Ventura Orders RV Park Owner to Stop Cleanup : Floods: Arnold Hubbard says he must bulldoze the mud from the property so guests can return. But the city contends that he lacks the proper permits.

The city of Ventura ordered the owner of a flood-damaged recreational vehicle park on Thursday to stop bulldozing mud from the property because he lacks the proper permits.

City officials delivered a letter to Arnold Hubbard, warning him that the cleanup of his Ventura Beach RV Resort after this month’s Ventura River flood may violate state and city laws, said Everett Millais, the city’s director of community development.

Hubbard said that since the flooding ended, his cleanup crews have been using front-end loaders to shove tons of mud off the property, creating a berm on the park’s eastern edge. The work is necessary, he said, so he can allow guests to return to the park.

But Millais said the five-foot-high berm, which is about 200 feet long and 20 feet wide, apparently violates a condition of the park’s permit from the city. The condition forbids Hubbard from building anything on a 100-foot-wide buffer zone that separates the park from the sensitive riverbed habitat, Millais said.

Hubbard also lacks permits from the California Coastal Commission to move the material in the first place, Millais said.

Hubbard complained that he was being criticized for cleaning up after a natural disaster, Millais said. However, Millais said, “How the material arrived in this instance doesn’t make a difference. What he has done in his cleanup activity is concentrated it in an area where he shouldn’t have.”

Millais said the man-made berm could damage the natural contours of the riverbed when the Ventura River floods again.

Thursday evening, Hubbard said he will seek the proper permits to allow the berm to remain, or if that is not possible, to have it removed.

“What we were going to do was kind of grade it off and make it kind of look nice and kind of do some planting there,” Hubbard said. “I think it would have been actually beneficial.”

But Hubbard conceded that such work might be forbidden in the environmental impact report that was written during the permit process in 1985.

Millais said the city learned of the berm from attorneys representing the Friends of the Ventura River, who threatened legal action unless the city enforced the conditions restricting the park.

“If we don’t want to be defending ourselves in court against why we’re not enforcing our own ordinances, we should be putting Mr. Hubbard on notice,” he said.