Drive to Limit Growth Nears OK for Ballot in Moorpark

A petition drive aimed at placing an initiative before Moorpark voters to limit the number of new housing units in the rapidly growing community to 250 a year appears to have succeeded, city officials announced Thursday.

The outcome of the drive set the stage for a clash between slow-growth advocates in the Ventura County city and the area’s influential developers.

City Council members, several of whom have spoken against a fixed limit on housing growth, will meet Friday to decide how to verify the 994 signatures on the petitions.

At least 601 valid signatures, representing 10% of the city’s registered voters, are needed to put a measure on the ballot, City Clerk Doris Bankus said.

The council must decide whether to approve the measure, call a special election or place the issue before voters in the June primary or November general election. The measure would require a simple majority for approval.

Retaining Rural Character

Starting in early December, volunteers from the Committee for Managed Growth went door-to-door through Moorpark seeking signatures in a campaign that, they say, will help retain the area’s rural, small-town character.

Their petition calls for giving the city Planning Commission an annual 250-unit allotment from which to approve projects. However, the proposal exempts several types of development, including subsidized housing for low-income residents, projects of no more than four units and houses on at least five acres.

Bob Crockford, an executive recruiter who is president of the Managed Growth group, estimated that there would be 50 exempt units a year, bringing the total annual growth to about 300 homes.

Since the city’s incorporation in mid-1983, officials have approved about 5,000 dwellings, about half of which have been built. Since 1975, when Moorpark was a sleepy, unincorporated community of 5,000, the population has tripled to about 15,000.

The growth petition is patterned after ordinances in two other Ventura County cities. The Thousand Oaks City Council in 1980 approved a plan that sets the maximum number of units at 500 a year. In 1981, Camarillo adopted a 400-unit annual limit. Both laws exclude from the limit housing intended for low-income residents.

35,000 Residents

Crockford said Thursday that the group hopes to ensure that population growth does not exceed the predictions in Moorpark’s general plan, which calls for about 35,000 residents by the year 2000.

Supporters argue that public schools, roads and municipal services have been overburdened by rapid development and that council plans to accommodate the growth have been drawn up haphazardly.

“This will force the city to plan each year what’s going to be done,” Crockford said.

Acknowledging that developers, who had fought growth curbs in Thousand Oaks and Camarillo, would likely outspend the slow-growth movement in an election campaign, Crockford nevertheless said, “We’re sure it’s going to pass.”

Mayor James Weak, echoing a sentiment expressed previously by other council members, said approval of the initiative would tie the hands of city officials in regulating growth and would jeopardize developers’ financial contributions to building schools and roads.

‘It doesn’t allow the city any flexibility,” he said.

Weak also criticized granting power to a non-elected body, the Planning Commission, to divide a fixed number of units among developers, and said the result of limiting general growth while exempting low-cost housing could be to “turn Moorpark into a mass of low-income housing.”