Group Vacates 40-Acre Hilltop Village Under County Pressure : Ojai Valley: Building, fire and health code violations lead to eviction. The residents can still hold outdoor meetings on the site.

Bowing to county dictates, members of the Ojai Foundation packed the last of their belongings Tuesday and moved out of their 40-acre hilltop village of canvas buildings, gardens, terraces and stone-lined walkways.

Faced with an eviction notice for building, fire and health code violations, the encampment’s 22 residents loaded their belongings into vans and pickup trucks and left the upper Ojai Valley property that had been the home of their group for more than a decade.

The departure, which came after Ventura County refused to extend a Feb. 20 deadline, was clearly a somber moment. The group can still hold outdoor gatherings on the property but cannot use any of the facilities, county officials said.

“It’s much more than packing up my things,” said Sandy Olken, 28, who lived in a tepee while cooking and gardening for the encampment during the last three years. “It’s packing up a way of life.”

“I’m coming up for a second wind,” said Lola Rae, 44, a foundation board member and 10-year resident. “I did my crying three days ago, and now I guess I’m ready to go.”

Founded in 1979, the Ojai Foundation bills itself as an alternative learning center rooted in American Indian and Oriental culture. It had sponsored retreats, seminars and conferences at the encampment on subjects ranging from environmental awareness to mythology and techniques for meditation.

But three of its neighbors complained after a late October program in which 350 people chanted and beat drums. The complaints prompted county inspections of the property, which the group leases from the Happy Valley Foundation, a philosophically similar organization.

Steve Offerman, administrative assistant to County Supervisor Susan K. Lacey, said the eviction was regrettable but unavoidable.

The codes that are keeping the foundation members from living on the land are the same ones used to force slumlords to maintain their rental properties, Offerman said.

“It’s unfortunate they cannot carry out their activities,” Offerman said. “I can’t say it’s unfortunate that our codes exact the high levels of compliance that they do.

“If we allowed people to live in any structure of their choosing, the potential for abuse of the codes would be great,” he said.

But Offerman’s rationale was lost on the foundation members. They were dismayed by the county’s unwillingness to grant an extension, particularly since the code violations did not surface for more than a decade.

“It’s good that people are protected from exploiters,” Olken said of codes designed to guard against substandard housing. But she said the codes should not apply to people who choose to live a simple lifestyle with only basic necessities.

County officials said they had not investigated the foundation’s living arrangements before because nobody had complained.

The compound--with outdoor showers, flush and portable toilets and solar electricity--recently has been home to 13 staff members, two graduate students, two work-study residents and five children. Most had cleared their belongings out before three county inspectors arrived at 2 p.m.

The compound’s 36 structures--primarily wood-frame and decked tepees, geodesic domes and Mongolian yurts--will remain up but cannot be used for housing or classrooms, said Leon Berg, an Ojai Foundation board member who has lived on the site with his wife and two children since 1979. The site will be guarded by two caretakers who will live in a trailer on the property, he said.

Berg said the foundation’s board will meet this weekend to discuss seeking permits from the county to use the vacant structures to house visitors on brief retreats. Foundation members say they plan to build a $2-million complex out of rammed earth but are about $1.4 million shy of the money needed for the project, despite a $300,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

A foundation supporter is providing rent-free accommodations to several staff members until March 1. Others will move into temporary quarters in the Ojai area. For March and April, the foundation has rented a 10-bedroom house for $3,500 per month on 2 1/2 acres in the eastern Ojai Valley, Berg said.

Michael Craft, the foundation’s program director, has been scrambling to find new locations for events scheduled in coming months.

The foundation will hold weeklong retreats in March for 40 seniors from a private high school in Santa Monica by having them camp in a nearby canyon, with the landowner’s permission, Craft said.

Craft said he has found locations in Malibu and Santa Monica for a national retreat for environmentalists in March, to be led by Thic Naht Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen master, and for an April conference on plant intelligence. He must find sites for an upcoming alternative theater seminar and for the foundation’s second annual storytelling conference, he said. Plans remain set for a series of retreats and pilgrimages to Peru, India, Nepal and Tibet during the rest of the year, he said.

“We were just trying to find a better way to live among ourselves, building a sense of community and a relationship with the earth,” Berg said. “Those values have been eroded in America in the last decade in so many ways.”

Ari Carpenter, 10, was upset Tuesday to be moving from her home of six months into more conventional living quarters in an Ojai-area house.

“I get fresh air and climb trees, and I’m not cooped up here,” said Ari, a fifth-grader at nearby Summit Elementary School. “I don’t understand why it is we can’t stay.”