County Report: Growth Control : 8 Cities Repeatedly Overstep Growth Limits Set by Law : Loopholes: Officials say the caps serve as strong tools for getting roads and other civic extras from builders.

Limits on housing construction in eight Ventura County cities have been routinely exceeded because of exemptions and loopholes in growth control laws, records show.

Ventura, Thousand Oaks and Ojai, for example, all passed laws to rein in the explosive growth of the 1970s but each exceeded the limits at least five times during the last decade. Simi Valley has surpassed its quota three of the last four years.

Cities have often borrowed from future allotments to accommodate developers, officials acknowledge.

“A lot of people will do shell games with the numbers,” said Keith Turner, the county’s planning director.

At the same time, however, the growth-limiting laws have given city officials more leverage to exact concessions from developers, government planners said.

By forcing builders to compete for a limited number of permits, city officials said, they have been able to tap developers for improvements to road, water and sewer systems.

Growth controls give cities “leverage to design projects to be more consistent with city goals,” said Harvey Molotch, a UC Santa Barbara professor who has written two books on slow-growth laws.

Deputy Mayor Donald Villeneuve said Ventura used the laws to encourage developers to build houses that they otherwise would not have considered building. Three builders agreed this year to construct 400 low-income houses by 1993. Low-income dwellings are exempt from the city’s building quota.

“Those would not be built if we had let the marketplace decide what to build,” Villeneuve said. “Screw the wisdom of the marketplace.”

Officials said the growth laws also have improved housing quality because they reward builders who include such extras as bike paths, parks, fire sprinklers and additional landscaping in their projects.

Overall, the new laws passed by area cities since 1979 have apparently contributed to a pattern of slower growth.

Ventura County’s population grew by more than 41% during the 1970s, more than twice as fast as the rest of the state. But it expanded by only 26% during the 1980s, the same rate as the state overall, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Many planners say, however, that the effect of growth control laws is limited. While the new laws reduced the supply of houses, they did not control the demand for them, the planners say.

Molotch said Ventura County’s experience with growth ordinances shows that the housing market is still in control.

“The effects of growth controls are exaggerated,” he said.

And Neil Moyer, president of the Environmental Coalition of Ventura County, said environmentalists have learned that growth limits “are not the be-all and end-all of growth management.”

The city of Oxnard, where officials have rejected growth limits, illustrates the point. The city grew by just 400 dwellings a year during the 1980s. But five other cities with building quotas issued more building permits.

The experiences of Oxnard and Fillmore, two of the county’s poorest cities, show that cities can grow quickly even if they build relatively few new houses. Oxnard’s population grew by 34,000, or 31%, during the last decade. And the population of Fillmore, which has limited construction to 61 new houses a year since 1979, grew by 2,400, or 25%, during the 1980s.

In both cities, an influx of farm workers from Mexico has pushed up the population. The census reports that nearly one-fourth of all dwellings in the two cities are overcrowded.

For Ventura County, the 1980s was a decade when slow-growth advocates increased their visibility and influence. Environmentalists scored stunning victories in three Ventura City Council races in 1989 and captured an east county supervisor’s seat in 1990.

A fear of repeating the Orange County experience by losing farmland and scenic canyons to development has prompted every area city except Oxnard and Port Hueneme to adopt construction quotas. Port Hueneme has no need for limitations because it has virtually no more room to grow.

The limits have been designed to keep the county’s population in line with existing road, sewer and water systems and to keep air quality from getting worse.

But officials agree that most of the growth control laws include loopholes that allow limits to be exceeded at the whim of city officials.

Many of the laws include exemptions for senior citizen and low-income housing and for projects with fewer than four units. Also exempt are projects that were approved before the laws took effect.

And city officials routinely have exceeded the growth limits by borrowing housing allocations from future years.

For example, Ventura’s 1979 ordinance is one of the most restrictive in the county. But its original annual limit of 550 single-family houses and apartments has been exceeded five times.

Ventura issued 3,132 residential building permits between 1985 and 1990. That surpassed by about 200 the number of permits issued during the same period in Oxnard, a larger city where no growth controls exist.

Current City Council members said the previous council abused the system.

“The previous council was in the habit of borrowing a lot,” Villeneuve said. “They must have taken lessons from Ronald Reagan.”

