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CALIFORNIA CITY - The City Council voted 4-0 last week, with Councilman Bill Smith absent, to request that Kern County Community Development Block Grant funds be shifted to reconstruction of the fire-damaged community center in City Park.
In addition, the city is requesting an advance of its 2009-10 and 2010-11 block grant funds - totaling $150,770 - for the reconstruction.

The city had originally designated the 2008-09 block grant funds for a water diversion project at the Lakeview Mobile Home Park. This project, however, has been determined to be infeasible, Public Works Director Michael Bevins said.

Instead, the city requested to move the remaining $70,000 in 2008-09 funds to the community center reconstruction effort.

This would mean a total of $220,770 in grant funding for the reconstruction project, with another approximately $60,000 in insurance payments, he said.

The money should be available to the city in March, Bevins said, and will need to be used within the year.

Mayor Larry Adams proposed holding off on the reconstruction work until the parks commission he has planned is in place to offer its advice and recommendations.

"It seems to me like one of the planning issues in that master plan for that area that we might want to get them involved in, whoever they turn out to be," he said.

A commission-designed master parks plan would help the city avoid problems it has had in the past with piecemeal solutions to larger problems.

"We tend to have an issue that is an issue and we tend to solve that particular issue, but we don't attack the totality of the problem," Adams said.

With time for planning, the community center renovations could be tied to the greater effort of refurbishing Central Park.

For example, solar cells could be installed on top of the building to provide power to the pump for the waterfall, Adams said.

"Those are the decisions a park commission should make," he said.

Bevins said that the community development block grants are required to be very specifically targeted. Reconstruction of the center would qualify for health and safety reasons, but additional improvements would probably not be permissible.

Instead, this could be seen as the first phase of a multi-phase approach to improving the center and the park, he said.

"Right now, the main focus is to get a building inhabitable so people can use it and be proud of it and it's not a blight," said Cecile Campbell of the California City Arts Commission, which is housed at the center.

The community center was damaged by a series of fires in April 2007.

agatlin@avpress.com