Deals, Donations Offered for Development Rights : Negotiations: Builder would give land for Ventura veterans’ center if allowed to construct 439 homes.

Eric Wittenberg wants to make a deal.

He’s willing to donate land to Ventura for a veterans’ nursing home, which city officials say could generate up to 275 local jobs. In return, he wants the city’s permission to build more than a third of the houses that will be allowed in Ventura before the turn of the century.

Specifically, Wittenberg envisions 439 homes on 43 acres he owns southeast of Telephone Road between Saticoy Avenue and Wells Road. The 400-bed convalescent home would lie on 22 adjoining acres.

Some City Council members say the idea is worth considering.

“Anything where we get land for development rights is what we are looking for,” Councilman Jack Tingstrom said.

County veterans say they are thrilled at the possibility of landing such a convalescent home--which would be state and federally funded--right in their own back yards.

“Veterans put everything at risk, and some came back and some didn’t,” said LeRoy Andrews, a Ventura architect and World War II veteran. “The ones that came back, the country owes them something a little extra.”

Wittenberg, a Newport Beach-based developer, says he is happy to be of service.

“We think it’s absolutely important, whether it’s our land or not, that Ventura gets the veterans’ facility,” he said.

Even if the council agrees in concept, the convalescent home is by no means assured. State officials will meet in Long Beach at the end of July to determine which Southern California city gets the next facility. Workers just broke ground on a 400-bed nursing home in Barstow, the second in the state and the first in Southern California.

Wittenberg hopes, as the source of the land, to sway city council members his way when it comes time to parcel out allocations for housing.

He has a lot of competition.

In two weeks, the council will begin discussing which projects they want to approve this year. The latest Wittenberg proposal is not officially on the list, because it was submitted past the deadline, but council members say it will probably figure into their plans.

Currently, developers from inside and outside Ventura, including Wittenberg, are asking to build a total of 3,100 houses.

But the city--bound by county-mandated air pollution and population-control standards--only has 1,018 housing allocations remaining until the year 2000.

In the rush to gain favor and the rights to build, the offers are pouring in.

One developer has offered to give Ventura land for a park, and $2 million to build it, in exchange for permission to replace 87 acres of lemon trees with 437 homes at the northwest corner of Kimball and Telephone roads.

Another builder says he will construct and donate some tennis courts, a clubhouse and an 18-hole golf course to Ventura if council members will let him build 467 homes on the northeast corner of Hill and Telegraph roads.

Slow-growth activists have turned out in force at City Council meetings to oppose many of the other developments proposed to the city. But the latest Wittenberg idea remains largely unknown to all but a few city officials and some members of veterans’ groups.

“I’m sure there’ll be opposition to it, but a lot of people don’t know about it yet,” said Councilman Gary Tuttle.

Council members say, however, that the Wittenberg offer is precisely the kind of development proposal they hope to see--one that offers them goodies in exchange for some of their limited housing allocations.

“Isn’t that the name of the game?” Tingstrom said. “We could negotiate with all (the developers) and get a little bit out of everything.”

From Wittenberg, at least as the offer now stands, Ventura could get 22 acres. If the city manages to catch the fancy of the state commission, that acreage could translate into a $33-million facility that would be the second veterans’ nursing home in Southern California and the third in the state. Construction on the convalescent home would not begin until the Barstow facility was up and operating--in spring, 1997, at the earliest, city officials say.

“The issue with the council is, does the city want to put forward a site to the (state task force knowing) that if the task force (says), ‘Ventura, you’re next,’ the city would have to give development permission to a developer?” said Everett Millais, Ventura’s director of community services.

Andrews, the local architect, thinks the right decision is obvious.

Having watched his father, a World War I veteran, move from home to home because the state’s only veterans’ convalescent facility near Napa had no room left, Andrews knows firsthand the need for more nursing centers for veterans.

“My father just passed away,” Andrews said. “He was almost 100 years old and trying to find a place, while he was alive, for him to live . . . well, we just went through everything.”

Andrews’ father lived alone until he was 93, when he reluctantly agreed to enter a retirement home. The family first tried one in Ventura, but when he wasn’t happy, they moved him to a facility in Ojai.

That center was good--until it burned to the ground. “So we moved him to another, bigger home,” Andrews said. “And it was fine but, well, not exactly what you would hope for.

“It’s too late now to do something for my father, but for other people, it isn’t.”

The county’s veterans’ services officer, Charles Lowrance, said that former soldiers need and deserve retirement havens of their own.

“Veterans in many instances have disabilities they received in combat which require a special type of medical attention,” he said. “Also, veterans have certain types of entitlements that no other citizens have.”

Whether that is true or not, said Richard Francis, a local lawyer and former Ventura mayor, that is not the only issue at hand in a development deal at which more than 400 houses are also at stake.

“The real question is a much bigger one,” he said. “How many homes, how soon?”