Ojai Law : The Tiny City’s Fight Against Tiny Crime Creates a Model of Restrictiveness

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian-born sage and champion of the independent thinker, was already well on his way to becoming Ojai’s patron saint when someone asked him about good government.

“There can be sanity,” Krishnamurti answered on that day in 1948, “only when you spurn authority.”

Before his death in 1986, Krishnamurti influenced millions with his talks on spirituality and built the town’s reputation as a refuge for the creative and contemplative. But on at least one front, he was a failure.

Ojai these days is no place to spurn authority. City leaders, desperate to halt growth, beat back creeping glitz and protect their city’s small-town, laid-back character, have transformed the place into a model of restrictiveness.

In their fight to keep Ojai Ojai, city officials have:

* Limited builders to a citywide total of 16 new homes per year, the strictest growth-control law among Ventura County’s 10 cities, and among the strictest in the state.

* Barred homeowners from cutting down, or trimming, their oak and sycamore trees without a city permit. The City Council enacted an emergency ordinance on the subject in March of this year, after someone felled oak trees on private property and city leaders realized they couldn’t punish him.

* Turned away fast-food restaurants. Their drive-through windows conflict with architectural review standards updated by the city in 1981.

* Dictated where homeowners can place their satellite dishes. That ordinance, passed in 1986, was one of the first such municipal laws in the nation. It is described by City Atty. Monte L. Widders as “one of the most restrictive” as well.

* Restricted business signs in size, number, material and placement. Those restrictions, laid down in 1956 and tightened in 1981, are among the oldest and most exacting in the state. Come November, all of Ojai’s businesses will be bound by them.

When merchants complain of skateboarders on downtown sidewalks, sheriff’s deputies respond. When a local charity wants to advertise its barbecue with a banner over Ojai Avenue, the Planning Commission has to OK it first. And when a new restaurant splashes some purple paint on its outside wall--as one did this summer--redevelopment officials protest.

For more than a decade, Ojai has been fighting off growth and straining to maintain its character. But can Ojai win those battles without undercutting its own storied creative spirit? For many, that’s an increasingly thorny question.

Ojai’s civic atmosphere is “somewhere between Utopia and Stepford Village,” said Jeanette O’Connor, former executive director of the Ojai Festival.

“You don’t have to worry about surviving , so your time and your energies are freed up to pursue artistic activities. . . . That’s definitely a positive aspect,” she said. But, O’Connor continued, “one of the problems there was having a community that concentrates on a certain level of sameness and coherence. . . . It has become a little flat, a little boring.”

City leaders, not surprisingly, take issue with that.

“Ojai looks better today than it did 10 years ago,” said Planning Commissioner David Hirschberg.

William Hattabaugh, a member of the city Redevelopment Committee, said, “We’ve tried to make Ojai an identifiable town and keep it that way. The real issue is, how far from a theme can you deviate and still maintain the character of the town? And frankly, we haven’t come up with an answer yet.”

Ojai only has this much time to worry about character and aesthetics, all sides agree, because it has relatively few other things to worry about. No rotting inner city, for instance, no topless bars, no murders since Ronald Reagan’s first term.

Yes, new houses keep going up in the unincorporated areas surrounding the city. Heavy traffic does slow Ojai Avenue down. And air pollution does gather from surrounding cities and hang above the town, trapped between the mountains.

But with the City Council aiming to limit growth to 1% every two years, Ojai’s population still falls short of 8,000. They are a peaceful people, gathering for chats at the old post office, biking past the educational and spiritual retreats clustered around the town, retreating from Ojai Avenue each weekend when the tourists descend.

The city began to grow a little over a century ago, when promoters first pitched the Ojai Valley as a resort with mysterious curative powers. The town was called Nordhoff then, and the Nordhoff Hotel stood amid orange and lemon orchards. In 1898, the Ventura River and Ojai Valley Railroad came through. In 1917, glass millionaire Edward D. Libbey had the arcade built and the post office tower erected, and the town renamed itself Ojai, a word derived from the language of the Chumash Indians.

Ojai’s free-thinking reputation grew in the 1920s, when the leaders of the Theosophy movement pulled up stakes from Hollywood and moved their headquarters, the Krotona Institute, to Ojai. Prominent Theosophist Albert Powell Worthington reported that the area was “impregnated with occult and psychic influences.”

About the same time, Krishnamurti arrived from India and started giving his regular talks. Artists followed, including the internationally known ceramist and painter Beatrice Wood, and in 1947 the Ojai Festival was founded. Over the years, the festival has drawn such luminaries as Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland and Pierre Boulez.

Spiritual groups kept coming too, from the Ananta Foundation to the Vortex Institute. Some have since gone, but otherworldly matters still get high priority. In December, 1985, when the city attorney suggested a local law that would tighten restrictions on fortunetellers, an eruption of protests and petitions forced a hasty rewriting session.

The library is another character indicator: The Ojai branch of the Ventura County public library system checked out about 15 books per city resident last year, easily the highest rate in the county. Librarians report that reading tastes run to spirituality, horticulture and Krishnamurti (who has some 50 books in the stacks), and that Harlequin romances are few and far between.

“There seems to be a wonderful, invisible quality to Ojai,” said Beatrice Wood, now 97 years old and still working in a hilltop home-studio beyond the eastern fringe of town.

“With a history full of holistic and spiritual purpose,” wrote resident Glenn Emanuel last year in a coffee-table book paying homage to Ojai, “its populace enjoys a lifestyle unique in outlook and unparalleled in its diversity and scope of thought.” The title of the book: “Ojai, Land of Man’s Sacred Nature.”

With such preoccupations, Ojai has never been much of a town for serious crime.

