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While Rocklin is struggling with decreased tax revenues, there are no plans to layoff city workers.
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Rocklin, population 52,000, was incorporated in 1893 and built on granite mining and the railroad. According to the city’s website, 22 quarries operated in Rocklin in 1910 and in 1912, close to 2,000 train carloads were shipped out of town. Granite from Rocklin was used in San Francisco and the state capitol building. Today, Rocklin still has many reasons to be proud including top schools, plenty of parks and low crime rates.
Public safety and schools have been high priorities for Rocklin as
demonstrated by the numbers the city unveiled last month at the town’s
State of the City address.
“Rocklin happens to be, as far as
crime is concerned, the safest community in the Sacramento region,”
said Rocklin City Manager Carlos Urrutia. “In 2007, we experienced our
lowest crime rate in the last five years. Our crime rate (for) serious
crimes went down by 12 percent.”
Urrutia also said that Rocklin is one of only two Northern California unified school districts in which every school scores more than 800 on the academic performance index test.
“Everyone knows that Rocklin has outstanding schools,” he said. “For the last 20 years, (the city has) worked with the school district in planning the schools.”
He attributed that cooperation as the reason the town’s schools do so well.
“Rocklin High School was recently named by the US News and World Report as one of the top 400 high schools in the country,” Urrutia said.
The town is also home to Sierra College and William Jessup University.
“We also have a two-year community college and even a four-year university in Rocklin,” he said. “It’s a place you can go from preschool to a four-year college education without leaving your city boundaries.”
The city’s General Plan, crafted 20 years ago, is an example of smart growth that the city has held to, according to Urrutia.
“We have followed it to a ‘t,’” he said. “Rocklin was built the way it was intended to be built.”
He said it was that General Plan that kept commercial development to the main corridors of Highway 65, Interstate 80, Sunset Boulevard and Sierra College Boulevard. The development, mainly located on the edges of city limits, allowed the town to preserve 20 percent as open space, he said.
“The General Plan is our constitution of land use,” he said. “We have a goal of 5 acres of park land for every 1,000 residents (which) exceeds most of the standards. (Our) goal is to have a park within a half mile of every home in the city.”
Rocklin is one of only two cities within the Sentinel’s five-city coverage area that fared well financially last year. Most cities would welcome an increase of 6.8 percent in sales tax revenue in the third quarter 2007 compared to the same time the previous year, but as Urrutia said, “We’re used to double digits. We’ve taken a hit.”
Auburn was the first city to respond to the downturn in the economy last week by announcing that up to seven city positions were being eliminated, with another employee likely to opt for early retirement, effectively reducing staff by eight positions.
Urrutia said Rocklin isn’t proposing any such moves because the city predicted a flat economy and prepared for it.
“Like everybody else, we are having some economic pains,” he said. “Revenues are not coming in like we expected.”
The city has ten staffing vacancies that they are in no hurry to fill.
“But we do not have a hiring freeze,” he said. “We are recruiting police officers because public safety is a top priority.”
He said other positions would be filled on a case-by-case basis.
Rocklin has a city employee task force that is looking at ways to reorganize and restructure the city. The group was put in place long before the current economic downturn.
He said if the economy doesn’t turn around, then they would look at adjusting the city’s two-year budget.
The city should be expecting more sales tax revenue after the new shopping center at I-80 and Sierra College Boulevard is complete. The center is slated to include WalMart, Home Depot, Kohls, Target and Lowes.
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