City’s Adult Business Plan Draws Fire : Oxnard: The proposal is tabled after landowners in the targeted northeast area vow to fight the ordinance.

A hotly debated plan to restrict Oxnard’s adult-oriented businesses to one section of northeast Oxnard has raised objections from industrial property owners in the area and has angered residents of a nearby low-income neighborhood.

The plan was tabled late Tuesday after nearly 300 people jammed an Oxnard City Council session to push for restrictions on adult book and video stores. The residents and property owners from an area one councilman called a potential “red-light district” are forming battle plans to change the ordinance.

In a confidential document submitted at Tuesday night’s meeting, the attorney for the major landowner in the area informed city leaders that he believes the proposal would discriminate against some businesses because it would decrease the value of the property.

“Our concern is that we’re being singled out,” said Allen Camp, an attorney for the Sares Co., the Oxnard developer that owns the land. “Out of the entire city, the ordinance would locate all of these businesses on about eight acres. That would be discriminatory (and) against the best interests of our business.”

The council tabled discussion on the ordinance in part so it could consider Camp’s letter during a closed session next week. Councilmen Bedford Pinkard, Tom Holden and Michael Plisky said the letter could warrant an adjustment to the plan.

The session would be closed because of a threat of litigation, Mayor Manuel Lopez said.

As it is proposed now, the plan would prohibit adult businesses from opening within 1,000 feet of a residential area, and would not allow the businesses to operate within 750 feet of one another. Although there are several areas that meet those criteria, the committee that drew the proposal settled on a single zone in northeast Oxnard.

Leaders of the city’s poor La Colonia neighborhood told council members they believed they were unfairly excluded from debate over the proposal.

Officials denied requests by community leaders to translate the 49-page proposal into Spanish, saying it would be too costly. Instead, they placed an advertisement in a local Spanish-language newspaper about Tuesday’s hearing.

“That’s just not enough,” said Carlos Aguilera, president of La Colonia’s neighborhood council. “Part of their staff is paid to translate material.”

Aguilera said the Latino community was in the process of organizing a protest to the ordinance.

“There’s going to be a vocal response,” he said. “This is a slap to the face of our community. The (city) staff never took us into consideration. They had a responsibility to represent everybody’s interests, including ours.”

Floyd Dautrieve, pastor of a La Colonia church, told the council that the city should be responsible for informing its residents about the plan.

“The people that are going to be most impacted by this ordinance need to get information about it,” he said. “Nothing ever came to this community in English or in Spanish explaining what was going to happen. These people weren’t even given a chance.”

“I can’t buy that,” responded Councilman Pinkard. “It was the responsibility of the neighborhood council to disseminate the information and notify those people.”

Pinkard also said he felt the ordinance provided a sufficient buffer to the residents because it prohibits adult businesses within 1,000 feet of a residential area.

But Aguilera said residents feared the ordinance would create a flow of adult-business traffic through the neighborhood.

Dautrieve added: “We don’t want La Colonia to become the pornography corridor of Ventura County.”

At the end of Tuesday’s session, Holden asked the council to consider the plan’s potential for negatively affecting La Colonia.

“I’m not sure what we’re accomplishing by putting all the adult businesses into one area,” he said. “If I lived in that area, I’d be a little concerned as to why I had to take them all.”

Mayor Lopez said one of the reasons he tabled debate on the ordinance was because he thought the issue warranted more consideration.

“That was one of the things that bothered me about the plan,” Lopez said Wednesday. “I was wondering, if we have existing businesses and we move them to another neighborhood, does that solve the problem?”

The consensus among council members was that they wished they could rid the city of the businesses entirely, but the law prevented it.

A possible solution, according to City Atty. Gary Gillig, would be to keep the zoning requirements but not limit the businesses to the northeast quadrant.

“We may not be able to find a bulletproof policy,” Holden said, “but we need to come up with a way to prevent all the negative effects from landing on one location.”