By Nancy Needham  nancy@theacorn.com

JANN HENDRY/Acorn Newspapers SITE WILL BE REFURBISHED--Day laborers wait for work at Royal Oaks Drive and Hampshire Road in Thousand Oaks on Tuesday. The site, just north of the 101 Freeway, is budgeted by the city to get $100,000 in improvements, including restrooms and floral landscaping. The one-year budgets approved by the City Council for the next two years beginning in July include some big-ticket items: $2 million for Auto Mall street parking modifications, $7 million in streetscape and landscape projects and $5 million for the proposed Discovery Center.

Another $5 million has been set aside for the Lang Ranch Park Phase I that would add eight baseball fields for Little League events. The Civic Arts Plaza will also get millions to spruce up its appearance. New furniture is to replace the old at city hall and the main library.

New equipment will be purchased to wash city buses and to lift them so their brakes can be checked.

The day laborer site will have flowers planted, permanent restrooms and other improvements at a cost of $100,000.

Two police officers will be among the three new school resource personnel added full time at Conejo Valley Unified School District high schools as the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program is dissolved.

These allocations were made official at the June 12 City Council meeting, where the consecutive one-year budgets were passed 4-1 with Councilmember Claudia Bill-de la Peña dissenting. The budget for 2007-08 was set at $213 million.

"We've gotten 500 calls for service a year from the high schools," said Police Chief Dennis Carpenter after the council meeting. "Now we'll have officers at the schools."

That will work more effectively than before, he said, and could result in the improvement of response times to other calls in the city.

The city's police force will add a detective to protect Thousand Oaks youth from Internet sexual predators as the police join a network of officers around the country fighting perversion that comes through technology, Carpenter said. The detective will conduct "Dateline NBC"-type operations, Capt. Randy Pentis said.

Several positions have been frozen or reduced by the new budget. The community development department has cut an associate planner, a building inspector and an administrative secretary. In the community and cultural services department a video production technician position wasn't filled, and one designated part-time crossing guard supervisor position replaced an hourly position.

"The city is in outstanding financial condition. We're not experiencing hard times. We're not having cash flow problems," Mayor Andy Fox said. "We did have a challenge in balancing the budget with respect to the recurring revenues to cover recurring appropriations, and we did rise to that challenge and we did that by cutting some positions, but we also put in money for two new positions at the police department--additional school resource officer and detective positions."

Agreement over spending was not unanimous. During the last council meeting, Fox asked the city staff to set up study sessions after questions were raised about the use of $40 million in undesignated city reserve funds to pay for budget items the city couldn't otherwise afford.

"Why are community study sessions and financial experts needed to address the simple problem of overspending? You are overspending. You need to stop it. Period," resident Dawn Williams said.