City Says It Is Being True to Its Schools

THOUSAND OAKS —  More than a year after the new Civic Arts Plaza began draining money for community projects, the city appears to be making good on a decade-old pledge to help fund a stadium and theater for local high schools.

By refinancing the existing debt of the Thousand Oaks Redevelopment Agency, the city has saved enough money to fulfill its longtime promise of $3.3 million for a stadium at Westlake High School and a theater at Thousand Oaks High School, according to a staff report.

The City Council will vote Tuesday to authorize an initial payment of $1 million to help fund the stadium. The remaining $2.3 million will be allocated later for the theater project.

“We made a good-faith commitment to the school district that we would come through with the funding, and we are,” Mayor Andy Fox said.

But Mildred Lynch, a Conejo Valley Unified School District board member who last year questioned the city’s ability to come up with the money, says she will not believe it until she sees it.

“All they have is promises,” she said. “Until it is in our hands, we don’t have it.”

Keith Wilson, principal at Thousand Oaks High School, is more optimistic after a decades-long search for money to build a 400-seat auditorium at the school.

“We just got the green light to go ahead so we are moving into the real heavy-duty part of planning right now,” he said. “We can’t wait.”

The school has been struggling to come up with the money to add a 10,000-square-foot theater since the campus was built in 1962.

Up until the late 1980s, the school held its drama performances under an outdoor tent. Then it switched to a reconfigured wood-shop classroom that could seat about 100 of the school’s 2,100 students.

In the mid-1980s, the City Council promised to do something about the problem. But discussions about funding a new theater coincided with the city’s struggle to finance the Civic Arts Plaza, Wilson said.

When city officials began hinting in 1994 that they would be hard-pressed to meet commitments to the district, some school officials feared they would never see the money.

“There was some question over whether the city was going to be able to come up with the funds,” Wilson said. “But basically, I refused to believe that it wouldn’t happen.”

Meanwhile, Westlake officials funded the construction of their stadium, which seats 4,300, using school district resources. If the $1 million comes through, the money will be used to recover costs, said Sean Corrigan, director of planning and facilities at the Conejo Valley school district.

The stadium, which was completed last year, has already seen its first football season.

The Thousand Oaks High School theater is scheduled to be completed by the spring of 1997, Wilson said.

Fox said fulfilling its promise to the school district has exhausted the funds of the city’s Redevelopment Agency, which uses property tax revenues to finance public improvement projects.

“Right now we are out of redevelopment dollars for quite some time,” Fox said.