Growth/ A Special Report : County Plans to Keep Rural Style : Development: Residents fear that citrus groves will yield to tract houses, but Ventura County expects to grow at a moderate pace over the next 30 years.

Robert Pfeiler was born on a ranch in Oxnard 81 years ago and hoped to eventually die there. But the growth of Ventura County has made that dream impossible.

The old farmer’s ranch was in the path of Oxnard development. He has already sold part of it, and the rest may be condemned for city needs.

Now he and his wife, Betty, are reconciled to moving somewhere else.

“We’ve thrown in the towel,” said Pfeiler. “I don’t know where we’ll go yet, but it will have to be somewhere with elbow room.”

For Pfeiler, there is a sadness over the development that has transformed Ventura County in the last two decades. Others, however, welcome that same growth with enthusiasm.

In the eyes of Roy Carlson, a real estate broker who has lived in Ventura for 20 years, the county’s growth has been both moderate and well planned.

Carlson sees a county where there are more families, more homes and more jobs, with comparatively few problems compared to more populated areas.

“I just came back from Los Angeles today where the traffic is so bad that ours seems like nothing at all,” Carlson said.

Ventura still needs to grow, he added. There are children growing up who will need houses someday. And businesses that will need affordable homes for their employees.

“If employers don’t have homes for their employees, in other communities they have moved out,” said Carlson. “Then you don’t have a growth problem; you’ve got an economic problem.”

Pfeiler and Carlson are just two of the 668,000 residents of a county that sometimes seems obsessed with future growth, a county that worries endlessly whether it is becoming another Orange County or San Fernando Valley.

That fear is voiced so often by Ventura County residents in so many public and private forums that it has almost become a cliche.

Residents fear that Ventura County’s remaining citrus groves will eventually yield to barren fields of concrete for businesses and houses as they did in Orange County.

They speak with disdain about the tract houses that now characterize the San Fernando Valley, where one city often blends into the next.

A look at the county’s growth patterns in the 1990 census year, however, shows that despite the fears of many residents, most of the experts believe that Ventura County will manage to hold on to its identity in the decades to come.

In interviews with The Times in recent weeks, the people who plan the county’s future said over and over again that Ventura County is different now from its urbanized neighbors to the south and will remain so.

The forecast for the county, they said, is one of moderate growth for the next three decades--one that will keep the county’s population under the 1 million mark until the year 2020.

The open spaces between most of the county’s 10 cities will be smaller, but they will still exist, planners predict. Within those cities, residents most likely will find themselves crowded more closely together.

There may be fewer single-family homes with large lots, the planners say. Housing density may increase and areas of cities that are now underused may be redeveloped to make room for more businesses and office buildings.

But the traffic and the congestion that now mark Orange County and the San Fernando Valley are not likely to occur here, officials said.

That is because the planners say they have learned from the mistakes made elsewhere and are committed to planning ahead. They are aware that there are limits on county resources such as water, clean air and roads, they add.

And, perhaps most important, they say, they are equally aware that the residents of Ventura County--the people who live here and elect the county’s leaders--simply do not want uncontrolled growth.

“Even if our population goes up half again as much as we are now, we won’t become another Orange County,” said Bruce Smith, who supervises the county’s planning section.

The county has three tools to use that will help make that so, Smith said.

The first is an agreement between the county and the cities that, with some notable exceptions, development throughout the county shall occur primarily within the boundaries of the 10 cities.

That agreement, Smith said, is called the Guidelines for Orderly Development and contrasts with other areas of the state where counties compete directly with cities for economic development. He said he knows of no other growth policy like it anywhere in California.

The second tool in containing growth, Smith said, is the county’s policy of preserving current agricultural land. The county has five greenbelts, vast areas of farm and open land on which no development or annexations can occur unless both county and city officials suddenly shift their current growth policies.

And finally, said Smith, there are the cities themselves.

Eight of the county’s 10 cities now have growth-limiting ordinances, Smith said, and Port Hueneme has no need for an ordinance because it has virtually no room to grow.

That leaves Oxnard, the only city that has chosen not to adopt a growth ordinance and is widely viewed as the most aggressive of the county’s cities in seeking economic expansion.

While trying to push most new population into the cities, Ventura County permits some growth in its unincorporated areas and will continue to do so.

