Money Problems Still Plague Port Hueneme : Budget: Signs of a financial crisis are abundant, and the mayor says services may have to be cut again.

When an electrical short blacked out the lights at Port Hueneme’s baseball diamond on a recent Thursday night, the city’s sorry finances forced the City Council to make a harsh decision.

If the lights went out again, the council informed the recreation director, the city would not be able to afford the estimated $17,000 needed to fix the problem and would have to cancel the softball league’s remaining schedule.

Fortunately for Port Hueneme’s softball players, the aging light standards at Moranda Park survived until the end of the season, sparing the city the wrath of 100 softball players.

Unfortunately for Port Hueneme residents, though, the problem was just the latest of numerous financial shocks that have left some of the city’s 24,000 residents wondering how the city will continue to pay its bills.

“I’m pessimistic because of what I see the state is going to do to city funds again,” said Dorothy Blake, who served on the city’s General Plan Advisory Committee. “In that sense, there’s nothing special about the problems Port Hueneme has.”

Mayor Orvene Carpenter gave a grim assessment of the city’s financial health.

“It’s pretty much gloom and doom,” Carpenter said. “If we don’t receive more money, we’ve got to cut services again.”

As in many other cities in the state, Port Hueneme leaders have repeatedly slashed expenditures the past two years, paring $900,000 from the city’s general fund and dropping 15 employees from the payroll.

Signs of a financial crisis are everywhere in Port Hueneme.

Strapped for cash, the council voted to close the Dorill B. Wright Cultural Center, lease out the city’s athletic center for a dollar a year, and pay its former financial director to work part time from his Colorado home.

City officials are also preparing to contract for police services from Oxnard or the Sheriff’s Department at an annual savings of $500,000, unless residents approve a property tax override on next June’s ballot.

The city’s efforts to raise revenues to replace the loss of state funds have met with mixed results.

Beginning three years ago, the city approved creation of three assessment districts to help pay for the maintenance of the city’s beach, parks and landscaped medians. The districts raised a combined $360,000 last year.

But the districts are controversial, and passage of the beach maintenance district three years ago led to protests by affected residents who complained that the city had imposed a view tax.

The state Legislature eventually amended the 1972 Lighting and Landscape Act that authorized cities to create such districts, barring cities from overriding the protests of residents.

More recently, there has been stiff opposition to a city plan to build a 10-acre recreational vehicle resort on the beach, a project city officials hope will bring in annual revenues in excess of $400,000.

Residents of beachfront condominiums, together with the Sierra Club, have sued the city in an effort to halt the project. In February, the council will consider the revised project that includes a plan to monitor coastal wetlands.

City leaders say it is Port Hueneme’s unique location that complicates the city’s financial dilemma. Hemmed in by the Pacific Ocean, the city of Oxnard and the Naval Construction Battalion Center, Port Hueneme has just 53 acres of vacant land left out of 2,850 acres.

Miles from the nearest freeway, the city is a poor candidate for attracting regional shopping centers and the attractive sales tax dollars they provide, officials say.

“If you run a circle around Port Hueneme to establish a market area, the circle runs into the Seabee base or the ocean,” City Manager John R. Velthoen said. “It’s hopeless.”

Ron Fuller, a developer who was a member of the General Plan Advisory Committee, said the members of the advisory committee found it difficult to identify new revenue sources.

“We spent a lot of time looking for new revenue sources,” Fuller said of the committee that met monthly for 14 months. “There is no room to attract retail centers to the city. All we can hope for are convenience stores and a few supermarkets.”

A hearing on the proposed general plan revisions will be held Jan. 5, and comments may be given to the city through that date.

Robert Braitman, a private land-use consultant who headed the county’s Local Agency Formation Commission until last year, said Port Hueneme’s financial bind is largely due to circumstances outside the city’s control.

“It’s not a case where the city staff is incompetent, profligate or corrupt,” Braitman said. “What they’ve done is provide housing for county residents at the expense of more shopping centers, and built a cultural center instead of an amusement park.”

Braitman blames state laws that both award sales tax revenues to the cities where the products are purchased and distribute an ever smaller share of local property taxes to cities.

“The people in Port Hueneme are largely shopping elsewhere, creating a transfer of sales tax revenues from Port Hueneme to other communities,” he said.

In a 1991 study of city financing, LAFCO determined that Port Hueneme received the lowest amount of sales tax revenues per resident ($31.43) of any city in Ventura County. The same study showed that the city received the second-lowest amount of property taxes ($69.95) for each resident.

The study showed that Port Hueneme and other revenue-poor cities of Santa Paula, Moorpark and Fillmore received less than half the amount of combined tax revenues than the cities of Ojai and Ventura.

Walter Kieser, a consultant for Berkeley-based Economics & Planning Systems, said the caps placed on property taxes in 1979 when voters approved Proposition 13 have forced cities to look in other directions to raise revenues.

Strategies include “fiscal zoning” to lure retail shopping centers, the use of redevelopment agencies to siphon property taxes away from schools and counties, charging more fees for city services and creating assessment districts.

Bitter opposition to assessment districts--which has resulted in the recall of city council members this year in Union City and Half Moon Bay--has limited the spread of assessment districts, Kieser said.

“Most cities have pretty much maxed out those opportunities,” Kieser said of various avenues cities have taken to restore their revenues.

In Port Hueneme, an advisory committee has reviewed the city’s three assessment districts to find a way to spread the cost more evenly, but the committee will not recommend raising any more revenues through such districts, one member said.

Despite the evidence of hard times, some opponents of the RV park say the city is not broke and, in fact, has millions of dollars in reserve accounts.

“On one hand, we know the city has been able to borrow $10 million to build a water plant, yet they can’t find $500,000 to pay for our Police Department next year,” opponent David Kanter said. “I think our priorities are backwards.”

Kanter also cited the $1.7 million the city has put aside to build the RV park as a possible source for police funding.

But city officials are adamant that they will have to trim city services again if they are unable to build the beachfront RV park or find other new sources of revenue.

“How long Port Hueneme is viable is up to the people in the city--not to me,” Velthoen said. “If the city doesn’t have a major new source of money, city facilities will gradually deteriorate.”

How Much Cities Collect

Total per capita revenues for Ventura County cities.

Sales Hotel Property City Tax Tax Tax Total Ojai $94.06 $74.48 $116.96 $285.50 Ventura 154.75 21.25 103.75 279.75 Thousand Oaks 111.43 12.28 113.79 237.50 Camarillo 69.71 9.29 134.84 213.84 Simi Valley 66.75 3.71 113.36 183.82 Oxnard 89.55 13.74 80.10 183.29 Santa Paula 51.40 3.17 72.35 126.92 Moorpark 34.39 0.00 90.03 124.42 Port Hueneme 31.43 11.84 69.95 113.22 Fillmore 42.79 3.23 48.68 94.70 County Average 91.21 12.09 100.57 203.87

Figures include taxes for cities, city-governed districts and other districts providing municipal services within city boundaries.

Source: 1991 report by Ventura County Local Agency Formation Commission.