Agencies Look at Proposal to Patch Relations : Moorpark: City and school officials have agreed to take plan to their respective bodies.

The city of Moorpark and the Moorpark Unified School District will consider creating a committee to improve often-strained relations between the two agencies, officials said Monday.

School board member Clint Harper said he discussed the idea with Councilman Bernardo Perez over the weekend, and both agreed to return to their respective bodies to pitch the idea.

“It’s been my experience that the relationship between the school district and the city is less than optimal. I think that’s a kind way of putting it,” Harper, a former councilman, said. “I think a lot of it is a failure to communicate.”

Although some tension has existed between the two agencies since the city incorporated in 1983, a more than six-year battle over ownership of a former school site has galvanized the sides against each other in recent years.

The city sued the district in 1988 over Moorpark’s right to purchase the 10-acre site from the school district, and the ensuing legal battle raged for years through several courts before the sides agreed to resume negotiations last year.

City and school officials say they are now closer than ever to resolving that dispute and want to look to the future in a more cooperative vein.

“The school board and the council are both policy makers and they set the tone and direction for our respective organizations,” Perez said. “We can no longer afford to sit back and watch things happen or, worse, watch things fall apart.”

One way of improving relations between the two agencies, officials say, is improving relations between school Supt. Tom Duffy and City Manager Steve Kueny.

Even their employers--the school board and City Council--admit to being less than enthusiastic about the adversarial attitude the administrators have displayed.

“Those two get anywhere near each other and the sparks fly,” Mayor Paul Lawrason said. “I don’t know why that is. They like to twist each others’ tails and, frankly, that’s not real productive.”

“I know Mr. Duffy would say that the problem doesn’t lie with him, it lies with Steve,” school board member Tom Baldwin said. “And I’m guessing that if you ask Steve, he’d say the problem lies with Tom. But regardless of who is at fault, they don’t get along.”

Duffy was on vacation Monday and Kueny did not return phone calls. But members of the school board and City Council said it’s now important to try to mend fences, and said they might consider instructing the men to make a more concerted effort to get along.

Harper said he envisions a committee made up of the mayor, one council member, the president of the school board and one other board member.

He said the group would ideally meet each month to discuss upcoming issues and try to diffuse potentially volatile situations before they have a chance to boil over.

Lawrason said he would support entering into such an arrangement with the school district.

“I think maybe it is time that we tried to do that,” he said. “We’ve not been real successful in cooperating and communicating the way things are set up right now.”