STRIP MALLED : Business: Camarillo merchants and residents claim there is a glut of convenience : centers, with many shops standing empty. City officials, however, say a major mall : is needed to keep local shoppers from traveling out of town.

Donna Leiper has seen plenty of changes in Camarillo since she set up business 13 years ago. Some have been easier to take than others.

First there was the influx of burned-out Angelenos, loading their BMWs and heading west for a quieter life.

Next came the bulldozers, destroying the orchards near Leiper’s home to make room for houses and apartments.

Then came the final notice that things would never be the same.

The strip malls arrived.

“They’re everywhere now,” said Leiper, an insurance agent whose office has occupied the same spot in the Ponderosa Center for seven years. “If you spend any time at all in Camarillo, you find out pretty quick that what the city is about now is shopping malls.”

Like many other locals, Leiper can rattle off the names of the various malls in the area, many of which have been built within the last few years: Carmen Plaza, Las Posas Plaza, Dos Caminos Plaza, Camarillo Village Square, Paseo Camarillo, Paseo Del Sol, Camarillo Plaza, Central Plaza, Ponderosa Center, the Crossroads Center.

Construction continues elsewhere in the city, and “Will Build to Suit” signs are sprouting from several vacant lots.

Leiper and others wonder whether their town needs so many shopping centers.

“What do we need more for? We’ve already got at least two of everything,” said Glenn Veneracion, a video store owner in the Crossroads Center. “There’s no control at all. It’s gotten crazy.”

“It’s ridiculous,” said Percy Severn, owner of a sporting goods store in the Paseo Camarillo center. “Every mall in Camarillo has vacancies, and a lot of people say the Camarillo Plaza never should have been built. I blame it on the City Council and city planners.

“They allow all these new malls to be built, when all of those businesses could have gone into malls that are already here.”

Camarillo isn’t the only city in Ventura County experiencing what some call strip-mall fever, but the phenomenon isn’t countywide either. Ojai, for example, is “extremely critical of sprawling strip malls all over the city,” Assistant City Planner Marilyn Grauel said. It has several restrictions that “make it extremely difficult to get a commercial project going.”

But cities such as Camarillo, Ventura and Simi Valley impose few restrictions on the development of commercially zoned property.

“Homeowners have very little say” in such building, said Bill Windroth, Ventura County’s top building official. Some city planning departments prohibit some types of businesses--such as fast-food restaurants--because of negative environmental impact studies, he said. But a development company “has no need to talk to homeowners to see what they want.” City officials disagree with critics who say Camarillo is being taken over by strip malls. In fact, they maintain it doesn’t have any malls at all.

“A mall is like the Oaks or the Santa Buenaventura,” said Tony Boden, the city’s planning director. “We don’t have any malls in Camarillo.”

So what are those places?

“We have convenience centers and community shopping centers,” Boden said.

A spokesman for Crossroads Development, the company that built the Camarillo Plaza and the Crossroads Center, has a third term.

“We don’t own any convenience centers or shopping centers,” he said frostily. “We do have an 80,000-square-foot specialty center.”

Camarillo’s city officials think the city’s problem isn’t too much retail space. In fact, there may not be enough. They’d like a big mall, anchored by a major department store.

That’s because the local centers, love ‘em or hate ‘em, aren’t enough to keep shoppers in Camarillo.

Boden said the city loses a lot of tax revenue to nearby mega-malls such as the Oaks in Thousand Oaks, the Santa Buenaventura mall in Ventura and the Esplanade in Oxnard.

He said the City Council is reviewing a Thousand Oaks company’s request to build a center with “certain big-name department stores.”

The decision, however, is still several months away. Residents and local merchants have been vocal in their opposition to the big mall, which would be near Camarillo High School.

Sporting goods store owner Severn, echoing the sentiments of several other merchants, said: “If they build that mall, there’d be no way I could stay here and compete with it. I’d either have to move my store into it or else go out of business.”

“The city isn’t talking about doing anything to put them out of business,” Boden said. “But if we continue to lose the tax dollars, something has to be done.”

Is anyone in favor of building the mall?

Boden paused. “The developer’s for it.”

Many merchants believe that a mega-mall would be the coup de grace to small businesses that already coexist precariously in mini-malls.

Some are muscled out by competition by big stores. Others have suffered from the proliferation of similar businesses, some merchants say.

Several stores in Camarillo have gone out of business when similar businesses moved in a few doors away.

The manager of a 6,500-square-foot restaurant that recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection said four neighboring merchants in the Camarillo Plaza have gone out of business in less than two years. He blamed it on what he called a “poorly thought-out” mixture of stores, one of which was a furniture store a few doors away from another.

Windroth, the county building official, views the rise and fall of fortunes in the malls from a slightly different perspective:

“It’s called free enterprise,” he said. “The guy’s a fool to lease a place without a written agreement about no competing business. He could end up next door to his worst competition.”

For customers, of course, competition can be a blessing. Faced with a smorgasbord of shopping, many local shoppers said they can pick the store that gives the best service.

“When everyone is basically selling the same thing and you’ve got so many stores to choose from, it makes sense that you can be pickier,” said Leiper from her office in the Ponderosa Plaza.

“I went into this one bookstore here looking for a book on Einstein, and the salesgirl didn’t know who he was. She said she didn’t think he existed. I kind of went, ‘Ooo-kay,’ and left. So even though it’s not as convenient, now I go to a bookstore in Ventura.”