ELECTIONS OXNARD HARBOR DISTRICT : 3 Challengers Seek to Oust Incumbents From Commission

In reading over the last year’s minutes of the Oxnard Harbor District Commission, candidate Faith Cosby said she discovered evidence of an unusual single-mindedness among its members.

On every vote recorded in the last 12 months, there was absolute unanimity among the five commissioners who govern the Port of Hueneme and have been weighing a $90-million port modernization project, Cosby said.

Cosby, 51, an Oxnard real estate broker, charged that the commission is a “rubber-stamp” for the port’s executive director, Anthony Taormina. “There’s been not one dissenting vote on anything in the last year,” Cosby said.

In seeking to unseat three incumbents Tuesday, Cosby and fellow challengers Raymond E. Fosse and William E. Bradley are raising voices of dissent.

But since the district’s formation in 1937, voters have never rejected an incumbent harbor commissioner, according to Ventura County records. Commissioner Stanley J. Daily, who is seeking reelection, said the incumbents’ success shows that voters have been satisfied with the commission’s performance since its inception.

“The record of the harbor district and the running of the harbor district has been exemplary and the incumbents, based on that, have not only won but won handily,” said Daily, a 13-year commissioner and former Camarillo mayor who is also running for the Camarillo City Council.

Fosse, a 52-year-old ship’s pilot at the U.S. Naval Station at Port Hueneme, said incumbents are returned to office because the harbor district elections generate little attention. Nearly half the county’s registered voters are entitled to cast ballots in the contest, but few are interested in the port, even though it pours an estimated $200 million into the county’s economy each year, said Fosse, who has lined up endorsements from several labor unions.

Daily and Commissioners Edward J. Millan and Steve W. Stocks--the other incumbents seeking to retain their seats--said the major campaign issue is whether the district’s boundaries should be shrunk, as advocated by the Local Agency Formation Commission of Ventura County.

The district now includes Camarillo, parts of Thousand Oaks and unincorporated areas of Ventura County, as well as Port Hueneme and Oxnard. LAFCO, which voted to condense the boundaries to Oxnard and Port Hueneme, was sued by the district, Daily and Millan, who as Camarillo residents claimed that their right to serve as commissioners had been violated.

Millan, 59, the port’s general manager for 16 years before retiring and winning election to the commission in 1986, said residents in the disenfranchised area should be allowed to vote on breaking from the district. His position is shared by Stocks, 65, of Oxnard. Stocks, a trustee of the Oxnard Union High School District and former principal and assistant superintendent in that district, was appointed to a vacant commission seat earlier this year.

As for unanimity, Daily said commissioners were united in all votes in the last year not because they are lackeys of the port administration, as his opponents claim, but because their two-member committees resolved potential conflicts in meetings with port staff before the commissioners voted in public sessions.

“Many problems are ironed out before things are brought to the board with a recommendation,” said Daily, whose dual candidacy was questioned as a conflict of interest and later sanctioned in an informal legal opinion from a county attorney.

The challengers insist that the issue is the commission itself and the “old-boy network” that has resulted in three former administrators and schoolteachers from the Oxnard high school district serving on the board, including Daily and Stocks, who were appointed on the recommendations of present or past commissioners with whom they worked in the schools.

“When they come into the public meetings, they have pretty much made up their minds,” said Bradley, 65, a retired insurance executive from Oxnard.