CITY SET TO TACKLE BUSINESS PARK ROLE.

Byline: Jim Skeen Daily News Staff Writer

Capping the end of a 19-year relationship with a nonprofit organization formed to bring non-aerospace jobs to the Antelope Valley, the city will assume ownership of 47 acres in the Lancaster Business Park as well as the park's $3.1 million improvement bond debt.

City officials said the transaction with the Lancaster Economic Development Corp., whose board of local civic leaders already has disbanded, will put the city in a better position to recruit businesses for the park and ultimately will pay off.

``We'll at least break even,'' Mayor Frank Roberts said of the deal. ``Even with the market downturn and the problems overseas, it still seems the economy is healthy.''

The transaction, approved unanimously by the City Council at its meeting Tuesday night, transfers $1.7 million in assets, including the LEDC's 70 percent ownership, valued at $875,000, of the park's business ``incubator'' building.

City officials say those assets are equal to the amount the city has spent on bond payments in the past three years on behalf of the business park, which was created in the 1980s to lessen the Antelope Valley's dependence on the ``boom or bust'' aerospace industry but fell into hard times in the 1990s.

The transaction also includes the city assuming $3.1 million in bond debt and obligations of $100,000 in county taxes and a $250,000 payment to two previous general partners in the LEDC, according to a city staff report.

The Lancaster Economic Development Corp. was formed with city help in 1979 to help spur non-aerospace manufacturing and industrial development. Over the years it created the 240-acre Lancaster Business Park, which now contains about 80 companies or government offices with some 1,400 workers.

The organization is disbanding to turn its economic development efforts over to a newly formed economic development group, the Greater Antelope Valley Economic Alliance.

The LEDC is perceived as being too focused on Lancaster and not enough on the Antelope Valley, officials said. It is viewed as an impediment to those trying to get the new entity rolling, LEDC and city officials said.

City officials believe acquiring the group's remaining property in the park will put Lancaster's redevelopment agency in a better position to market them to business.

The city has stepped in a number of times in the past to help the LEDC. It gave the group a $738,000 start-up loan in 1979 and $111,000 to get the business park going.

The corporation failed to make its city loan payments on time in the early 1980s because sales of industrial park lots did not meet expectations. The payment issue was resolved in 1986 when the city accepted three lots as payment for the remainder of the loan.

Roberts said the city is looking to hire the group's executive director, Vern Lawson Jr., to run the park's business incubator building, which rents spaces to start-up companies.

Lawson has served as executive director of the LEDC for 17 years. Before that, he was Lancaster city manager for three years.