School’s Bid for Calleguas Water Denied : Oxnard: LAFCO protests campus’ location amid farmland. District officials vow to drill wells if necessary to serve facility.

A state agency has voted to prevent the new Oxnard High School from tapping into city water, but school officials said Friday they will complete the partly built campus even if they have to drill wells to serve it.

The Oxnard Union High School District will appeal the Local Agency Formation Commission’s decision against allowing the new school to get its water from a local water district, Assistant Supt. Bob Brown said.

And if the appeal fails, he said, the district will drill wells to pump water onto the 50-acre campus near Gonzales and Patterson roads.

“We’re building a school there and we’re going to have water there,” Brown said. “That’s not a maybe.”

Oxnard school officials would prefer that the school be annexed to the Calleguas Municipal Water District, which serves Oxnard, because that water comes from state reservoirs, a cleaner and more reliable source than wells, Brown said.

But the board of LAFCO, a state-sponsored agency that regulates all changes in boundaries for various districts and cities, voted 3 to 2 against the proposed annexation. Board members said the new school’s location, smack in the middle of agricultural fields, flouts county efforts to preserve farmland.

LAFCO Commissioner Maria E. VanderKolk, a county supervisor who represents Thousand Oaks, said she voted against Oxnard school officials’ request because the school district has ignored county concerns about protecting farmland. “The decision by the high school to proceed with building on that site just flies in the face of county planning guidelines and principles,” VanderKolk said. “They chose to ignore the county’s concerns. They chose to ignore concerns of the agricultural community. They just decided to plow forward.”

Situated just west of Oxnard city limits, the site for the 2,250-student school is surrounded by citrus orchards and fields of row crops in an area the county has zoned exclusively for agricultural use.

Now about one-fifth completed, the school is slated to open in early 1995, when it will replace Oxnard High School on 5th Street.

Most developers would need special county approval to build on the site, but state law exempts school districts from zoning laws.

Oxnard school officials said they took advantage of that exemption because noise, glare and other problems of living close to high schools made it difficult for the district to find suitable property within city limits.

Regardless of the district’s reasons for choosing the new site, the decision sparked resentment from some county officials who are anxious to protect agricultural areas, LAFCO Commissioner Larry Rose said.

Rose also voted against the request for the high school, but not because he holds hard feelings against the Oxnard school district, he said. “There’s a lot of people out there that would like to see them kicked off that site. I’m not one of them.”

Instead, Rose said he based his vote on his belief that LAFCO’s duty is to uphold county planning guidelines. “That’s our purpose there, to prevent the premature expansion into agricultural areas.”

Allowing the Calleguas water district to extend its boundaries beyond Oxnard city limits to serve the new school may encourage other developers to build on farmland near the campus, Rose said.

Besides, he said, it may be to the district’s advantage to drill its own wells. Ground water can be cheaper over the long run than state water, and it may also be more reliable during droughts, when Calleguas and other water suppliers often ration sales.

The LAFCO decision will not stop the high school from being completed, Rose said.

“What it does is say: ‘Live within your means,’ ” he said. “We’re not going to extend urban services out into the agricultural areas.”

In addition to VanderKolk and Rose, LAFCO Commissioner Bob McKinney, an Ojai City Council member, also voted down the Oxnard High proposal. Commissioners John K. Flynn, a county supervisor from Oxnard, and Alex Fiore, a Thousand Oaks City Council member, sided with the school district.

Although he agreed that it would violate county planning guidelines to extend the water district boundaries to the school campus, Flynn said he was concerned that the school may have trouble getting enough well water to fill drinking fountains, irrigate a football field and meet state requirements for fire pumps.

Flynn said he believes LAFCO may reverse its decision once commissioners hear the school district’s concerns about relying on ground water.

“If I had my druthers I would have preferred the school would have been within the limits of the city of Oxnard,” he said.

But, the supervisor added: “It’s a matter of reality. The school is going up.”