Council OKs Budget After Erasing Deficit

After whittling away $151,000 worth of vacant jobs and shuffling police hardware requests onto another funding list, the City Council has approved a balanced $32.6-million budget for 1996-97.

The council voted 5 to 0 late Monday to raise the city’s annual spending level by 8% next year from the current budget of $30.2 million.

Until the City Council opened a series of budget review sessions earlier this month, Simi Valley faced a $327,300 shortfall in revenue that it expected from taxes, fees and state and federal funding.

But the council pared that shortfall to zero by rejecting budget requests for expensive hardware, such as a mobile police command center, and by finding alternate funding for other needs.

Rather than use money from the general fund for a $96,000 optical imaging system for loading paper records into police computers, the council told the Police Department to pay for it with proceeds from sales of property seized in drug cases.

The council also froze two vacant positions in the department of public works.

And council members ended a practice of waiving building and plan check fees for earthquake reconstruction, which was put in place after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Collecting those fees again will bring the city an estimated $48,000.