THE ELECTION : Business Group Takes Aim at 2 Supervisors : Politics: The coalition targets John K. Flynn and Susan K. Lacey. It backed three winners in Ventura City Council race.

The same coalition that helped remove a slow-growth majority from the Ventura City Council in Tuesday’s election already has targeted Ventura County Supervisors John K. Flynn and Susan K. Lacey for its next campaign in the spring.

“We will be recruiting candidates. You bet your life,” said Carolyn Leavens, spokeswoman for a coalition of ranchers, bankers, merchants and building-trade unions called Venturans for Responsible Government.

“We’re setting up some long-term strategies,” she said Wednesday. “This is a group that will not go away.”

She said the coalition poured at least $40,000 into the successful Ventura City Council campaigns of Greg Carson, Jack Tingstrom and Tom Buford--who collectively pushed aside slow-growth incumbent Donald A. Villeneuve.

Leavens said the group will next take aim at Flynn of Oxnard, who angered business interests by opposing a high dam on Sespe Creek, and Lacey of Ventura, a political ally of Villeneuve.

The coalition does not now plan to challenge Supervisor Maggie Erickson Kildee of Camarillo, who is viewed as a moderate, Leavens said. Two supervisors are not up for reelection next year.

The same factors that helped pro-business candidates in Ventura this fall--concern about the economy and a general displeasure with incumbents--will exist in the supervisorial races, Leavens said.

Indeed, voters’ pocketbooks and their antipathy toward incumbents emerged elsewhere in the county.

In Camarillo, voters rejected both a $55-million school bond issue and recalled three directors of the Camrosa Water District because of increased water rates.

While the Ventura council results showed that voters were worried about the shuttered storefronts on Main Street, a number of local officials and political activists said the defeat of Villeneuve was not a rejection of the county’s environmental movement.

“To write off the slow-growth or environmental movement in this county would be absurd,” said Kevin Sweeney, spokesman for Patagonia Inc., a Ventura-based company that has supported environmental candidates locally.

Sweeney said that while Villeneuve and Steve Bennett--the two candidates Patagonia endorsed--both lost, the three winners all ran on platforms that support controlled growth.

“The pendulum swings back and forth,” Sweeney said, referring to the victories of three slow-growth council candidates in 1989. “The business community was angry this time.”

Part of that swing in this election was the withdrawal of Patagonia as a large contributor and adviser to slow-growth campaigns. “Let somebody else be the big gorilla working behind the scenes,” Sweeney said.

The current big gorilla is the business coalition. And Leavens is its designated voice.

Leavens, whose family owns 1,000 acres of citrus orchards and who is a power in local Republican politics, ran against Lacey in 1988, spending more than $100,000 but failing to force the two-term incumbent into a runoff.

Leavens said she will not challenge Lacey next spring because a part-time appointment to a federal economic development board takes too much of her time. The coalition, however, is strongly considering an endorsement of a Ventura businessman, whom Leavens refused to identify.

“We just hold different kinds of views” than Lacey, Leavens said. “She is not a business person. She comes from a teaching background . . . and that doesn’t give you a background in economics, which you need to be able to do that job.”

Lacey said she doesn’t think there will be much carry-over, if any, from the Ventura council races to her reelection campaign.

Ventura voters hated the disharmony of the council’s meetings, Lacey said. But the majority of supervisors have distinguished themselves “by trying to work through problems together,” she said.

And if the business coalition thinks she is anti-business, it is wrong, Lacey said.

“I believe very much in revitalizing downtown Ventura,” she said. “But I don’t believe in just willy-nilly growth or that the county of Ventura should get into a building match with the cities. I think we should keep our greenbelts.”

Lacey said she has a reserve of $10,000 to $20,000 to begin the campaign. She was outspent by more than 2 to 1 by Leavens four years ago.

Lacey and the other supervisors angered business and water interests last month by endorsing Flynn’s plan to allow construction of a dam only on the lower four miles of the 55-mile-long Sespe Creek near Fillmore.

Flynn said he favored saving nearly all of the creek not for environmental reasons, but because concern over the river has muddied the debate over new ways to provide water for Ventura County.

A dam on the upper Sespe is too expensive to ever be built, Flynn said.

Leavens, who represented the Ventura County Economic Development Assn. on the Sespe issue, said she felt “absolutely betrayed” by Flynn. Business organizations and the Ventura County Farm Bureau favor a plan backed by Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino (R-Ventura) that would preserve up to 42 miles of the Sespe but allow two high-country dams.

Leavens said Flynn, who has worked closely with water districts for many years, engaged in a “political ploy” that he hoped would bring him support from environmentalists.

“If that’s the game he’s going to play,” Leavens said, “that tells us that he is not the concerned water person . . . who can do what is necessary for the water problems of Ventura County.”

Flynn, co-chairman of a statewide water committee, said he favors the same realistic water projects as business groups and Leavens--desalination plants, low-rise diversion dams on the Santa Clara River and a pipeline that would bring Northern California water to Ventura for the first time.

Leavens favors a possible Sespe dam, which probably would be funded by a bond issue, Flynn said, because “she wants the people of Oxnard to finance the development of her lemon orchards in Ventura. She wants a subsidy.”

The supervisor, who is seeking a fifth term, said his position on the Sespe makes sense to most local farmers. They know that if the creek is dammed, the water will go to cities rather than flowing to the Santa Clara River and sinking into water basins that supply farmers’ wells, he said.

Flynn said he sees the Ventura council vote mostly as a statement about the disorganization of slow-growth candidates and of the voters’ desire to put moderates in office.

Voters realized, Flynn said, that the Ventura council’s rejection last year of a California State University campus in the city was an enormous mistake.

While seeing little spinoff effect on himself, Flynn said he thinks that Lacey may be in for trouble.

“I would really be worried if I were Susan Lacey,” he said. “She supported Villeneuve. She was on the wrong side of the slate this campaign.”

Flynn has accused Erickson Kildee and Supervisor Vicky Howard of conspiring with Leavens and Oxnard Mayor Nao Takasugi to defeat him next year. Takasugi said Wednesday that he has not discussed with Leavens his possible campaign against Flynn.

“We’ve never talked about it,” said Takasugi, who with strong business support set a county record in a local race by raising $160,000 in 1988. Flynn said he has a treasury of between $12,000 and $15,000 but that his campaigns always have emphasized door-to-door canvassing.

Flynn has said he will recruit a candidate to run against Erickson Kildee, if necessary. But he would not say Wednesday if he has taken such a step.

Community College District Trustee Timothy Hirschberg said family and friends have encouraged him to run against Erickson Kildee. “But I have resisted talk of running up to this point.”

Erickson Kildee said she has accumulated $50,000 for her re-election campaign. She said her political moderation should make her less vulnerable to challenge.

“I tend to be a middle-of-the-road kind of politician,” she said. “And I think this is a time when people will be looking for that kind of balance.”