ELECTIONS / OXNARD CITY COUNCIL : Activists Cite Potential for Major Change

Against the backdrop of a huge American flag lining the entire wall of a La Colonia school auditorium, Carlos Aguilera tried to sow the seeds for an election-season harvest.

His neighbors had just rattled off a long list of complaints about crime and other problems in the Oxnard barrio. Aguilera’s answer was that they have never been in a better position to turn things around.

Come Election Day, the neighborhood leader said, La Colonia can flex some political muscle.

“These conditions exist for one reason,” he said, as volunteers sliced through the audience registering voters. “We have not been a political force, and this year that has to change.”

At neighborhood councils throughout Oxnard, residents are talking about change.

From blue-collar residential islands carved from farmland to pricey waterfront parcels, they are talking about a change of leadership to pull the city out of a financial hole that forced $5 million in cuts this summer.

In mobile home parks and working-class neighborhoods, they also are talking about a change of priorities to narrow the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Just how much change, and how it is accomplished, won’t be decided until Election Day. But the potential exists, like never before, to overhaul a government body laboring to pay its bills and struggling with voter discontent.

With the exception of longtime Mayor Nao Takasugi, who is stepping down to run for state Assembly, every Oxnard council member is seeking election to some city post.

Voters on Nov. 3 could put three new faces on the five-member council. Three new philosophies. Three new votes.

At almost every turn, council members are taking heat for decisions and being reminded that the November election isn’t far away.

In the city’s Rio Lindo district, four middle-class neighborhoods on the city’s northeast side surrounded by strawberry fields and fruit orchards, hundreds of residents marched on City Hall in August to protest the placement of a regional shopping center nearby.

Despite warnings from those in attendance that it could mean the council members’ jobs, the council approved the development.

And in the city’s southeast area, working-class residents from a small collection of tract homes known as Tierra Vista yelled so loudly about plans to relocate a run-down trailer park to prime farmland near their neighborhood that city officials reversed their decision.

“There is a lot of anger in the community, it’s very real and very alive,” said Paul Chatman, chairman of the Tierra Vista Neighborhood Council. “This is probably going to be an election year like no other in Oxnard.”

In the mayoral election, Councilmen Manuel M. Lopez and Michael A. Plisky are among five candidates for the city’s top elected post, which hasn’t had a new representative in 10 years.

Lopez and Plisky, who both lost to Takasugi in the 1988 mayoral contest, emphasize their leadership abilities and say the most pressing issue facing Oxnard is a money shortage that has whittled away at city programs over the years.

“We’re in debt like you wouldn’t believe in this city and our city leaders are to blame,” said Eleanor Branthoover, who heads the Rio Lindo Neighborhood Council. “They’ve made some very bad business decisions and future generations are going to pay for their mistakes.”

Branthoover was referring to city agreements that return sales tax dollars to developers of new projects as incentives to build.

Lopez, an optometrist, was born in Oxnard and has been a public servant for 27 years, 14 of those as a councilman.

He believes that the city has not paid enough attention to young people and low-income residents, and he said he has a better sense than his opponents of the kind of development that the community wants to see.

Plisky, a business and tax consultant, has lived in Oxnard for 20 years and has served on the council for nearly six years.

He said his strength lies in trouble-shooting the city’s financial problems and drafting tough agreements with prospective developers that make money for the city.

Lopez and Plisky differ most on low-income housing policies, a major issue for the city’s Latino community.

Lopez charged that Plisky has attempted to shove low-income people out of Oxnard. He noted that Plisky supported an unofficial policy requiring that houses sell for at least $300,000 to generate enough property taxes to equal the cost of providing city services.

“We are all so separated economically in Oxnard, and I don’t believe Mike realizes that,” Lopez said. “Because I was very poor, I am sympathetic to people who are poor.”

Plisky said attempts to build affordable housing and develop other programs for low-income residents need to be balanced by more expensive development that not only pays its way, but subsidizes these other projects.

“You can’t have all the fringe and frills he (Lopez) wants without satisfying some of the basic needs,” said Plisky, who believes that all cities in the county should work together to supply affordable housing.

But no matter how much the two candidates try to carve reputations as best qualified to lead during these tough economic times, they remain intertwined by service on a City Council that is perceived by many as too cozy with developers and out of touch with the community.

It’s a point that their opponents and other critics raise at every opportunity.

