Money Makes a Round Trip

* Laurann Cook is the mayor pro tem of Fountain Valley and current president of the Orange County chapter of the League of California Cities.

In other words, she is a staunch supporter and propagandist for Orange County cities (Orange County Voices, Sept. 21).

Cook says hundreds of millions of dollars in city revenues have been shifted to the state in recent years. And she’s basically right.

But what she conveniently fails to mention is why the state took the money.

The fact is that most of the money shifted from the cities to the state ended up coming back to the same community from whence it came. Only this time it came back to the K-12 school districts instead of the cities.

So, actually, there was no net loss in community spending as Cook alleges.

Simply put, schools got more and cities got less. Naturally, cities are vehemently opposed to sharing what they mistakenly considered to be their own money, even though it is being spent on schoolchildren in their own communities.

But the financial reality is that, on the whole, K-12 school districts were, and still are, in much worse financial shape than most cities, and that is undoubtedly why Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature did what they did.

Take the city of Anaheim and Anaheim Union High School District. Each has about 2,100 full-time employees. But 150 city employees had total compensation of over $100,000 in 1996.

In contrast, only three Anaheim Union High School District employees had total compensation of over $100,000. That’s a huge disparity.

I think it’s worth pointing out that Anaheim is the only government entity in the state to my knowledge that mandates a “Total Compensation Report” by March 31 of each year.

Without this report it would be impossible to make this comparative analysis. That’s why taxpayers in other communities should wise up and demand it.

PHILLIP KNYPSTRA

Anaheim