Some See Red at Busy Intersection : Ventura: About 60,000 vehicles pass daily through Valentine Road at Victoria Avenue, the city’s most troublesome traffic spot.

When Jim Salzer opened his record store near the intersection of Valentine Road and Victoria Avenue in Ventura in 1972, there wasn’t much traffic--or anything else--in the vicinity.

“It was very quiet and sedate,” he said. “There was very little going on here. People criticized me for building my store in the middle of nowhere. In five years, all of that changed.”

In 1976, Salzer lost his curbside parking when Valentine Road was widened to include a left-turn lane. The same year, the Ventura County Government Center opened a few blocks down, on Victoria Avenue.

Those changes, coupled with rapid growth in the area, are blamed for creating what is now the busiest and most troublesome intersection in the city and possibly all of Ventura County.

“It is the worst as far as intersections,” said Nazir Lalani, Ventura’s transportation and traffic engineer. “That is definitely it.”

Lalani said an average of 60,000 vehicles pass through the intersection daily. The figure does not include vehicles exiting from the Ventura Freeway onto Victoria Avenue.

He said his office receives about 600 traffic-related complaints a year, and about a fourth of them involve the Valentine Road-Victoria Avenue intersection.

The Ventura Police Department is the source of many of those complaints. Police said they frequently have to send officers to direct traffic at the intersection because its traffic signals break down.

Lalani said the highly complex, computerized traffic signal has broken down at least once a month since January. A recent power outage left the traffic signals out of sync for two days, even though power in the area was restored within five minutes, he said.

Lalani said he wrote a letter to Caltrans, which is responsible for operating the signals, suggesting that it either “do a better job” or let the city monitor the lights.

Ray Ciriaco, a Caltrans electrical engineer, said one reason the lights keep breaking down is because of power outages, which foul up the traffic light’s programming system.

“There is a power outage about every three weeks,” Ciriaco said. “We really don’t know what’s going on with Edison.”

Mark Olson, an area manager for Southern California Edison, said the city has had four power outages near the intersection since January. Two were caused by cars running into utility poles elsewhere, he said.

Since the last outage, Ciriaco said, Caltrans has installed wiring that will keep the traffic lights working during a power failure.

Salzer said the city should find a way to reduce the volume of traffic that passes through the intersection every day.

“I’ve seen this finger-pointing exercise before,” Salzer said. “The city is extremely slow to act, and no one seems to hold them accountable. They should have been looking at this 10 years ago. We’ve basically seen our business strangled by traffic, and the city does nothing about it.”

Salzer said most of the traffic is the result of overdevelopment in the city’s industrial and business park area, located on and southwest of Valentine Road.

Everett Millais, Ventura’s community development director, sees things a little differently.

Despite rapid growth in the district during the late 1970s and through the 1980s, Millais said it was not until 1988 that the city began collecting fees from developers to help solve traffic problems created by their projects.

The system worked well until March, when the City Council passed a water conservation ordinance that has temporarily eliminated new development in the city. The result is that the city is left without some revenue for traffic improvements.

City officials said about 10,000 people work in the district, and many of them use the Victoria Avenue and Valentine Road intersection to get to work every day.

“There are more people employed there than in any other part of the city,” said Mark Stephens, senior planner for the city.

In addition to the massive amount of growth that has occurred in the city south of the Ventura Freeway, Millais said the Ventura County Government Center is responsible for funneling a large amount of traffic through the Victoria Avenue and Valentine Road intersection.

More than 2,400 county employees work at the center, located at the corner of Victoria Avenue and Telegraph Road. The center, which attracts hundreds of visitors throughout the county daily, moved from what is now Ventura City Hall to its present site in 1976.

“If you want to point the finger, you could blame the County Government Center for a lot of the traffic,” Millais said.

Millais said that before much new development is allowed along Victoria Avenue and Valentine Road, the city probably will require that funding for traffic improvements be in place.

According to Lalani, however, that could be another 10 years.

He said funds that the city will receive from Proposition 111 have already been earmarked for other projects that have been delayed over the years because of a lack of funding. Proposition 111, which was passed by voters in June, raised the gasoline and diesel tax to help finance traffic improvements statewide.

The additional tax money is expected to generate an estimated $18.5 billion statewide for transportation projects over the next 10 years, with Ventura County receiving about $200 million.

Lalani said work on realigning Valentine Road and reconfiguring the on-ramps and off-ramps of the Ventura Freeway could begin sooner--in four to five years--if county voters approve a ballot measure in November that is basically a companion piece to Proposition 111.

State and county transportation officials said about $2 billion of Proposition 111 funds will be distributed to those counties that can come up with matching funds. They said if voters approve the half-cent sales tax increase, the county could receive another $130 million over the next 10 years.