COLUMN ONE : Not Like Orange County : Ever more urbanized, the area has become a model of what not to do--particularly in Ventura. With the region’s image as a haven from L.A., it’s an ironic twist.

Gazing out his office window into a grassy valley, Dr. Michael Sparkuhl remembers how he fled Laguna Beach for a simpler life in small-town Ventura County. But now he fears that the simple life is about to pack up and leave him behind.

In the three years since he came to sleepy Santa Paula from Orange County, Sparkuhl has watched in dismay as big-city life followed him north: A K mart uprooted an orange grove. A four-lane highway leveled graceful rows of eucalyptus trees lining a country road. And a 2,000-inmate jail could soon carve a huge chunk out of nearby citrus groves.

All this has forged in Sparkuhl the dread that rustic, tranquil Ventura County will soon follow Orange County’s path from urban getaway to urban center.

“We’re real close to having the same thing happen as what happened in Orange County with runaway development,” Sparkuhl said. “I’m afraid it’ll hit us too. I think we’ve got 15 years, then the inexorable forces of development will push on through.”

Long a guaranteed escape for jangled, jaded big-city folk, Ventura County sees a vision of its future 85 miles south in Orange County and doesn’t relish the picture. The locals shudder to think that the lengthening shadow of urbanization could saturate their rugged canyons with shopping malls, crowds and crime.

And Orange County, which for years capitalized on being a haven from everything Los Angeles, finds itself singled out for some of that same disdain--especially in Ventura County.

So fervent is the rejection of Orange County that Ventura residents cite it as everything to avoid. That sentiment has fueled a slow-growth wave, sweeping into office politicians who warn ominously that a cavalier attitude toward development could turn their home into an Orange County clone.

“The pressure here is what Orange County was feeling 15 years ago, and it’s going to be a challenge to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” said Maria VanderKolk, a 26-year-old political novice who took a seat on the Ventura County Board of Supervisors in January.

To be sure, this kind of attitude is hardly new. All over Southern California, counties are recoiling from neighboring areas that they view as overdeveloped. San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties are trying to shake off a proposed regional government alliance with Ventura County, contending that Ventura’s interests and needs are too urban.

San Diego County is home to a slow-growth movement called PLAN--Prevent Los Angelization Now. And San Bernardino and Riverside counties worry that Orange County may be looking to export some of its jail, landfill, traffic and airport problems to the Inland Empire.

But experts say that a classic example of this antipathy can be found in Ventura County’s barrage of hostility against the perceived ills of Orange County.

Because growth issues have become such a sore point, Orange County developers feel the chill when they look to leave their imprint on Ventura County. They have become something of a dirty word in Ventura city politics, doubly unwelcome as a pro-growth force and an outsider perceived to be meddling in local affairs.

After funneling thousands of dollars to losing pro-growth candidates for the Ventura City Council in 1989, Orange County developers have contributed nothing to the 18 people vying for office there this year. Candidates said accepting such funds would be “the kiss of death” in Ventura’s increasingly slow-growth environment.

Both coastal counties that hug Los Angeles--Ventura to the west over the Simi Hills and Orange to the south--can trace some of their growth to fleeing urbanites. But since the end of World War II, it is Orange County that has attracted the development dollars, riding such a boom that many increasingly view it as an extension of congested, befouled Los Angeles, no longer the refuge it once was.

Like many Californians, people in Ventura County share an aversion to “Los Angelization,” the relentless sprawl that has made it an international emblem of faceless freeway living.

But while only a dwindling few can remember a pristine, small-town Los Angeles, recollections abound of an unspoiled Orange County that seemed to vanish only yesterday. In Ventura County, people view it as a sibling recently lost: they know that not long ago, it looked a lot like today’s Ventura County, with wild, open vistas and uncrowded towns, the sea of red-tiled rooftops only a developer’s daydream.

“Ventura County is a forgotten part of Southern California, very similar to the way Orange County was before the developers came,” said Richard Senate, Ventura County’s semiofficial historian. “But L.A. extended south first, so we kept our rural nature long after it vanished in Orange County.”

Ventura’s contempt takes some by surprise in Orange County, where a 1989 poll showed that 51% of its residents wanted to live nowhere else.

“Orange County is the best place to live, second to none,” brags County Supervisor Thomas F. Riley. “Maybe (Ventura County) ought to start looking at us and copying the things that we did right.”

Riley, whose coastal southern district has been the site of much of the county’s development in the last decade, boasted about Orange County’s public schools, libraries, performing arts center and newly expanded airport.

But others in Orange County think the criticism rings uncomfortably true. They say that compliant county supervisors allowed powerful developers to forever change the face of the county, replacing huge swaths of open space with endless housing tracts and industrial parks.

“We’ve become another Los Angeles,” said Tom Rogers, a San Juan Capistrano cattle rancher who co-wrote a slow-growth measure that was defeated by voters in 1988. “We’re strictly an urban area and becoming more so everyday. There’s an absolute desire to pave over and build on every square foot available in Orange County.”

It was a companionable blend of geography and politics that produced an Orange County courting and basking in its own growth, while Ventura County snoozed unmolested in the shadows of its oak trees, according to local historians and urban planners.

Cheap, plentiful land and a friendly attitude toward development encouraged major defense and aerospace firms like Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas to expand into Orange County in the 1950s, drawing thousands of employees, who found houses more affordable and neighborhoods less crowded than in Los Angeles.

Exploiting Orange County’s easy access to Los Angeles, many joined the commuter culture, keeping their Los Angeles jobs and buying homes in North Orange County towns like Buena Park and Anaheim, said Rob Kling, UC Irvine professor and co-editor of “Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County Since World War II.”

