When More Is Too Much: Putting Limits on Growth

“The more you get away from local government, the more you become a voice in the wilderness,” said Mayor Alex Fiore of Thousand Oaks in explaining why he has never been interested in moving up the political ladder.

“You might be in Congress an awful long time before they even recognized that you existed. And it’s hard to get something done for your constituents when you’re one voice in 400. Now I know we’re talking about different issues. They might be talking about revenue sharing and we’re talking about fixing a pothole. But to me city council is work of a magnitude more difficult than any other. You are looking right into the eyes of the people and maybe making some very harsh decisions. You don’t do that in Washington and you don’t do that in Sacramento.”

Tall, leathery and raspy-voiced, like an Italian Marlboro Man, the chain-smoking Fiore has played a unique role in the city’s history: He was a member of the incorporation committee 22 years ago and has been elected to every council since. He embodies in many ways the Southern California experience, even as Thousand Oaks, transformed from Jungleland to major city, exemplifies suburban development.

When Fiore arrived from Rhode Island in 1951 the Conejo ( rabbit , in Spanish ) Valley, which embraces Thousand Oaks, was not even a pit stop on two-lane Highway 101, but derived its name from the tens of thousands of rabbits that swarmed the fields and today still pop out of roadside holes and gather like spectators on golf course fairways

Holder of a degree in accounting, Fiore, after a stint as a state auditor, joined the Rocketdyne Corp., where he ultimately became vice president for finance, and so participated in the conversion of the Simi Hills from a place for shooting Westerns to a site for testing space shots. During a 1959 family outing to Jungleland, the compound that furnished trained wild animals for films, he discovered a budding subdivision where medium-priced houses were selling for $24,000, $12,000 less than the same models in the San Fernando Valley.

He bought one the same day, and with his family joined the other 3,000 residents of the community. Oriented toward their jobs in the San Fernando Valley, they had to look for government to the Ventura County Board of Supervisors, 25 miles to the west.

But the distance to be bridged was more than geographic. A county that was one of the prime agricultural areas in the United States, was a major oil producer and had a substantial military presence was taken aback by the settlement of two bedroom communities--Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley--on its sparsely occupied eastern reaches. The supervisors were more often than not unsympathetic. The residents learned firsthand that there are major differences between county and city governments.

All California boards of supervisors and most city councils are composed of five elected members who determine policy and hire a manager or chief administrative officer to supervise departmental operations. But while councils have control over both their policies and programs, supervisors, though locally elected, are the officers of an entity beholden to the state--counties act as the regional arms through which the state carries out its programs. Counties have administrative responsibility, but policy is established not so much by the supervisors as by the Legislature. The supervisorial role was further diminished by the passage of Proposition 13, which hit counties, most dependent on property taxes, the hardest. Since supervisors can no longer increase taxes, the annual budget process, once controversial, has become largely a pro forma exercise in which supervisors maintain the division of the pecuniary pie essentially as is.

Although both meet once weekly, councils, in deference to their amateur political status and nominal pay, normally meet at night. Supervisors, presumed to devote full time to their jobs, are paid a professional salary and schedule their meetings during the daytime, thus inconveniencing the public, assuring smaller audiences and speeding up sessions. (A few of the larger cities, such as Los Angeles, which have full-time councils, follow supervisorial practice.) Generally, county codes are not as demanding as municipal codes, citizens in unincorporated areas are less organized and have less opportunity for input before a board of supervisors, so developers have an easier time getting their projects approved.

In 1964, Conejo residents, dissatisfied with county government, decided to incorporate. A determination not to repeat the errors of Los Angeles but to create a model community and keep short rein on government characterized the incorporating committee and has shaped Thousand Oaks ever since. In an early manifestation of the tax revolt that would lead to Proposition 13, residents demanded that the municipal government operate on a pay-as-you-go basis without a general property tax. A decision to preclude the kind of hodgepodge development that blights many urban areas led to the establishment of a strong planning department and stringent codes. Most of all, a tradition of citizen participation, and of government openness and responsiveness, was established. For more than a decade Fiore has held court each Saturday morning in the community’s original shopping center; for the last half dozen years his example has been emulated by County Supervisor Ed Jones, a former Thousand Oaks councilman who makes himself available in the Oaks regional shopping mall.

