Council Funds Record Amount of Community Grants

Tuesday night’s RPV City Council meeting began with a staff report showing pressures facing the city’s fiscal year 2011 budget and ended with the council approving $142,500 in grants to 21 applicants, including the Peninsula High School pool project.

The total value of the approved grants was said to be the largest in city history.

“This is the largest contribution we’ve ever made,” City Manager Carolyn Lehr said.

The council awarded its biggest grant, worth $80,000, to the Peninsula Pool Campaign, which needs to raise $2.1 million by June 1 to replace a 40-year-old pool too small for major swim and water polo competitions and is literally falling apart. 

The pool’s deck and coping is crumbling, and the metal rebar “skeleton” supporting the deck is rusting and corroding. Campaign officials said the damaged pool has caused injuries to athletes and that some schools refuse to compete in it. Plus, constant pump and filtering problems are compromising the pool’s water quality.

Based on health and safety concerns, the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District has approved $1.3 million to build a new pool. The campaign has collected another $400,000, including the council’s grant, so far.

But the clock is ticking. The district’s funding authorization expires June 1, so the campaign needs to bring in the final $400,000 by then in order to build the new pool.

“We are really under a time crunch,” said Mary Di Matteo, co-chairman of the Peninsula High School Pool Committee, who addressed the council. “This pool is a huge community asset … and several outside groups use it besides the student athletes at our school.”

The council unanimously approved the $80,000 grant with some key conditions:  that the campaign raise the funding needed to replace, not just renovate, the pool; and that the city and the school district enter into a joint use agreement to permit recreational activities for the community, not only students, to be held at the pool.

“We are thrilled that they granted us the funds,” said Di Matteo, the parent of a Peninsula water polo player. “I actually had tears in my eyes.”

Emotions run high within the campaign. The biggest individual donation is $150,000, made by Ken and Marilyn Prindle. Their daughter, Jaclyn, was a popular member of the school’s swim and water polo teams from 1999 to 2003. 

Jaclyn died last year at age 24 from heart problems caused by Marfan’s Syndrome.  The disease affects the body’s connective tissue, and estimates say that at least one in 5,000 Americans have the disorder. If the campaign raises the targeted funding by June 1, the new pool will be named in Jaclyn Prindle’s honor.

The council turned down grant requests from two prominent community organizations. The Peninsula Education Foundation asked for $55,000 to aid their annual campaign to raise funds to help the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District cover its operating expenses.

Carolynn Petru, deputy city manager, called it a “unique request” that asks the city to help defray the operating expenses of another government agency that provides services to the same community. The staff recommended denying the request because it didn’t fit the city’s normal criteria for issuing grants.

Mayor Tom Long and Councilman Douglas Stern said that granting the $55,000 request sets a bad precedent for city grant requests and won’t help solve the long-term underlying financial problems facing the district.

Approving the $55,000 request, Long said, is like “throwing a life jacket meant for a small child to a whale in distress.”

The school district’s operating budget is $90 million a year, he said, adding that the only way RPV could afford to offer significant financial help is to make “dramatic cuts” in the city’s own operating budget of about $20 million a year.

Long said the district and foundation must find other ways to address the financial problems other than “cannibalizing the budgets of each of the (Peninsula’s) cities.  We can’t do it, and it won’t work in the long run.”

In turning down the chamber’s request for $5,000 to help its operating costs, the majority of the council took a similar stance—that the organization should turn to its membership for such funding.

Other major grants approved Tuesday night include $10,000 apiece to Peninsula Seniors, the Palos Verdes Library District, and the South Bay Children’s Health Center. 

The council also approved a $7,000 grant to the docent program at the Point Vicente Interpretative Center; $5,000 grants to South Bay Family Health Care and the Kiwanis Club of Rolling Hills Estates, which supports activities across the Peninsula, including the Palos Verdes Marathon; and $4,000 to the Harbor Community Clinic.   

Smaller grants went to several other organizations, including the Community Helpline, Pet Protectors League, Shakespeare by the Sea, Norris Center for the Performing Arts, and Support for Harbor Area Women’s Lives (SHAWL). 

Council members acknowledged their decisions on grant requests would leave several groups, most of which are staffed with volunteers, unhappy with their funding decisions.

“We’re dealing with a finite resource, which is money,” Mayor Pro Tem Anthony Misetich said. “There’s never enough, but we try to stretch it as best we can."

Four of the five council members tried to meet staff’s recommendation to target grant funding—not counting the pool request—to a maximum of $60,000. Only Councilman Brian Campbell ignored that target, recommending approval of more than $125,000 in grants as an “investment back into the community” in a tough economy.

“I see this as a much more serious economic emergency out in the community,” Campbell said. “I think we can find the money. Every organization out there that is struggling for money will just have to find a way.”

The council considered the grant requests after hearing a staff report which gave an overview of the city’s sources of general fund revenue, in preparation for a May 21 public workshop on the FY 2011 budget.

The tenor of the report was just how limited the city’s revenue-generating sources are and how far they’re stretched. For instance, RPV has the lowest amount of general revenue per capita—about one-third less than the statewide average and about half as much as other contract cities in the South Bay.

The report also shows that the city provides services with a much smaller staff than surrounding cities, when comparing full-time personnel to the number of residents served.

Despite the budget pressure and the fact that many organizations saw their requests cut or not funded at all, Lehr said the $142,500 in grants approved by the council “far exceeds” payouts of previous years.

“And as far as I know, we’re the only city on the hill that’s making any contributions of these sorts," she said.