Latino Input Sought for Santa Paula Plan

In determining the future shape and character of Santa Paula, volunteers and city leaders have come up against one big obstacle: how to get the city’s Latinos involved in the process.

“Look at the faces of the people here and you can see that over half the population of Santa Paula isn’t represented,” Stanley Howlett, a longtime Santa Paula resident, said at a special City Council meeting last week to update the city’s General Plan. “You’ve got to make an effort to get Hispanic people in here.” About 60 members of the public who are working on the plan also attended the meeting.

The General Plan update will decide how and where the city will grow. City officials said the plan will have a great effect on social, economic and environmental issues faced by the city, as well as determining its future character.

Without Latino participation, they said, the plan would not truly represent the majority of people in Santa Paula.

Council members expressed frustration at the low Latino turnout at the special meeting, saying they had sent out notices in both Spanish and English, but some residents said that wasn’t enough.

“There was a bureaucratic effort made,” said Mike Hernandez, one of the few Latino residents participating in the General Plan update. “You mailed out the notices, but you’ve got to make a personal effort. Somebody has got to go out and knock on some doors.”

Council member Alfonso Urias said the council should not delegate the task of reaching out to Latinos to the city staff. “The somebody who should be doing this is us,” Urias told the other council members. “We all have to do it.”