May 4, 2005 - Top Stories
By DAVID ROSS
Tennis players will get to volley a while longer. Swimmers will get to splash around for another summer. Picnickers will battle ants on the grass for yet another season.
Adams Park got a reprieve Thursday night when John Currier, chairman of the Rincon Indian band, gave a check for $15,000 to parks board Pres. Eric Jockinsen.
That’s enough to keep the park going for another year.
The board voted to postpone terminating the park for several months, possibly a year. It also voted to send a letter to the school district rescinding its request to end the lease of the park.
But, as Jockinsen and other board members were quick to point out, it doesn’t deal with the park’s long-term money hemorrhage.
“That was an absolutely fantastic gesture by the Rincon band,” said Jockinsen, beaming.
“I would like to caution people that this is going to keep us running over there for a year but it doesn’t fix the long term problem of how to generate revenue. Everything over there is aging and it’s a constant battle to stay one step ahead of the bills,” said the board president.
The gift did prompt the board to vote formally to postpone divesting itself of the park, which it leases from the school district.
As he presented the check, the Rincon chairman, whose voice shook with emotion, observed, “We were having a tribal council meeting and we saw the newspaper with a headline about the park. We thought this was the right thing to get behind. Sometimes we can’t move as quickly as we’d like, but our idea was to see if we could help the parks district through next year.”
The audience burst into applause.
Currier said that too often tribal members and the rest of the community focus on issues that separate them. “If we put the ones we disagree to one side and work on the ones we agree on, we can accomplish a lot.”
Interest in the park has grown in the two months since the board announced its intention to give the park back to the school district.
This time about 40 people were at the VC Parks & Rec board meeting. Many of them were leaders of the community.
Easy to get signatures
Carol Prime, who gathered signatures on a petition asking the board to reconsider its decision to give up the park, said, “I knew you were struggling all this time but I didn’t know there was a chance you would close the pool,” she said. “Most people were shocked and learned about it from reading the letters to the editor in the paper. They were surprised that your situation hadn’t been communicated before the election.”
She said it was easy to gather 250 signatures. “People in this community support this park.” A common theme among those she talked to was the sentiment: “Gee, I would have voted for Prop. CC if I had known you were going to close the park.”
Her petition requested the board to keep the park open. It asserted that it is not the school district’s responsibility to do this. It advised the board to seek short-term and long term grants.
“If we get enough people behind it, I don’t see why the community couldn’t do the same thing for this park that it did to raise funds for the high school theater,” said Prime.
For nearly an hour audience members informed themselves about the park’s situation.
Audience member Larry Glavinic said “What I’ve heard is that all of the equipment is aging and that’s why you’re losing money. But last year and the year before you operated at a deficit for the park: Why didn’t didn’t you shut down?”
Jockinsen replied that they took money from the reserves to pay for Adams’s Park. Eventually, if they kept it up, they knew they would run down the reserves to zero.
He added that most people look at the district’s books and see the money that it has in Parkland Dedication Ordinance (PLDO) funds and assume that it has enough funds to operate. The problem, he said, is that this money can only be used for capital purchases. It can buy the car, but not the gas or the tires.
Glavinic added, “When we first moved here, one reason I liked Valley Center was how people came together. Maybe we need a bulletin board to say we need someone to do a fence, or volunteer to do something. I suspect there is some good will in the community. It might hold us over until we can get past this.”
“The volunteers of the past have disappeared,” said Jockinsen. “Over the last few years Valley Center has changed. Attitudes have changed. Now the people who used to do the volunteer work ‘have a life.’ ”
Detaching areas from
the district
Audience member Cal Townsend said the district should rid itself of areas that voted against Prop. CC last November.
“We [members of the garden club] have talked among ourselves. A lot of people on the east side of our district don’t give a damn about our park, because they don’t use it. What can we do to redraw our district boundaries so that they can go their way and we can go ours?”
Jockinsen said that the district had looked at that possibility before. The process is very expensive, would come out of the general fund, with no guaranteed result.
“We may not have a lot of funds, but we do have some political clout through our supervisor,” said Townsend. “Change the game plan. Charging parked cars without a helmet hurts.”
Director Tom Litchfield said it’s a myth that Prop. CC failed because of opposition from Hidden Meadows. Although Meadows voters opposed the bond in large numbers, only two precincts in VC mustered the necessary two-thirds to pass.
Mrs. Johnson said Hidden Meadows people want to start their own parks district.
Litchfield noted that it costs $35,000 to LAFCO (Local Agency Formation Commission) for a boundary adjustment. “You have to pay it up front,” he said.
Audience member and former director Art Weller asked if they could work with the county supervisor to accomplish the same thing.
“We tabled it because we couldn’t afford to gamble with the minuscule resources that we had in the bank. I couldn’t afford to roll the dice,” said Jockinsen.
