VENTURA : Keys Residents Assail Tax to Dredge Silt

Residents of the Ventura Keys neighborhood packed City Council chambers Monday for a raucous hearing on the city’s proposal to tax 299 Keys homeowners $1,680 a year for dredging silt from the waterways in their back yards.

About 180 disgruntled Keys residents attended the meeting to protest the plan, which the city says is needed to finance clearing the waterways of sediment that drains from the Arundell Barranca. Under the plan, the city would pay 25% of the cost of regular dredging and levy taxes against the residents of the proposed district to raise the other 75%.

Property owners argued that the city should pay to keep the Keys clear of debris that washes down from other parts of the city. “The city will receive about $2 million out of 300 small homes,” said Keys resident Joel Martin. “To add insult to injury, this polluted material blocking the waterway belongs to the city.”

Other residents also protested the council’s plan to charge them for removing debris from the channels that wind through their neighborhood.

Some cited an engineer’s report on the plan, which indicated that pesticides and erosion from nearby fields flow with other sediment.

“Whether or not the city changed the type of silt coming down, you are responsible,” Ventura Keys Assn. representative Diana Becker told the council. “It is public silt.”

Representing the city’s viewpoint, Supt. of Streets Ron Calkins said the developer who built the Keys in 1964 knew that the waterways would get clogged with silt and agreed to a similar assessment district at the time. That district would also have charged the homeowners for dredging; however, parts of that agreement were invalidated by Proposition 13.

Calkins said the barranca now has sections lined with concrete that have reduced the amount of silt draining into the Keys.