Moorpark Surprise : Instant Ban on Building Permits OKd

The Moorpark City Council, known for its opposition to limits on housing construction, stunned the area’s developers Tuesday by ordering an immediate ban on issuance of building permits.

Culminating a tense meeting that started at 7 p.m. Monday and dragged on until 3 a.m. Tuesday, council members voted 4 to 0 for a two-week moratorium on permits.

The action, taken through an emergency ordinance proposed by Councilman Danny Woolard, was provoked by a staff report disclosing that the city of 16,000 had issued 1,004 building permits since Jan. 1, 571 of them in the last three weeks. Woolard called those numbers “astronomical.”

City officials predicted that 800 more permits will be sought by the end of the year, producing a one-year record of more than 1,800 permits, which would bring an estimated 6,000 new residents to Moorpark. About 800 permits were issued in the city’s last fiscal year, officials said.

The rush for permits, developers said, was prompted by fear that they will be hard to come by if voters, as expected, adopt some form of growth controls at the polls in November.

Rival Growth Measures

A group of residents, the Committee for Managed Growth, succeeded in January in placing an initiative on the November ballot--Measure F--that, with exceptions for low-income projects and those of four units or fewer, would limit housing growth to 250 units a year through 1995.

The City Council in June voted to offer voters less restrictive building limits. It authorized a rival ballot measure--Measure H--that would limit Moorpark’s population to 33,878 by the turn of the century by allowing issuance of building permits for 411 residential units a year.

Although he has been a vigorous foe of fixed growth, Woolard said the emergency ordinance was needed to give city planners time to assess whether the permitted construction will overtax roads and schools, the central contention of slow-growth advocates.

He said the permit boom threatened to undermine the council’s growth initiative, because the number of permits issued this year would be subtracted from the total allowed over the plan’s life.

‘Astronomical’ Number of Permits

“I’d like to see the ban run the whole calendar year,” he said. “Eighteen hundred permits in one year is astronomical.”

The council scheduled a public hearing for Sept. 2 on a staff report on the likely effects on city services of the permitted construction. The ban is set to expire Sept. 3 but may be extended by the council.

Councilwoman Leta Yancy-Sutton argued against the ban but abstained from voting after City Atty. Cheryl J. Kane advised her that she faced a possible conflict of interest. Yancy-Sutton’s husband, Ed Sutton, writes bids for an Oxnard construction company working on several Moorpark projects.

The votes on growth in the quiet Ventura County city loom over this year’s council races. Two incumbents, Yancy-Sutton and Albert Prieto, are facing two slow-growth activists, John Wozniak and Clint Harper, and four other challengers.

The disclosure of the leap in the number of permits led to predictions Tuesday that the Committee for Managed Growth had been handed a public relations bonanza.

“It demonstrates an absolute lack of control in planning,” contended Bob Crockford, president of the group. “It underscores the desperate need for passage of the managed-growth initiative.

“The council is derelict in their duty and they’re ruining the city.”

Builders Complain

Angry developers, meanwhile, charged that the vote was engineered to win public support for the council’s growth plan by seeming to be tough on developers.

The builders were particularly incensed because the ban could halt projects that already have city approval. A housing project must pass the city’s planning commission and council before a developer can take out a building permit.

Builders also complained that the city was restricting progress on projects that have contributed millions of dollars in fees for road, park and sewer improvements.

“It was totally unjustified. I think it was a political decision the council felt was necessary before November,” said Mitchel B. Kahn, an Oxnard lawyer who represents G. H. Palmer Associates, a Brentwood developer.

The company has spent about $8 million on site preparation for a 370-unit apartment project in central Moorpark and planned to take out its building permits Tuesday, Kahn said. Last Wednesday, he said, the company wrote an $824,000 check for an improvement fund for Los Angeles Avenue, a contribution mandated by the council.

Give Back Money

Yancy-Sutton said she sympathized with builders who expected smooth sailing on approved projects.

“If you take their fees and approve their projects, they have a right to pull building permits. If we’re going to shut them down, I suggest we hand them back their money,” she said.

“What we’re basically saying is that what we did wasn’t right.”

Tom Speirs, a spokesman for Newbury Park-based Warmington Homes, said the moratorium is premature.

“They based it on no facts on hand. They’re doing it for no other reason than that the numbers look big,” said Speirs, whose firm had planned to take out 88 building permits next week for its 217-house subdivision in the Peach Hill area.

Speirs argued that some developers are stockpiling permits for two years of building to cushion the impending growth controls, thereby creating an exaggerated impression of a building boom.

‘Natural Influx’

“There is a natural influx of people wanting building permits prior to the November election,” he said.

Woolard predicted that, if the council does not extend the ban at its Sept. 2 meeting, “you’ll see 500 more permits go out within three days.”

But he stopped short of saying that the projects should have been rejected or that the city was amiss for not recognizing the leap in permits sooner. “I don’t want to say the city issued too many. They’ve just issued enough,” he said.