“Plisky and Lopez are cut out of the same pro-development cloth,” said Oscar Karrin, a champion of mobile home park tenants who is running for mayor. “This has become a city of big developers and special interests.”

Added mayoral candidate John D. Quigley, a sewage treatment operator for Oxnard: Council members “have made moves to draw business away from downtown and disenfranchise those who supported the council in the past.”

A fifth mayoral candidate, Anthony De La Cerda, lists his occupation as a job developer. Family members said he is away at military boot camp.

The call for a change of leadership, an anti-incumbent sentiment that some Oxnard residents attribute to the campaign of would-be presidential candidate Ross Perot, is coming from all areas of the city.

When it comes to the incumbents, said council critic Scott Bollinger, an unsuccessful former candidate himself, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference.

“We haven’t changed the way we do business in this city for many years and it’s going to keep getting worse,” said Bollinger, who lives in the Via Marina neighborhood sandwiched between farmland and the ocean on Oxnard’s west side. “This council will go on raping and pillaging what’s left of the city’s tax base.”

He agreed with other council critics that the November election presents a rare opportunity to make some real changes at City Hall.

“There’s no way a city gets into this much trouble without something being very wrong,” he said.

Elected officials are used to such blasts, especially in an election year. Councilwoman Dorothy S. Maron said some criticism is warranted, but noted that she was often the minority voice on a growth-oriented council.

“There have been some bad business deals,” said Maron, who is concluding her 12th year on the council. “With the strong pro-growth council, there has been a lot of giving away.”

Maron and Councilwoman Geraldine W. Furr are up for reelection. Furr did not return phone calls for this story.

Running against them are Roy Lockwood, a retired fire chief; Fred Schwartz, a retired aerospace engineer; Andres Herrera, a business owner; Larry Stein, an accounting consultant; Bedford Pinkard, a retired recreation supervisor; William C. Winter, a writer; and Deborah L. De Moss, a homemaker and child-care provider.

When critics question the wisdom of development deals, they most often refer to agreements that return to developers a portion of the sales tax generated by their projects as an incentive to build in the city. In the case of the Oxnard Auto Center, auto dealers were guaranteed half of the sales tax they will generate over their lifetime.

Maron abstained from that decision, citing a conflict of interest because she owned property in the area. But she lent her approval to a similar agreement that lured the Radisson Hotel to Oxnard. The hotel quickly declared bankruptcy.

And most recently, she and her colleagues approved construction of a controversial regional shopping center on the city’s northeast side.

“I look at what is the best thing for the city of Oxnard,” Maron said. “Most of those things I think have been fairly good for the city.”

After issues of money and red ink, conversations about city politics invariably focus on those who have been left out of the system.

Council candidate Bedford Pinkard, who supervised Oxnard’s parks and recreation department as it was gutted by budget cuts over the years, said some segments of the community have been neglected by city officials more interested in development agreements than developing its citizens.

Young people, seniors and poor minorities have been most affected by the council’s neglect, Pinkard said.

“I just feel the existing City Council is not responsive to the needs of the total community,” said Pinkard, who has served as a trustee on the board of education for the Oxnard High School District since 1972.

Pinkard, who is black, said he believes that minority communities and other disenfranchised groups will make a difference in this election.

“I think people are going to vote more this time than any time before,” he said.

But while Latinos and other minorities in Oxnard make up most of the city’s population, they constitute less than a third of the city’s 50,398 registered voters. That means, as in past years, elections will be won and lost in areas of the city where voter turnout has traditionally been high.

In the pricey waterfront community of Mandalay Bay, residents have long been concerned about city politics.

Near another American flag, this one flapping behind a city boat crawling past million-dollar homes that line water channels, 71-year-old Earl Manzer listed the problems faced by his neighborhood.

Although police protection is generally good, Manzer said, burglars have tried to break into his home five times in the last few years. Homeowners here pay a hefty annual assessment to remove soil and sand that slips into the water channels that snake through the bay.

And motor home owners occasionally park their vehicles on city streets, ruining Manzer’s view.

“Our problems are different here,” Manzer said. “But we also have the same concerns about growth and development that other people in the city have.”

Each home may have a private dock and a boat, Manzer said, but the city election is as important to Mandalay Bay as it is to La Colonia or Rio Lindo or Tierra Vista.

“This is our town,” he said. “We all have something at stake.”