The ‘brutal truth’
“Maybe we should have come out with the brutal truth to the voters,” he said. “That $15,000 from Rincon is almost exactly our deficit, so for a year we have breathing room. But if someone doesn’t walk out of this room and say, ‘I’m going to do this—I’ll get the volunteers, then the problem won’t be solved.”
The park doesn’t have a caretaker any more, he noted. “So who closes the park every night?”
Marcia Townsend asked if the $15,000 would pay for a caretaker.
“Why don’t have a caretaker because the septic at the park is done,” said Litchfield. “We used to offset the cost of a caretaker by giving them a place to live.”
He added that the last caretaker was doing a “fine job,” and the fact that he had to move was because the septic failed.
Audience member Jack Vosberg said that it is time that the YMCA, located on park property with a $1 a year lease, pay rent.
“They’re getting a free ride,” he said.
Joyce Johnson, general manager of the parks district, said that she and the school district are exploring getting the YMCA to pay rent.
Where the Costs Are
Mrs. Johnson noted, “The pool runs year round and the expenses for that are astronomical. Jamie Smith [who runs the pool] is always looking for new ways to utilize that space.”
Smith has looked at the last three years’ expenditures. “The park lost $15,000 in three years. But the other areas weren’t rolling in the dough. Increasing fees should be looked at seriously. The pool and tennis courts by themselves are not necessarily the issue. With the pool we get surprise expenses. The park doesn’t generate its own income because there are no fees for walking on and having picnics.”
She added that if the pool hosted more lessons during the summer that it might clear another $10,000 over last year.
The pool, she said, “is a community function that this district needs to provide.”
Responding to criticism that the board was not doing its job by considering shutting the park, Jocksinsen responded, “We have an entity of this district that is not running so well. That’s what you elected us to do, to make sure that not just a special interest group, that not just a special interest tennis group, not just a special interest sack lunch, get taken care of. We have to be interested in all of you. We have to take care of all of us.”
Litchfield added that Adams Park was singled out was because the parks district doesn’t own it.
“We had to ask, ‘What does happen if it goes to the school?’ We didn’t know if the school would keep it open. They certainly have a bigger budget to work with. Adams Park as a unit lost fifteen thousand dollars last year. If it stayed the same way, the parks district was gone in three years. We looked at the pool. Two years prior it made money, but last year the energy bills were so high,” said Litchfield.
“The tennis courts are kind of a wash,” he said. “The park routinely loses eight thousand a year. If we could get Adams Park to raise fifteen thousand more a year, that’s not that much.”
“No one at this table wants Adams Park to go away,” said Jockinsen. “But if you look three years down the road and there’s no parks district, we have a fiscal responsibility to the district.”
He added that user fee increases “are definitely on the table.”
Audience member Andy Washburn asked why they couldn’t build a new pool, which would cut maintenance costs associated with aging equipment.
“Sure we could do that,” conceded Jockinsen. “but to gain back that $500,000–it’s really hard to put it back as fast as it goes out. We are trying to hold onto as much of that as we can, to buy some more land.”
Audience member Wayne Reilly said that perhaps the way to approach another bond election is to hire a professional marketing company.
“Most people here are for parks. Maybe I did a poor job of reading the papers, but whatever it was, I didn’t know,” he said.
Weller said the board could generate income for the park by making it more attractive.
He asked when they will be improving the rest rooms.
Jockinsen said they are approved for a HUD grant to do that. As to when it will happen, “I can’t tell you that until we lay out the entire deck of cards and see where it lands,” he said.
“An Empty Room Upstairs”
At the end of the discussion, before the board vote, Jockinsen observed, “It’s great to see this many people in the room. We’d love to have this many people at every meeting. Usually we sit in an empty room upstairs. Make sure your neighbors know to come down on the fourth Thursday of the month.”
Tosh Yamagata, president of the VC Tennis Assn. observed, “We will continue to support the parks as we have in the past, by cleaning the courts, maintaining the lights, replacing the nets, keeping the courts clean. And I think we are gong to donate some funds to cover the costs of things that directly affect the tennis courts.”
These would include weed removal and the water system.
“There are a lot of things that we get from parks and rec and we haven’t before donated those funds. There’s a reason for us to kick in some additional funds. We do want to keep the parks open.”
Yamagata said that many who use the courts don’t belong to the club. “A lot of people will do things if it doesn’t cost them anything or any time. I’m not as confident as you people are about what the people of this community will do for this park.”
“A gaping wound”
In moving to postpone the termination of the park, Jockinsen commented that the previous vote to terminate the park, “at least brought it to the forefront, which was actually my intent. It brought all of you out tonight.
“I don’t want people to sit back and think that this is not a huge, huge problem. It’s a gaping wound. The gift from Rincon will give us some breathing room to get our funding in line.”
The option to end the district’s support for the park remains on the table, he said.