A few other cities can claim lower rates of crime per capita. But earlier this summer, the FBI rated Ventura County the safest urban county in the western United States. And in raw numbers, no city in the county had fewer crimes than Ojai.

Sheriff’s Department figures from 1989 show no homicides, two rapes, one robbery and 10 assaults--a total of 13 violent crimes for the year. There were also 76 burglaries, 41 cases of grand theft, 122 cases of petty theft, 24 stolen cars and three cases of arson. The rate of crime amounted to 35.1 crimes per 1,000 people, about half the state average, and a decrease from previous years.

“We answer calls from skateboarders on the arcade all the way on up,” said Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Jones.

“Because our crime rate is so low, we’re able to respond to a lot of other things that other law enforcement agencies can’t,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Larry Weimer.

And even when the sheriff’s deputies can’t respond, other authorities may.

The city’s Senior Citizen Volunteer Patrol, made up of about 35 of Ojai’s older residents, licenses bicycles, coordinates Neighborhood Watch programs, assists in traffic control on big holidays, and even keeps a list of vacationing residents, so that their homes can be watched.

Then there’s the city code enforcement program. Last summer, 13-year-old Cody Gehrke was discovered to be selling lemonade downtown without the necessary city business license and county permit. A resident complained to the city, and he was shut down.

“Everyone can do his own thing here,” said Elaine Willman, the city code enforcement officer who broke the news to Cody’s family. “That’s what we say, philosophically. But there’s an element of community awareness. . . . If somebody calls me about a noisy rooster, I’m there the same day. If somebody calls about a noisy rooster in Los Angeles, that takes weeks.”

In the month of July, Willman got 13 complaints, ranging from trash at Nordhoff Cemetery to a report of roosters, turkeys and goats in a residential area. Most were resolved the same day. Among her other duties in August and September, Willman has been compiling a list of more than 600 signs that will be newly subject to city ordinance on Nov. 12. Every sign has been photographed, the better to be reviewed by city officials and active citizens like Roy Patton.

“What we’ve tried to do,” said Patton, “is eliminate the commercial look of signs, and keep them limited to identification only, and that means you can’t advertise products out on the street.”

Patton, 78 years old and a 46-year Ojai resident, is the city’s unofficial official maker of wooden signs. His tastes tend to agree with the Planning Commission’s, and he has been known to provide free consultation to merchants whose signs he finds unattractive. If they resist, he has been known to complain to the city.

And Patton’s interest reaches beyond signs. Eight years ago, when a local artist proposed a colorful mural on an outside wall downtown, Patton led a protest against it.

“What a can of worms!” he said. “Soon, there would be murals on every blank wall on every building in Ojai.” Patton prevailed.

“We’re trying to stay a small town in Southern California, and that’s not an easy task,” City Manager Andy Belknap said.

“I have yet to find a city where the people and the city government work the way we do to save what we’ve got,” said commissioner Hirschberg.

“We’re quite a disciplined community,” said Mayor Nina Shelley, “in terms of our economy, and the way we want it to look, and the way we want it to operate.” But has Ojai become too disciplined for its own good? Some people wonder.

Michelle Sandoval found herself amid a controversy this summer when she and her husband put purple paint on the wall of their new restaurant, MK’s, on Ojai Avenue. Redevelopment commissioners and some residents decried the color scheme as a blemish on the city’s earth-tone theme. Some suggested that it looked “very L.A.”--which Sandoval denied, maintaining that the restaurant is “very Ojai.” For now, the paint remains.

“Even though the people are supposed to be so free spirited and free thinkers, they tend to be more critical,” Sandoval said. “People are extremely idiosyncratic here.”

Jeanette O’Connor is more skeptical. For the past 12 years, she has worked on the widely respected Ojai Festival, a classical music event staged in town every summer since 1947.

“The festival was perceived by most of the City Council members as being very close to something that attracted--uh oh--the T-word: tourism,” O’Connor said. One result of that, she said, was that the city was reluctant to offer financial backing to the event.

“Here we were, the only internationally known arts event in Ventura County,” O’Connor said, “and in 1989 we got nothing. And in 1990, we got $350.”

Mayor Shelley discounted O’Connor’s analysis, saying that the city had limited money for the arts, and that Ojai Festival officials have always been able to find support elsewhere.

Either way, the situation is no longer O’Connor’s problem. After this past summer’s festival, the 37-year-old O’Connor resigned as executive director, took a job with a chamber music organization in Manhattan, and rented an apartment on the edge of Harlem. Ojai’s reined-in atmosphere, she said, was a factor.

Librarian Ann Crozier chooses to stay because “it’s a wonderful town in many ways.” But she finds the community’s restrictiveness “a bit excessive. . . . The valley has been open to all of these alternative visions. To decide that these can only be focused in red tile and beige paint is a bit restrictive and pretentious.”

Margot Eiser, the manager of Time Portal Books on Ojai Avenue and a failed City Council candidate in June, is another dubious resident.

“I don’t think the government really wants any creativity in Ojai,” Eiser said. “It just doesn’t want anybody to make waves. . . . I don’t think they support anything unconventional, that’s all.”

But civic character is a slippery subject. Within a few breaths of her criticism of the City Council’s conservatism, Eiser was stewing over the colors that Sandoval and other merchants have been allowed to use on their storefronts.

So goes Ojai, land of tolerance and restriction, in search of its future. Maybe Cody Gehrke has seen it. Now 14 years old, Cody this summer switched from selling lemonade to bottled products, including Evian water, along the Ojai Trail. He was well on his way to revenues “in three figures” when he noticed in mid-July that he had competition from another teen-ager, one without clearance from City Hall. Cody turned him in.