They’re Outta Here : Relocating: The cost of housing is considered a big reason why people leave the county. Many have packed their bags for L.A. County and Arizona.

You might have heard about this growth thing. Ventura County, land of mild temperatures, rural valleys and acre lots, is gaining population so fast that a year’s worth of new residents would fill the Ventura Theater 41 times over.

But plenty of people are leaving, too--enough, in fact, to empty that same Ventura Theater 38 times over. The California Department of Finance, which keeps track of drivers license transfers, counted 32,357 outgoing Ventura County residents between July 1, 1988, and last June 30.

And those people aren’t always going where they’re expected to.

Seventy-six of last year’s reported departures were headed for Arkansas. If the state is counting properly, seven others were aiming for North Dakota. And among all destinations, the most popular was . . . Los Angeles County.

Despite all the bashing Los Angeles takes around here, and all the real estate refugees heading here from there, that great sprawl to the south attracted at least 10,534 people from Ventura County in a year’s time.

“Oh, you’re kidding,” said Carol Lavender, director of sales for the Ventura Convention and Visitor Bureau. “I’m amazed at that. . . . Some of these moves have to be job-related entirely.”

“Never!” said Nancy Nustad, vice president of Steve Schmidt & Co. Real Estate. “Really?”

Nancy Williams, executive director of the Ventura County Economic Development Assn., wasn’t pleased with the figures, either. But she also said she wasn’t surprised, given the rapid growth of communities with relatively affordable housing such as Palmdale and Lancaster, near the northern fringe of Los Angeles County.

“You can trace it back to a number of reasons,” Williams said. “And one of the biggest reasons is the cost of homes.”

Amid the current hubbub over growth, those who leave Ventura County are little noted and not long remembered. But each outward-bound resident has his or her reasons, and sometimes those reasons carry a cautionary message for local leaders.

“I would love to raise our son in Ventura, camping on the Rincon and letting him play in the hills, but we know it’s an impossible dream,” writes Tracy Werth, a Ventura County native who left for Arizona 14 years ago. “He’d be in day care while I worked to help pay $1,000 just to rent some dump.”

Duncan Campbell, a 34-year-old surfer and entrepreneur who left in 1980, returned for two years beginning in 1986 and then left again for Hawaii. He said he has run into a dozen old acquaintances from Oxnard, now all relocated to the North Shore of Oahu.

“It’s a really strange thing,” Campbell said. “They really love Oxnard and Ventura. But it’s like . . . ‘We’re outta here.’ ”

Among those who spoke for this story, housing costs and career opportunities were by far the most reasons given for leaving. But with no state universities in the county, students are another big part of the population exodus.

“I was interested in the experience of living further away from home,” said Chris Stanley, a 19-year-old biology major at UCLA. “I don’t think I’ll be living back in Thousand Oaks, ever. . . . There’s not too much there that’s terribly interesting.”

Frances Cogswell of the Rio Mesa High School class of 1974 in Camarillo lives near Griffith Park and is embarked on a career in advertising and entertainment. She says she still thinks of Camarillo as home--”I guess because my mother still lives there and it’s so small a town”--but she hasn’t lived there for more than a decade.

Among California counties attracting former Ventura County residents, the state’s 1988-89 license transfer figures showed that Los Angeles was followed by San Diego County (which took in 1,735), Santa Barbara County (1,548), Orange County (1,322), San Bernardino County (1,016) and Riverside County (1,009).

Beyond the state line, Ventura County sent more people to Arizona than anywhere else. Of 8,337 people who left the county for other states, 769 chose Arizona. Oregon was the next most popular destination with 679 migrants, followed by Texas (675), Nevada (550), Florida (456) and Colorado (443).

Far beyond the state line, of course, there is another departure category. County officials recorded 3,321 deaths here in 1989, making the hereafter a more frequent destination than any other state, but still less frequent than Los Angeles County.

Cindy Russell left Ventura in 1987. From Pennsylvania, she offers this advice:

“Stay there.” Russell, 33, was working as convention services manager at the Ventura Convention and Visitor Bureau in 1987 when she decided to head east. Now she lives with her parents in tiny Marienville, Pa., working at a drug rehabilitation centerand studying toward a teaching credential.

“I regret leaving,” she said. “All my family was back here in Pennsylvania, and I had lived in Ventura County for seven years. I was starting to get homesick, and tired of moving back and forth. So I moved back east, to Virginia Beach, Va.” She took a job at the Better Business Bureau there.

“I lived there for two years and I hated it the whole time. The pay was much, much lower than California . . . and the cost of living was not that much less,” she said. “And coming from Ventura, I hated the weather. I just really missed California.”

Russell expects to finish her credential work in two years, and then probably come back to Ventura.

But don’t expect all the other Ventura County emigrants to follow her home.

Lezley and Tom Buford, for instance, are just getting settled in Michigan.They moved from Ventura to EastLansing in January. Tom Buford, president of the VenturaCounty Chamber of Commerce in 1986, had a successful law practice in Ventura, but was interested in practicing more labor law, a goal more easily achieved in heavily unionized Michigan. Lezley Buford, a county planner in Ventura, plans a return to graduate school at Michigan State in the fall.

She now works in the city of East Lansing’s Economic Development Department, and worries less about anti-growth sentiment than she did in Ventura.

Bill Garcia, a 42-year-old school librarian who grew up in Ventura County and left three years ago, the issue was general quality of life. He found it better in Merced, north of Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley.

Garcia, who rented a home in Ventura, said he pays less in Merced for a mortgage on a home with a swimming pool. And his wife, Kathy, who formerly worked for the city of Ventura, now stays home and sees more of their two daughters.

“I’ve lost some friends that I don’t see as often,” acknowledged Garcia, who left behind a teaching job at Santa Paula High School. “And even though Ventura’s not that big a city, with Los Angeles and Santa Barbara nearby there were more cultural things to do than there are in Merced. I’ve lost the closeness to the beach that I had really enjoyed. And our families live in Oxnard, so they’re farther away. . . .

“But the things that I’ve gained--there’s just that sense of starting over,” Garcia said. “It’s been a challenge, and it’s been exciting.”