State to Buy 2 Properties Near Airport : Santa Paula: Owners of the houses destroyed in a 1992 plane crash say that splitting $250,000 is too little too late.

State transportation commissioners have agreed to spend $250,000 to buy two houses that burned to the ground after a fiery plane crash near the Santa Paula Airport in 1992, officials said Thursday.

But the families who lived in the modest houses when a light airplane dropped out of the sky almost 20 months ago complained Thursday that the money is too little too late.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand is real good, but (half of that) is not enough to rebuild my house,” said Joe Garcia, a 74-year-old Santa Paula native who owns one of the homes destroyed in the crash.

“It’s costing me $13,500 to clean up the debris, $7,000 for the architect and $4,000 for the permits,” Garcia said. “And I can’t even rebuild at my own place.”

The California Transportation Commission voted unanimously Wednesday to give Santa Paula $250,000 to buy the burned-out remnants of two Santa Clara Avenue bungalows, which lie under the flight path of planes landing at privately owned Santa Paula Airport.

But the money will not be immediately available to Garcia and Rafael Rodriguez, the second property owner.

Independent appraisers must place a fair-market value on the parcels, and the actual disbursement could take months, said Ginger Gherardi, executive director of the Ventura County Transportation Commission.

But “this allows them to finally get compensated for the property that’s been lost,” Gherardi said. “This is a mechanism for these people to get some compensation, which up to now they’ve had no opportunity to get.”

In August, 1992, a light plane piloted by William Lewis Clark clipped wings with a Cessna 150 flown by flight instructor Andrew Sinclair about 300 yards from the runway.

Clark, a crop duster pilot from Kern County, burned to death after his plane crashed into Garcia’s home. Sinclair was able to land his plane safely on the runway.

In the months following the crash, the Santa Paula City Council rezoned the area around the airport in an effort to establish an “inner safety zone” at the request of the state.

The rezoning means that Garcia and Rodriguez would not be permitted to rebuild their homes even if they could afford to, Santa Paula City Engineer Norman Wilkinson said.

About a dozen other homes inside the inner safety zone are presently occupied, and those residents are allowed to remain there indefinitely. But if those homes are damaged or destroyed, those residents would also be prohibited from rebuilding.

“Things have changed dramatically since the airport was built in 1930,” Wilkinson said. “These lots and homes date back to the 1920s, so we have a very old problem that does not quite fit modern regulations.

“We’re going to be working on getting state funding for years and years to try and acquire these homes and get them leveled,” he said.

Garcia and Rodriguez have filed civil suits against the city of Santa Paula, the owners of Santa Paula Airport and the pilots to try to be compensated for losing their homes.

Victor Martinez, the Oxnard attorney representing the two Santa Paula homeowners, said the state transportation commission agreement would not affect his clients’ case, which is scheduled for trial later this year.

“We’ve had two homes destroyed for more than 18 months,” Martinez said. “It’ll help our clients restore some order into their lives, but they still have other damages they’ve suffered as a result of the airplane crash.”

Attorneys representing the pilots and other defendants did not return calls Thursday.

Assemblyman Jack O’Connell (D-Carpinteria), who testified before the state Transportation Commission last month in an effort to help Garcia and Rodriguez, said he was pleased with the panel’s decision to buy the burned-out properties.

O’Connell introduced a recently passed law that allows transit funds to be made available to private airports to fund the acquisition of property inside state-mandated safety zones.

“A private airport used by the public should be eligible for this funding,” O’Connell said. “We went from not even being eligible to getting a quarter-million dollars. So that’s a success story.”

But Garcia said he expected most of his share of the $250,000 to dwindle away--either to attorneys, appraisers or for fees such as building permits.

“They said they were going to buy the property for a freeway and that was 37 years ago,” he said. “This thing happened 20 months ago and nothing’s happened so far. This whole thing has gotten out of hand.”