WILDOMAR -- The phone rings and it's a Wildomar resident calling to offer congratulations on the city's incorporation.

It rings again and it's someone looking for a job with the new city.

It rings again and it's a developer wondering where to take a new set of plans.

The city of Wildomar has had a phone number since late June but there was no phone and no one to answer a phone until City Hall opened July 1.

Since the doors swung open last Tuesday morning, the person picking up the phone has been Denise Wilfinger, a certified permit technician who has been answering questions, passing along messages to the city's interim staff members and trying to find out what to do about a squirrel infestation at a Wildomar resident's home.

That was one of the quirkier calls, Wilfinger said during a phone interview Friday, the last day of the first business week for the city of Wildomar.

Wildomar's City Hall, Wilfinger's home base, is inside office space in a building in the southeastern corner of the Oak Creek Shopping Center on Clinton Keith.

The desk Wilfinger uses was donated by the county of Riverside. All of the other furniture inside Wildomar's City Hall also was donated: the cubicles, the filing cabinets and the shelves.

The county made a deal with the city: if it took some of the used office equipment it had to take it all. The city, grateful for the free equipment, gladly accepted.

On the walls of the office there are pictures of the five-member City Council, elected in February during the same election that saw voters approve the formation of the city and its division into five electoral districts. There's a map of Wildomar that details the city's boundaries. There are chairs and magazines for someone waiting for an appointment and there are fresh flowers.

Since incorporation, the walls have been getting crowded with all of the proclamations and plaques given to the city by neighboring cities and elected officials, Wilfinger said.

Inside the cubicles, interim city staff members, including at times the finance director and the planning director, are working on the budget and the large stack of development projects that had been in some stage of the county's approval process.

Wilfinger said the city is starting to take over responsibility for providing the services that had been provided by the county but there are still some big gaps.

For instance, the city hasn't yet developed a fee structure that lists how much a developer will be charged to submit plans, pull permits and so on.

Also, the county is still handling the issuing of business licenses because the city doesn't have a tracking system set up for that kind of information.

To help with the transition, the county has been providing training to Wilfinger and the city's other new employees, who are being paid as part of the contract the council approved with InterWest, a public works and engineering firm.

"We're taking over a little bit at a time and we're going to do it (the training) every day until we get it," she said.

Councilman Scott Farnam, a member of the council's facilities committee, said he is pleased with the new City Hall and that an empty office next door could become a site for future council meetings.

The owner of the building has said he would offer the city use of the office until it is leased out, Farnam said.

Having a regular meeting place will be a boon for the council, which has been nomadic during its first months of existence: meeting inside a church, the lobby of a financial services building, a middle school, a high school and a football stadium.

Mayor Bob Cashman said it was amazing to stop by the office and see everyone working on city business, months after there was doubt in some quarters if incorporation would even be approved.

A corner of the office has been set aside for the council members and Cashman said he has stopped by to check his e-mail and get some work done.

Contact staff writer Aaron Claverie at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2624, or aclaverie@californian.com.

City of Wildomar contact information

- Address: 23873 Clinton Keith Road,Suite 201, Wildomar, CA 92595

- Phone: (951) 677-7751

- Web site: www.cityofwildomar.org