City May OK Plan That Would Allow New Housing : Ventura: The proposal would replace a moratorium on building permits. The limits of 185 units a year reflect the slow-growth bent of the council.

The Ventura City Council is expected to replace the current moratorium on building permits with a program that will allow 185 new units a year, city officials said Friday.

But if adopted as expected Nov. 26, the Residential Growth Management Program will drastically reduce the number of new units that had been allowed in the past decade and reflect the slow-growth bent of the new City Council majority that was swept into office in November, 1989.

In the past 10 years, Ventura averaged about 560 units a year, Community Development Director Everett Millais said.

Vice Mayor Donald Villeneuve, who heads the city’s housing subcommittee, said he was confident that the plan would be adopted when the council votes on it Nov. 26.

“If we go much lower, we’d be standing still,” he said. “I think this plan is the best way to control growth while maintaining a commercially viable city.”

Moreover, while the new growth plan will allow developers to file building plans with the city, no new construction will be allowed until the city overcomes its water shortage emergency, Millais said.

The moratorium on filing applications was adopted in January after city officials determined that unless the number of building allocations was reduced, the city would exceed a General Plan population limit of 102,000 by the year 2000. This moratorium will end when the new growth management plan is adopted.

In March, the city declared a water emergency and banned all new water hookups until the city finds new water sources. The ban on water hookups will remain in effect after the growth-management program is adopted, and no new construction will be allowed until the ban is lifted, Millais said.

In adopting the growth plan, however, the city would allow developers to begin the process of obtaining building permits, which normally takes about 18 months.

Millais said such a decision would justifiably raise expectations among developers that new construction will be allowed in the city in the foreseeable future.

“By going forward with this plan, the city will be putting developers in the hopper with the expectation that they will be allowed to build again,” Millais said.

“The water emergency was not adopted as a growth-control measure,” Millais said. “The RGMP will become the city’s instrument to control growth.”

Bob Holmes, a spokesman for the Ventura Building Industry Assn., said developers had mixed feelings about the growth plan. While they would be happy to be able to file for building applications again, they were disappointed with the low number of new units the city would allow.

“There’s a great deal of concern that we will be allowed less than a couple of hundred units a year,” Holmes said. He said the Southern California Assn. of Governments has determined that to meet its fair share of the region’s housing needs, Ventura should allow about 770 new units per year.

“There’s no question that the city could accommodate that much growth if the council wanted to provide affordable housing to its residents,” Holmes said. He said the city’s refusal to build more housing has helped make Ventura one of the most expensive places to live in the country.

Councilman Gary Tuttle disagreed with Holmes’ assessment of the city’s capability to absorb more housing units. The water crisis, he said, had proven that the city doesn’t even have enough resources to meet the needs of its existing population.

“I’m not even sure that the city can accommodate the numbers of units proposed in the RGMP,” he said.