Oxnard Council to Consider New Cutbacks : Budgets: City manager urges department mergers, elimination of two elected positions.

Oxnard City Manager Vernon G. Hazen is recommending that the city eliminate five departments and consider dropping the elected positions of city clerk and city treasurer in order to balance the city’s budget.

The proposed reorganization would eventually result in an annual savings of $1.6 million, with $584,000 in savings coming in the 1993-94 fiscal year that begins July 1.

The recommendations are contained in a report obtained Friday and scheduled to go before the City Council on Tuesday. It has until June 30 to pass a new budget.

If the five departments are eliminated, the number of city departments would shrink to eight from the current 16. The council has already approved the elimination of three other departments through mergers.

The savings are intended to further reduce an austere $60-million budget presented to the council in May. The additional reductions may be necessary if the city loses up to $2.6 million in revenue that state legislators are expected to shift to school districts.

Councilman Bedford Pinkard, who worked for the city for 32 years before retiring, asked Hazen last month to return with a reorganization plan. He said Friday he welcomes the chance to trim the city’s overhead.

“We can better serve the public through consolidation,” said Pinkard, who had not seen Hazen’s specific proposals. “We don’t need a lot of the administrative overhead that we have.”

Under Hazen’s plan, the city’s personnel department would be absorbed by the finance department and the Fire Department included with police in a new public safety department. The council has already agreed to merge the duties performed by parks and recreation, redevelopment, and management and budget services with other departments.

Hazen also will recommend that the city attorney, the economic development department and the Oxnard library be privatized. The city would pay for legal services only as needed and would spin off the library and economic development department as nonprofit community services.

The library would be one element of a nonprofit foundation for the arts, while economic development activities might be absorbed by the private Ventura County Economic Development Assn., Hazen suggested.

If adopted, the proposed changes would eliminate 11 high-ranking positions in addition to the 12.5 positions already targeted for elimination in the draft budget.

The elected positions of city clerk and treasurer could only be eliminated if a majority of Oxnard voters agree to do so, but the duties--and pay--of the two positions could be reduced by the council, Hazen said Friday.

He added it is unlikely the elected posts could be dropped before the terms of the current officeholders expire in 1996. In a report to the council, Hazen warned that changes in the two elected positions might be viewed as political tampering if done without an election.

Hazen said the savings achieved by the proposed reorganization could be followed by further savings once the departments are merged and the effects on city services are examined.

In his report, Hazen noted that he consulted with the city’s departments before proposing the reorganization, and he said the savings can be achieved without a large loss in city services. But he added that the city cannot achieve change without some pain.

“Will there be a diminution of certain services? Probably,” Hazen said. “But can we get along better with the reorganization than without it? Yes.”

He said the recent restructuring of parks and recreation, by adding parks to public works and recreation to community services, demonstrates the likely success of the proposed reorganization.

“People came out with doomsday reports when we considered the change, but the merger has gone better than expected,” Hazen said. “Recreation is alive and well, and parks are alive and well.”

The changes, he said, would increase the city’s organizational agility and make the city more competitive.

“We’ve all got to get more competitive if we are going to survive in the current economic climate,” Hazen said Friday. “It’s not business as usual these days. Just ask IBM or General Motors.”