Municipal government with an at-large council offers the greatest opportunity for citizen participation and input, since all members are responsible to the entire electorate. Districting compartmentalizes, parochializes and politicizes--in a pejorative sense--the governmental process, since voters have ballot-box influence on only one of several legislators. Other council members are more likely to heed extraneous influences, such as campaign contributors, in matters not affecting their districts. Horse trading, which plays little part in an at-large structure, takes on importance. If a matter is of concern to only one district, the representative for that area may find it expedient to make deals with other legislators: “You vote for me on this, and I’ll vote for you on that.” According to Fiore, “That does not happen on our city council. We don’t talk to one another about issues.” Discussions and decisions take place only at council meetings.

An at-large electoral system would, of course, be impractical in an impersonal, amorphous megalopolis such as Los Angeles, where each of the 15 council members has a constituency exceeding 200,000 residents, more than twice the entire population of Thousand Oaks. Yet the controversy and gerrymandering accompanying the creation of a second Latino district in Los Angeles exemplify the negative aspects of district elections. Nor can a prima facie case be made that at-large elections exclude minorities. Thousand Oaks, with a minute black population, has had a black councilman for the last dozen years.

Since World War II, development in Southern California has been for all practical purposes freeway-dependent. Subdivisions anticipating freeways are pioneered by people willing to extend their commutes in return for lower housing prices. When the freeway is completed, travel time drops, housing prices rise and the new subdivisions turn into boom towns.

But after a decade the new freeway is as congested as the old; rush-hour travel replicates pre-freeway frustrations, and smog crosses another mountain barrier. At this juncture the suburban settlers examine the source of their problems and discover it to be themselves. So a movement to cap development emerges.

Thousand Oaks was a creation of the Ventura Freeway. Not only--with a population of 95,000--has it become in a quarter century the 34th largest city in the state, but its strategic location has brought about major commercial and industrial development. Its mall has made it the shopping hub for eastern Ventura and far western Los Angeles counties. Its wealth and municipal surpluses are the envy of the older, mixed demographic county areas. Yet by 1980, with the Ventura Freeway, the world’s busiest artery, going to potholes, Conejo residents concluded the time for moderation had arrived. An initiative limiting growth to 500 units per year passed with 60% of the vote and set a precedent for the area.

Two years later the issue was joined at the state level when Nathan Shapell, an influential Beverly Hills developer who owns one of the largest remaining tracts in the Conejo Valley, succeeded in pushing a special-interest bill through the Legislature to exempt “new towns” that provide 20% low-income housing from local control.

Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., then running for the U.S. Senate, vetoed the measure. But the effect was merely to shift development to the contiguous communities of Simi Valley to the east and Moorpark to the north. With the completion of the San Fernando-Simi Valley Freeway and the decline in interest rates, residential permits in Simi Valley mushroomed from 418 in 1983 to 2,300 this year, and Moorpark’s in the same period zoomed from 197 to 2,500. Such a population explosion is beyond the capacity of either community to handle. Both cities, following the Thousand Oaks example, have placed growth limitation measures on the November ballot. Simi’s would limit annual construction to 702 units and Moorpark’s to 300.

A progression of events that occurred over 16 years in Thousand Oaks has thus been compressed into three; and if the measures in Moorpark and Simi Valley pass, as they are likely to, and the two communities join Thousand Oaks and Camarillo (which limited growth in 1981), then most of the western reaches of the Los Angeles Basin will be placed in a slow-growth mode. It would--no matter what happens to Proposition U, the slow-growth initiative in the city of Los Angeles--mark a victory of residents over developers, and demonstrate the power of the individual’s ballot in small and midsize municipal elections, where campaign expenditures play a relatively minor role--Fiore spent $5.76 in winning reelection in 1978 and former City Planning Commissioner Virginia Davis lost in 1984 after expending nearly $17,000, a record for a Thousand Oaks council race.

Regional constraints on residential expansion would be unprecedented in Southern California. They will, perhaps, require a reassessment of the demographics projecting an increase of more than 5 million people in the Los Angeles basin during the next 25 years. Voters at the local level, where their voices are not lost, are saying that more has become too much; it is time to stop overburdening facilities and freeways, and give the environment, and people, some breathing room.