Schools Eyeing Santa Ana Dollars

The Santa Ana Unified School District soon may challenge the city to live up to its motto that education comes first.

The district, one of the four fastest growing in Orange County, commissioned a study about six months ago to determine whether the lack of action by past school boards, combined with ambitious city building plans, could obligate the city to contribute millions of dollars in redevelopment money to help relieve overcrowded classrooms.

School board President Sal Mendoza revealed during a board meeting recently that the confidential study is being conducted, and said that he believes the city may owe the district up to $80 million for school construction and expansion.

Mendoza said board members will review the study, which cost about $8,000, behind closed doors today.

Mendoza said that overcrowded classrooms stem from city plans dating back to the 1980s, when apartments and condominiums went up in downtown Santa Ana in the hope of providing more housing and luring young professionals into the city.

But the result was a population boom almost exclusively fueled by large, sometimes extended families.

Mendoza said that because a combination of city zoning policies and redevelopment money allowed the high-density apartment buildings, city redevelopment money should help relieve the school overcrowding that resulted.

At the district’s Century High School, for example, two of six outdoor basketball courts and an area earmarked for an outdoor swimming pool are now filled with portable classrooms to help relieve a space crunch.

“What went up was all these apartment buildings,” Mendoza said, “and now we’re paying the price for it.”

City Councilman Robert L. Richardson, who served on the school board from 1988 to 1990, said it would be premature to comment on whether the city would negotiate with the school district. But he added: “I’m real proud of the legacy to develop a positive working relationship between the city and the school district. The results of that are all over town.”

Richardson pointed to $8 million of redevelopment money the city loaned to the school district in the late 1980s to help relieve overcrowding.

Since 1972, Santa Ana has instituted six redevelopment zones, which have generated about $150 million in tax revenue over the last 10 years, said Bob Hoffman, the city’s redevelopment and real estate manager.

Redevelopment zones are aimed at renovating blighted areas. The city may use money generated from redevelopment zones to fund business and residential projects. Before 1994, school districts and cities would enter into negotiations over how much the schools would receive.

In 1994, state law laid out the percentage of redevelopment money to be given each government agency, including school districts.

But until 1989 in Santa Ana, a time punctuated by bitter relations between the city and the school district, school board members failed to negotiate with the city for redevelopment money.

*

School district officials cite a number of reasons for the lack of negotiations, including inexperience with complex redevelopment issues and the belief that the state would help pay for new school facilities.

School board members “were just asleep at the switch,” said current board member Robert W. Balen, who criticized Mendoza for revealing the existence of the current study. Balen believes the district has little chance of receiving any money.

So far, the district has reached three agreements for redevelopment money that have paid the district $3.5 million, according to Robert W. Giritz, the school district controller.

Redevelopment money is not used to pay for the day-to-day operations of school districts. Rather, in Orange County, that funding typically comes from a combination of county property taxes and state general fund money.

But redevelopment money is coveted by school districts.

And Mendoza believes the city owes the district at least 10 years’ worth of past redevelopment money.

“We’ve been impacted by redevelopment. That is a given,” he said, and later added that “we have a responsibility to seek all avenues to get dollars to build new facilities.”

The school district’s latest action may be the first of its kind in Orange County, said Bob Ours, an administrator with the Orange County Department of Education who works on redevelopment issues.

Kevin Mukri, spokesman for the California Redevelopment Assn., said school districts and other government agencies have asked to modify past redevelopment agreements, but changes have been made informally and with little fanfare. Rarely, he said, has an agency commissioned a formal study as has the Santa Ana school district.

Redevelopment negotiations “have happened a lot of times,” Mukri said. “But not to this point, where there’s a study.”