Downtown Renovation Slow Going

When a frustrated Moorpark Chamber of Commerce last week abandoned plans to stage a weekly farmers market on High Street--an idea supported in theory by a wide constituency--it illustrated the historic difficulty Moorpark has had in revitalizing its downtown.

City officials have for years listed High Street renovation at or near the top of their wish lists. But the effort to energize the city’s sleepy commercial district has been slow and contentious, often falling victim to infighting among various factions.

“The main reason that things fall apart is just politics, politics and power, pure and simple,” said Joy Cummings, chairwoman of the Moorpark Old Town Merchants Assn. “The city wants to do things their own way, and they have no idea what they’re doing because they won’t listen to the people who know what the street needs.”

Cummings and other merchants formed their group in 1991 in the hope that a united front could fight more effectively for the kind of improvements they saw as necessary to save their businesses.

“We felt we were being ignored, and there had been talk for all these years about doing something for downtown and nothing had ever been done,” Cummings recalled.

The association made its first goal the addition of stylish benches, planters and trash receptacles along the commercial strip. The ensuing battle, Cummings said, was indicative of the city’s approach to downtown redevelopment.

After selecting a design and finding a manufacturer willing to provide the amenities for $6,000, Cummings and association members spent two years trying to persuade the city to purchase the items. In the end, council members decided to go elsewhere and spent $20,000 on other versions of the same items, which were installed late last year.

Cummings and some other merchants have criticized the new furniture--made partly of recycled plastic and aluminum--as unsightly.

“The street-furnishing escapade was a classic example,” Cummings said. “The message came through to us merchants loud and clear that we don’t have the class or the know-how to know what is needed downtown.”

Mayor Paul Lawrason and other city officials disagree.

“It’s a matter of opinion,” he said. “She was dead-set on a certain style of furniture, which we felt aesthetically and technically was not as appropriate.”

And while Cummings and other critics say the city has been slow to make improvements that would help turn downtown Moorpark into a tourist and shoppers’ destination, Lawrason said the city has made steady progress toward that goal.

“We have spent more money in that small area than anywhere else in the city,” he said. “We spent several million dollars to improve streets, storm drains, gutters, sidewalks. . . . The city’s made substantial investments in those public improvements as a foundation for things that are going to happen in the future, and people have just simply not considered that and don’t care to see that the city has moved forward.”

Councilman Scott Montgomery said the 10-year-old city has always been willing to make the High Street improvements, but has only recently had the necessary tools.

“The reason that change has taken so long on High Street boils down to two things: opportunity and money,” Montgomery said. “Opportunity in the sense that up until now the city would have virtually had to force private property owners to do certain things with their property to achieve that Old Town area--and that doesn’t happen.”

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The city’s acquisition last year of 4.7 acres of prime commercial real estate on the south side of High Street--and the funding of a redevelopment agency a year ago--have paved the way for real improvements, Montgomery said. The city this week will consider whether to use one acre of the land for a park.

“With the acquisition by the city of much of the Old Town area, there is now opportunity. The reality is that it will take years, because of money,” Montgomery said. “The biggest hurdle keeping us from having the Old Town area that everybody wants is not conflict, it’s not a disagreement in vision; it’s money, that’s all.”

Others believe that it may take more than money.

“There has to be a more organized group to handle this,” Moorpark Chamber of Commerce President Francis Okyere said. “There has to be a group of chamber, city and downtown merchants formed to move forward with this project. When any one of us tries to do anything individually, it’s unsuccessful.”

As evidence, he pointed to the chamber’s failed attempt to draw shoppers downtown with a weekly farmers market.

Although City Council members, merchants and residents expressed broad support for the idea, Okyere’s specific proposal eventually became mired in months of negotiations with the city and merchants over location and competition with existing businesses.

Last week, the chamber announced that it was shelving the still-popular idea.

“You look at downtown and definitely everybody agrees that something has to be done,” Okyere said. “The question is, who’s going to do it?”

While the chamber leader said the answer lies in some type of standing committee made up of chamber, merchant and city members, Lawrason prefers a less formal approach.

“You don’t want to get mired into a committee or group situation where achieving some consensus is not possible or difficult at best,” Lawrason said. “We have the responsibility for doing it, the elected officials. We could just do a plan, have some meetings, a few workshops and let the public have as much opportunity for input and to be a part of it as possible.”

For her part, Cummings said the battle to revitalize High Street has left her frustrated and skeptical of the public process.

“I’m afraid to ask them for anything any more because any time we ask them to do anything for us, they do it their own way, mess it all up and the street looks worse than before,” she said.

Cummings, who has owned The Gas Station clothing boutique for seven years, said she is dreading a pending city project to install historic-looking lampposts on the street--something the association requested shortly after it was formed.

“I am terrified that they are going to tear up the streets all summer, kill our business and after it’s all done, we’re going to have no better street lighting than we have now,” she said. “Whenever they come in and spend their millions, they always end up hurting us more than helping us. I’m past getting excited about anything.”