Councilman Gary Tuttle said: “The previous council made a joke of the numbers.”

Tuttle was among three candidates who were swept into office in 1989 on slow-growth platforms. Last year they reduced Ventura’s building-permit quota to 185 units a year. The drought has since forced the city to impose a moratorium on all new dwellings except for low-income projects.

In Simi Valley, voters approved a 1986 ballot measure that limits permits for new houses and apartments to 172 a year. But the limit has been exceeded in three of the four full years it has been in effect. The city issued 893 permits in 1987, 507 permits in 1988 and 1,269 permits in 1989.

The city issued just 134 permits in 1990, but the demand for new houses had slumped in a depressed market.

Simi Valley officials said some new permits have been issued for housing projects approved before the limit took effect.

Simi Valley Mayor Greg Stratton said the city will make up for the extra permits by reducing the number issued in the future.

“Every unit that is built is accounted for,” he said. “So there is no cheating on the system.”

But Thousand Oaks’ experience with controlled growth indicates that it could take many years for the ledger to balance out.

Thousand Oaks has exceeded its annual building limit six times in the last seven years. Since passage of controversial Proposition A in 1980, the city has built an average of 650 houses a year. Its quota was 500 until 1990, when a judge ordered it increased to 650 after a builder sued.

In Ojai, a growth law has allowed only 16 new dwellings a year since 1979. But the limit has been exceeded nine times, most dramatically in 1989, when the city issued 31 permits.

Ojai Councilwoman Nina Shelley said the limit may have been exceeded because the city approved a 100-unit federal housing project for senior citizens in 1981, and it was built over several years. The city’s quota exempts senior citizen housing.

Shelley said the measure also exempts detached guest homes, which have grown in popularity for five or 10 years.

The most vehement opposition to growth control laws has come from the building industry.

Paul Tryon, a spokesman for the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California, said home buyers end up paying for the laws because housing prices soar when the supply of new dwellings is low.

But Molotch and other housing experts said studies comparing real estate prices throughout Southern California have shown that home values are not affected by slow-growth ordinances.

Tryon said that without new growth, cities cannot pay the price of needed improvements to road, sewer and water systems. “Very few companies are making investments in Ventura County’s future,” he said.

Ultimately, Tryon said, residents in slow-growth cities will find themselves with little money to provide basic services, including parks and schools.

Growth laws force developers to compete against each other in “beauty contests and bidding wars,” he said.

While builders have resisted the laws, environmentalists say that the measures are only as strong as the will of the public officials who enforce them.

Kevin Sweeney, a spokesman for Patagonia Inc., a Ventura clothing company that has participated in several slow-growth campaigns, said he is concerned that growth laws are being circumvented by persistent borrowing from future allotments.

“It underscores a problem we have with slow-growth ordinances” that do not have the full support of city officials, he said.

What is needed, Sweeney said, is a group of environmental activists that makes sure city officials follow their own rules and objects loudly if they don’t.

“It’s difficult even for a slow-growth advocate on a city council to tell developers ‘no’ a hundred times,” Sweeney said, “and that is what it takes.”

Residential Building Permits

Since 1979, eight of Ventura County’s 10 cities have adopted growth control limits to slow the pace of development. Often, however, cities exceed the limit.

Year Annual 1st half enacted limit 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 of 1991 Camarillo 1981 400 408 306 462 568 614 470 95 Fillmore 1979 61 112 32 67 78 56 30 18 Moorpark 1986 270 403 1,921 4 254 251 92 1 Ojai 1979 16 14 21 19 25 31 19 1 Oxnard na none 350 579 430 831 367 376 161 Port Hueneme na none 60 233 34 56 159 0 77 Santa Paula 1985 125 149 94 105 58 169 36 32 Simi Valley 1986* 172 2,483 1,728 893 507 1,269 134 165 Thousand Oaks 1980** 500 911 812 856 915 408 769 415 Ventura 1979*** 550 538 566 633 778 351 266 12 Unincorporated na none 503 817 702 1,084 1,351 420 131

* revised July, 1991, to 548 ** revised 1990 by court order to 650 *** revised 1990 to 185 na not applicable

Source: Building Industry Assn. of Southern California, Construction Industry Research Board and city officials