“Don’t sit back and wait. Keep doing what you are doing to generate interest,” he told the audience.
Visitors to this Saturday’s Valley Center Arts & Music Festival are encouraged to bring their lawn chairs or blankets to enjoy a full day of music, fine arts and fun activities.
With an emphasis on offering unique gifts for Mother’s Day, the Artists on the Lawn booths and children’s activities will provide solutions to gift shopping.
The Festival opens at 10 a.m. at the VC Community Center at 28246 Lilac Road (next to the fire station) with free admission and free parking in the lot at Lilac Road and Valley Center Road.
Artists will be selling their works on the lawn and in the Fine Arts display in the Community Center.
The Lavender Fields has donated a limited supply of lavender sprigs that will be distributed by Miss Valley Center and her Court in the gazebo area where they will also be selling drawing tickets for donated gift items.
Chair massages will be offered by Valley Center Wellness Spa along with gift certificates and spa-related items.
The Rad Hatter, a popular festival activity, will assist visitors in making creative and unique hats to wear or give as a gift.
Food vendors include Casa Reveles, Country Junction Deli, shaved ice and kettle korn.
St. Stephen’s Youth Group will be taking photos with fun props as a fund-raiser for their upcoming trip. Petei McHenry from the VC History Museum will have a booth offering books from local VC authors too.
Forever Young, a band composed of mostly local Valley Center residents, begins on the main stage at 11 a.m. followed by folk duo Connie Allan and Bill Dempsey. Their Instrument Petting Zoo on the lawn area will offer visitors an opportunity to pick up and play many different types of musical instruments.
Triple Play, a Valley Center based trio will play hits from past to present. At about 3 p.m., Supervisor Bill Horn is expected to drop by an d assist in making a presentation of the Youth Art Scholarship offered by the Valley Center Arts Assn.
The festival’s featured band begins at 3:30 p.m. Sue Palmer and her Motel Swing Orchestra will have everyone dancing or moving to her upbeat boogie woogie melodies.
For additional information about the Valley Center Art & Music Festival call the office at 749-8852 during business hours.
In an effort to make Western Days a bit more like it used to be in the “old days” the festival’s committee is looking for local people to demonstrate a hobby or skill from the days before cell phones, PDAs and computers.
According to Carol Timm, secretary of the Western Days Committee, “We’re looking for people who spin their own yarn, or do juggling, sleight of hand. Anything that’s from early days that we don’t do today.”
Skills that you could demonstrate might include churning butter, spinning, weaving, carding wool, or even Native American dancing.
“Since we’re charging people to come onto the fairgrounds we’d like to offer something a little bit different,” she said.
If you would like to participate, contact Carol Timm at 207-2880 or call Kym Peters, who is in charge of entertainment at the festival, at 749-7518.
Deadline is May 16.
Honorary Mayor candidate Martha Bozulich, representing the VC Kiwanis Club has no shortage of promises if she gets elected to this powerful and influential office.
Her only announced rival so far is Brenda Kline of the VC Chamber.
“I’m going to promise that there’s going to be parking in front of every business in Valley Center,” she told The Roadrunner.
“I am running because I have a background in music and art and I want to bring culture to Valley Center,” she said, and added, “I want to keep Valley Center rural.”
The candidate also pledges to “watch over the activities of the county planning and land use and keep them posted of our local goals.”
The showdown between mayoral candidates will occur May 22 at Community Hall, 4-7 p.m. She will probably give a speech at the event, she says.
To donate to the Martha Bozulich campaign contact her at Coldwell Banker at 749-5655.
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A resident of Valley Center since 1985, Mrs. Bozulich is originally from the San Fernando Valley. She was a reading teacher for 16 years and taught in Afghanistan for three years, as well as San Francisco, New York City and Los Angeles.
She obtained her real estate license in 1981 and has been selling it since then.
She is also a certified paralegal and large scale litigation for three years with corporate legal offices.
“I got into real estate because I’m interested in land,” she says.
“I like working with people and finding the proper location both financially and spatially . It’s a game to put them into a place that works for them.”
“I like Valley Center because we don’t have big developments. I don’t like working with development real estate. I think tract homes are very boring. I love Valley Center because of the chance for people to do what they want to do and go in the direction they want to go and to follow their own personal interests.”
Possessing a singing voice, she has previously appeared in chorale concerts at Palomar Community College.
Now she sings in the choir at Light of the Valley Lutheran Church.
She is in her third year of Bible study fellowship, a seven year study program, at the church.
Rob Gilster, coach of the phenomenally successful VCHS Jaguars’ Football Team last year, will lead something entirely different this Memorial Day Weekend. He has been named grand marshal of the Western Days Parade. We hope to have an interview with him for next week.
The Valley Roadrunner
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Tel. 760.749.1112 Fax 760.749.1688
Website: www.valleycenter.com
Email: editor@valleycenter.com
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