WESTMINSTER : 2 Schools Declared as Surplus Property

The Westminster School District board has declared Midway City and Gill elementary schools as surplus property, paving the way for their eventual lease or sale.

Supt. Gail Wickstrom recommended the action, saying the estimated $3 million from disposing of the properties could help pay for the repair of the district’s other schools.

“I don’t do this without great hesitation,” Wickstrom told the board Tuesday. Based on staff enrollment projections, she said, “I don’t believe the Midway City property will be needed for future growth.”

“Gill School is not needed and has not been needed since 1976,” she added.

The board unanimously approved Gill as surplus property but split 3 to 1 in approving a similar declaration for Midway City.

Trustees Ron Morgan, Sheryl Neugebauer and Kathleen Stirling Iverson supported the motion, but Trustee Margie L. Rice opposed it, saying the advisory panel that originally recommended selling the school in 1989 was “biased.”

The Midway City campus, at 8521 Hazard Ave. in Westminster, was built in 1947 and will be closed this summer. Its students and staff will move to the Jessie B. Hayden campus, which is currently closed and will be remodeled by September, said district spokeswoman Audrey Brown.

The 10-acre Gill site, at 15252 Victoria Lane in Huntington Beach, has been leased to the county special education program since 1976. The 100 students participating in that program will be moved to other sites, Wickstrom said.

Several residents asked the board to reject the staff recommendation or delay a vote, saying the district had insufficient information about current property values and potential enrollment growth.

George Mathis, president of the Golden West Homeowners Assn., called the district’s $3-million estimate “an arbitrary guess” and warned the board that it risked selling the property for too little in a poor market.

However, the district’s attorney, Richard Godino, said that getting a precise estimate now for the properties’ value is “premature” and emphasized that the board was considering whether to declare the sites as surplus, not deciding whether to actually sell them.

The board would not make any final decision until after the fair market value and other information were available, he said.

The board is unlikely to make such a decision on Midway City for at least six months.

Because the county’s lease at Gill expires in 1994, the board would not make a decision concerning that site for at least 18 months.

After the meeting, Iverson said the board would not let the properties go unless the district stood to gain substantially from their sale.

“We have aging schools, and they need and deserve to be brought up to current standards, and we have no way of raising revenue to do it,” she said. “There comes a time when you have to dig into your savings account.”