To date, the county has allowed growth outside of the cities in five areas: the Ojai Valley along the Ventura River, Santa Rosa Valley, Oak Park, Lake Sherwood and Piru, a community which planners expect to eventually become the county’s 11th city.

The county is now considering proposals for large developments on two ranches east of Thousand Oaks, which are zoned for open space in the county’s general plan. But the largest share of growth, some 91%, will occur within the boundaries of Thousand Oaks and the county’s other cities, Smith said.

“Our county is not in the urban development business,” Smith said. “Counties like Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside compete directly with the cities for development.”

Those counties compete for the dollars development brings because, like every county in California, they need money to provide roads and services to existing residents, said Robert Braitman, executive officer of the Local Agency Formation Commission.

Like the cities, the counties can require the developers of new homes and offices to pay the price of road improvements, sewer capacity enlargements or water delivery expansions in the areas in which they want to build.

“More and more we have said to the new buyer: ‘You build the infrastructure,’ ” said Braitman. “That marries you to new development and you become hooked on development.”

But Braitman, whose agency sets city boundaries, credited the “enlightened Board of Supervisors” in Ventura County with wise decisions that have steered clear of what he called get-rich-quick schemes.

“They have not been induced to making land-use decisions based on income,” he said of the supervisors.

Paul Tryon, executive officer for the Southern California Building Industry Assn., is one of many in the building industry who feel that Ventura County’s growth policies are too restrictive.

Ultimately, Tryon said, Ventura residents will find themselves facing a growing deficit of funds to provide roads, parks and schools.

“We have shifted the burden of providing infrastructure from traditional sources to developers,” he said. “Without allowing developers to build, you fall behind. The deficit will become more apparent in future years.”

Because of today’s growth policies, Tryon and many others in the building industry predict that the Ventura County of the future will increasingly be a place where only the rich can live.

The slow-growth policies in the cities have also caused housing prices to shoot up, with the median price for a home in the county now at $252,000, Tryon said. This compares with a median price of $23,100 in 1970 and $93,500 in 1980.

In Tryon’s view, the price of homes is only going to get higher in the years ahead, not lower, eventually creating problems for businesses that might want to locate in the county.

“That drives employers out,” he said.

While the planners and the developers debate the benefits of moderate growth, however, the fact remains that some longtime county residents such as Robert Pfeiler are planning to leave the county because of the pressures of growth despite official talk of slow-growth and even no-growth policies.

The ranch where Pfeiler was born in 1908, still planted in lemons and vegetables, is between Rice and Rose avenues and Gonzales and Colonia roads in the area which the city of Oxnard wants to develop next. The Pfeilers have already sold an option on part of their 55 acres to a developer and the Oxnard School District wants the balance of the property to build a school where the Pfeiler family home now sits.

The district may condemn the land to get it, Pfeiler said.

Ironically, it is the county’s slow-growth philosophy restricting most development to the cities that is partly to blame for the possible loss of the Pfeiler family farm.

His property is within the city of Oxnard’s sphere of influence, in an area outside the city’s current boundaries that the Local Agency Formation Commission has said will be within the ultimate city borders.

That made Pfeiler’s property ineligible to become part of the greenbelt between Oxnard and Camarillo. Nor could Pfeiler’s land qualify for protection under the California Land Conservation Act.

Also called the Williamson Act, the conservation act allows growers tax breaks if they place their acreage in agricultural preserve status. The growers must notify the state 10 years before they want to change the status to subdivide or develop.

If Pfeiler had been farther outside the city limits to the east toward Camarillo, he might have been able to reach his goal.

“My lifelong dream was to live my life out here and then turn the property over to our children,” he said. “But they come along and say we’re going to develop and you have to get out.”

For every farmer in Ventura County who wants to stay on his land, however, there are others who resent county policies and would like to have the option of selling to developers.

One of the county’s current growth controversies in the agriculturally rich Santa Clara River Valley focuses on that recurring issue.

Landowners in the unincorporated area of Piru have joined together in a committee to prevent the county and the city of Fillmore from forming a sixth county greenbelt that would stretch from Fillmore east through Piru to the Los Angeles County line.

