5,900 Acres May Be Transferred to Kern County : Boundaries: It is the only way for residential developers to get services in that area. Officials approve of giving up the land.

Kern County may soon swallow up about 5,900 acres of undeveloped land from neighboring Ventura County, and Ventura government officials aren’t batting an eye.

A bill that is sailing through the Legislature to officially transfer the land to Kern County was described by one Ventura County official as a “ticky-tacky little thing” and a “simple housekeeping matter.”

It’s not that Ventura County doesn’t care about the land--most of which is in the Los Padres National Forest. It’s just that the property is so far from any county services that it makes more sense to let Kern County annex the area and then provide essential services so part of it can be developed, Ventura County officials said.

“The area should be in Kern County,” said Robert Braitman, the head of Ventura County’s Local Agency Formation Commission. “It’s only logical.”

The change will make the county border more consistent with topographical characteristics by moving the boundary from the foot of a hill to the top, he said.

The boundary will move by about five miles.

The legislation stems from the desire of developers, who owned at least 590 acres of the land, to build a residential housing project on their property in the northeast corner of Ventura County, south of Frazier Park and west of Interstate 5.

As the developers were drawing up their plans, they found that most of the public services that they needed were not supplied by Ventura County but were available from Kern County, just across the county line, said Mike Callagy, owner of a Bakersfield engineering firm that sought the boundary change on behalf of the developers.

Callagy said Thursday that Ventura County had limited resources to provide essential services at that end of the county. The property, he said, is “not only a long way away . . . but there’s no convenient way to get there from Ventura.”

Consequently, the boards of supervisors in Ventura and Kern counties agreed in 1986 to the border switch. Assemblyman Trice Harvey (R-Bakersfield), who was then a member of the Kern County Board of Supervisors, said supporters of the agreement had not realized that they also needed to change state law describing county boundaries.

Harvey is carrying legislation to put the state’s seal of approval on the deal. It has cleared the Assembly without any opposition and is scheduled to be heard Wednesday by the Senate Local Government Committee.

According to the committee’s analysis of the measure, “the counties want the statutes to reflect this reality” that the sparsely populated mountain land is now in Kern County.

“It’s simply a good government bill for changing boundaries,” Braitman said.

Penny Bohannon, Ventura County’s legislative analyst who helped draft the bill, said the legislation will simply make the transfer official. “It’s just a housekeeping matter,” she said. “It’s a ticky-tacky little thing.”

Ventura County has wanted to make the border change official for several years but for one reason or another it was never done, she said.

Ginny Camarillo, a senior administrative analyst with Ventura County, said about 10% of the property was owned by private landowners who also had land in Kern County. Because the land was split between two counties, the developers apparently found themselves unable to pursue their project, she said.

Camarillo said “it was not adjacent to any area we would consider for development,” largely because “our county’s philosophy is to promote development within cities” and there was no Ventura County city nearby.

Harvey and Callagy said Donald Tate of Malibu and others had sought to develop the land, which is near the intersection of Ventura, Kern and Los Angeles counties. He said Los Angeles County did not want to annex the territory because of the added expense of providing such services as police and fire protection.

But Kern County supplies these services to nearby Frazier Park, so the developers sought annexation, Harvey said. He added that while most of the terrain is mountainous, there is a stretch of flatland suitable for development south of Frazier Park.

However, Callagy said plans for development have never gotten off the ground. He said the developers “just haven’t had the money or the time to pursue them.”