chief Bob Roper said.

“If fire facilities fees are held just by one city, they won’t have enough to build a station,” Roper said. “But if they put it in a community fund, when a station needs to be built somewhere, there’s money. It may not be a tangible benefit for a given community, but it’s a resource to draw on.”

The tension between the county and its cities--especially those east of the Conejo Grade--has built steadily over the years, and California’s recent budget woes have only upped the ante, analysts on both sides agreed. “The state really makes counties and cities adversaries,” said Johnson, VanderKolk’s aide. “It gives each of them a tin cup and makes them come begging.”

Property Tax Contributions

Per Capita Assessed City General Fund Locality Property Values Taxes Thousand Oaks $8,846,821,161 $249 Oxnard $5,797,484,881 $119 Simi Valley $5,745,479,322 $169 Ventura $5,316,563,998 $169 Camarillo $3,852,777,926 $208 Moorpark $1,726,702,762 $198 Santa Paula $818,411,355 $95 Port Hueneme $763,341,534 $115 Ojai $486,496,630 $188 Fillmore $345,399,696 $83 County unincorporated $8,020,477,904 $267

Source: Ventura County Assessor’s Office