The group, which includes a representative from the developer Newhall Land & Farming Co., wants to keep its options open, whether to farm or to subdivide and sell. “A greenbelt is just another layer of government,” said Mary Ann Berrington, who was elected chairwoman of the committee. “Look at Oxnard and look at Simi Valley where they have greenbelts. They have become blights.”

Instead of a greenbelt, which Berrington says may only encourage urban sprawl, the group wants a master plan for the area that would allow hillside development and subdivisions while preserving the citrus and avocado orchards below.

Berrington and her husband, James, farm 40 acres zoned for agriculture. Neither of the Berrington sons wants to take over the family ranch and the Berringtons say they will have to sell their home with their ranch when they retire.

“When my husband is too old to farm anymore we will have to move away,” she said. “I am very interested in preserving the green of the valley, but you have to measure that against economics.”

While the Berringtons are a farm family, some who are on their side in the Piru dispute are developers, and county planners say that much more is at stake in the Piru area than might initially be seen.

The region, in fact, is one of the largest agricultural areas left in the county, and a major battle over development could eventually be fought there.

With 15,000 acres on the Ventura County side of the Santa Clara River Valley, and another 25,000 acres on the Los Angeles County side, Newhall Land has a strong interest in the land-use policies being developed in the area, said Skye M. Fleming, senior real estate analyst at Newhall Land.

Newhall Land, the developers and creators of Valencia in Los Angeles County near the intersection of the Golden State Highway and California 126, recently removed 11,849 acres of farmland east of Piru in Ventura County from agricultural preserve under the Williamson Act.

The acreage will come out of agricultural preserve in 1998 and could at that time be used for development, although Fleming said the company now has no plans to develop the area.

Fleming said, however, that Newhall Land has contributed $3 million in land and cash to Caltrans for use in widening California 126 all the way from Fillmore through the Piru area to the Golden State Freeway.

To planners in the area, that means future development. The widening of California 126 will surely induce growth along the highway, said Mary Ann Krause, planning director for the city of Fillmore.

Throughout the county, roads are one of the keys to future growth. While the widening of California 126 through the Santa Clara River Valley could encourage growth, city planners elsewhere say highway problems could slow growth in other parts of the county.

The rapidly growing city of Moorpark is one example. Caltrans plans to connect California 118 and California 23, which dead-end in the city and contribute to the city’s major traffic problems, Planning Director Pat Richards said. If no money becomes available there to help the traffic flow, growth could slow with the commute, he said.

In Moorpark, people must decide whether they want to accept a low level of service, according to Richards, or allow more growth that could help pay for better roads.

“In order to solve those problems, since roads were not planned for, the only way to put them in place is with growth,” Richards said. “But my perception is that the majority of the people here are looking for a certain quality of life, escapees from other highly urbanized areas.”

Other factors that limit growth throughout the county include the availability of water. The city of Ventura, for instance, is now considering a moratorium on all new water hookups for at least the next year. It also is considering a rationing program to cut water use by 40%.

“Water is absolutely the limiting factor to growth here,” said Everett Millais, director of Ventura’s Community Development Department. Without importing state water, the city now estimates that it can support an ultimate population of only 102,000, just slightly more than the current estimated population of 97,000.

“Unless desalination becomes cheap or unless the city gets state water, that’s really it,” Millais said.

Other cities, including Oxnard, Camarillo and Fillmore, that depend in part or in full on local water supplies have similar limits on growth capacity, their city planners say.

They add that the county’s air quality, which is worse than state or federal standards say is safe, may also limit the amount of new homes or businesses that can be built here.

The county’s Air Quality Management Plan sets population limits for each area of the county. Growth ordinances in Ojai, Ventura, Thousand Oaks, Fillmore and Simi Valley require the cities to stay within the limits of the air quality plan projections.

Perhaps the most important factor that will keep Ventura County on a course of moderate growth, LAFCO’s Braitman believes, is the desire of the people who live here to maintain something close to the status quo.

Braitman made it clear that he believes most people in the county now support moderate growth at most and will make that clear to their elected leaders. Others, however, have said that there is no way to predict with certainty whether events in the future could change the pressures on county officials one way or the other.

“The question of land use in Ventura County is a matter of public policy and is being formulated by public officers today, just as 20 years from now it will be formulated by public officers at that time,” Braitman said.