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The tiny city of Maricopa turns 100 next month, but whether it makes it to 101 is another story.
A Kern County grand jury recommended this week the oilfield community pull the plug on itself.
In a report titled, "Maricopa, Lots of Past, Any Future?", the grand jury said that finances in the city of 1,154 have been so bad that an administrator once borrowed money from "private individuals" to meet the payroll.
If a majority of the declining town's residents vote to disincorporate, it would be only the third time in 48 years that a California city has terminated itself.
Forty miles southwest of Bakersfield, Maricopa was at the epicenter of one of the great American oil booms. For 18 months starting in 1910, oil spewed out of the Lakeview well outside of town, raining down to form a lake and a river eight...