Orange County’s location in a “vacuum of energy” between Los Angeles and San Diego ensured a continued clamor for jobs and housing from both sides, said Laguna Niguel planning consultant Frank E. Hotchkiss, former director of strategic planning for the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

The expansion was stunning: the Orange County economy that generated $13.5 billion in 1975 hit the $60-billion mark in 1989, surpassing Arizona’s and ranking alongside those of Austria and Denmark, Kling said in his book.

And, along the way, Orange County saw its suburban sprawl overtake its namesake citrus crop. In the early 1940s, it boasted 75,600 acres of Valencia orange groves. But by last year, Orange County’s namesake fruit harvest had dwindled to only 3,300 acres--puny compared with Ventura’s 14,200.

One of the things Ventura Countians say that they fear losing most is the unique personalities of each of their 10 cities, from semi-urban Oxnard to rural Fillmore. Looking toward Orange County, they feel that one city often blends facelessly into another, and that the whole mess is indistinguishable from Los Angeles.

Sparkuhl’s fond hope is to stall the march of history just a little longer, so that his baby daughters can attend the little red schoolhouse nearby, where 26 students from kindergarten through sixth grades study together in one room.

Ventura County’s newfangled slow-growth movement is gaining passionate converts in people with small-town dreams, people like Sparkuhl, and like Lorena Young and Dave Duffy.

Young’s 16-month-old daughter carried a picket sign outside Camarillo City Hall recently that said, “Keep My Future Green.” She and her mother were protesting an Irvine developer’s plan to clear celery, tomato and scallion fields for a 928,000-square-foot complex of retail shops, theaters, a hotel and a skating rink or miniature golf course.

“If we keep letting these things happen, pretty soon she will be living in Orange County, except that it will be called Ventura County,” Young said.

Duffy, the publisher of Backwoods Home, a Ventura build-your-own-home magazine, recalls that when he moved to Ventura 20 years ago, there was no rush hour and he didn’t have to lock the doors of his beach house. About 10 years ago, he said, the “hippie party” environment of beach living began to vanish as the wealthy bought up property. The money drew burglaries--and bolted doors, Duffy said.

“For me, it’s a sense of resignation that the best of Ventura County has already been lost,” Duffy said.

Call it “Fear and Loathing in Ventura County,” perhaps. Whatever, it’s a dynamic that is being played out across America. Joel Garreau, who crisscrossed the country for several years researching “Edge City: Life on the New Frontier,” his new book about the urbanization of suburbs, said counties everywhere are agonizing over the battle between nature and the bulldozer.

Americans seem to be torn between the belief that growth equals progress and the notion of nature as a sacred paradise, Garreau said. The way they are currently--if awkwardly--trying to resolve the dilemma is by creating “edge cities,” turning the old residential bedroom communities into urban areas that attempt to combine the grassy quiet of suburbs with the vital job and entertainment hubs of the old downtowns.

“The problem becomes how do you create growth without screwing up nature?” Garreau said. “And we’re still trying to figure that out. It’s a national work in progress.”

Indeed, Ventura Countians say that’s exactly what they’re trying to figure out.

Ken Bauer is seeing the press of development in eastern Ventura County first-hand. Across the street from his Thousand Oaks home, the little valley that wore a blue and yellow wrap of wildflowers each spring will soon be graded for 36 homes. Planners predict that the number of homes in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Moorpark and Oak Park will leap by half in the next two decades.

And in the county’s most hotly debated development issue, 2,600 homes could be built in the 10-mile buffer of space that separates eastern Ventura County from the San Fernando Valley, land owned by entertainer Bob Hope and the Ahmanson Land Co. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, set to open Nov. 4, is expected to draw activity into Simi Valley.

The relative merits and drawbacks of growth remain a matter of disagreement. But consultants and analysts who examine both counties say Ventura can learn from Orange’s mistakes, allowing enough growth to preserve its economic health, yet controlling it sufficiently to preserve its quality of life.

Many planners agree that Orange County’s greatest mistake was allowing growth at a rate that outpaced the building of roads.

Richard Wittenberg, Ventura County’s chief administrative officer, takes that lesson very much to heart after crawling through Laguna Niguel traffic on the way to a wedding recently.

“It was unbelievable. It was a parking lot,” he said. “The only thing worse I’ve ever done is drive on the Long Island Expressway in New York.”

Both Goodkin and Rocky Tarantello, an Orange County consultant and USC professor of real estate, agreed that Ventura County can succeed at warding off overdevelopment with coordinated political will.

Researching the possibility of a planned community in Ventura County last year, Tarantello found it was “not a viable investment” for a developer because it lacks adequate roads, water and sewage capacity.

Many developers already view it as hostile turf because the county and many of its cities require a daunting series of fees and permits that drive up the cost of building, the consultants said.

While tight growth controls can benefit residents, they can also raise ethical questions for society at large. Tarantello criticized restrictive growth policies as failing to allow for “pluralistic” communities that offer “room for everyone.” Goodkin agreed.

“I think of Ventura County as Los Angeles’ Marin County, people in love with Perrier instead of water,” Goodkin said. “But it’s un-American to be so elitist. It’s essentially unethical for people to be so selfish about protecting their environment that they don’t protect young people and retirees who need affordable housing.”

Nonetheless, Ventura County’s slow-growth movement is only gaining momentum.

Kevin Sweeney, spokesman for Patagonia Inc., a Ventura outdoor-clothing maker that is active on slow-growth issues, says there is room for people of all stripes in Ventura County. But he also wants to preserve the reality behind his image of the area: two oak trees on a hill.

“It’s fields for kids to play in, for couples to go walking together after dinner. You only recognize the value of open space when you lose it.”

Times staff writer Daryl Kelley in Ventura County contributed to this report.