Ventura Applies for Emergency Permit for Keys Dredging

The city of Ventura has applied for an emergency permit to dredge up debris and sand that washed into the Ventura Keys waterway during last week’s rainstorm, officials said Saturday.

Five years worth of lemon rinds, leaves, railroad planks and thousands of plastic bags were swept down the Arundell Barranca drainage channel and into the marine community’s waterway during the downpour.

The California Coastal Commission, which would issue the permit, could not be reached for comment Saturday.

The channel has been at the heart of a months-long dispute between the city and residents of the Ventura Keys, a neighborhood of 300 waterfront homes just north of Ventura Harbor.

Homeowners, who claim that the city has allowed contaminants from sewer and storm-drain runoff to pollute the Keys waterway, have sued the city in Ventura County Superior Court, seeking damages for diminished property values.

City officials have argued that the channel was wrongly designated as a water-sports area and that health standards on the waterway should be relaxed.

Even before the storm, the homeowners fought to force the city to pay for the channel dredging, which would cost $1 million to $3 million.

Ventura officials insist that a special assessment district must be set up to levy fees against the homeowners to pay for channel maintenance.

Ventura Mayor Richard Francis said if the coastal commission issues an emergency permit, the city would pay for the dredging initially. “What happens after that remains to be seen,” he said.

The city, which applied to the coastal commission Friday, hopes it can capitalize on the storm to receive an emergency permit within 14 days, rather than waiting almost 20 months for the commission to process a regular dredging permit, said City Manager John Baker.

“There’s certainly a lot more debris and some . . . depositing of silt at the end of the barranca,” Baker said. “We have to establish that there was an emergency condition, and they have to assess whether we have established that.”

The waterway needs to be dredged “because it is an access-way and there should be passage,” Baker said. Keys residents complained before the storm that at low tide the silt in the water impeded their boats. City officials hope to hear from the commission early this week, he said.

“The storm has given us a window of opportunity to apply to the coastal commission to do the work that needs to be done,” said Francis, adding that the Keys waterway has been dredged twice following storms, once in the late 1960s and again almost 10 years later.

“The storm has greatly increased the necessity to a point where it has become an emergency,” he said.

Between 70,000 and 90,000 cubic yards of sediment lay in the channel before the storm, said city spokeswoman Barbara Fosbrink. But city officials declined Saturday to estimate how much debris and sediment filled the waterway after the rains.

A resident, however, described the channel as filled with “hundreds of thousands of yards of junk.”

Jim Majewski, of the Save the Keys Committee representing area homeowners, said thousands of plastic bags, foam containers, lemon rinds and leaves from the city’s storm drains choked the waterway. Last week’s three days of rainstorms washed the debris, which had accumulated over five years of drought, down the Arundell Barranca.

“It looks as if you could walk across it,” Majewski said. “It looks like a big field rather than a channel.”

Majewski said he was hopeful that the coastal commission would be sympathetic to the situation.

“If we do get another storm . . . this is going to be a swamp,” he said.