$10,000 Sought to Plan Ventura Marine Center

Offering no concrete financing plans but lots of enthusiastic ideas, a Montecito-based entrepreneur has asked Ventura for $10,000 to help him plan a state-of-the art marine center at Ventura Harbor.

And some excited Ventura council members, impressed by Al Fiori’s proposal at a Wednesday committee meeting, promised to rush the proposal onto next Monday’s council agenda so the city could write him a check as soon as possible.

“We want Ventura to become a center for marine education,” said Fiori, one of two partners in the year-old Rising Hawk Productions. “We would like to see this be a state-of-the art facility that would attract visitors from up and down the coast.”

For a city eagerly eyeing the tourist trade and the ready cash it brings, Fiori described a combination educational, entertainment and research complex that would attract visitors from across California.

Fiori said the project would be developed in concert with the National Park Service, the Ventura Harbor District, and private investors, most of whom have yet to be identified.

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Officials from the Harbor District and the Park Service joined Fiori at the meeting. The Park Service and the Harbor District have long hoped to develop an education center at the harbor, but lacked the private sector partner to pay for the construction.

The one potential private investor Fiori did trot out Wednesday is the production company of friend Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of celebrity oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. The Santa Barbara-based Cousteau has said he also may collaborate with Fiori on a Native People’s Center in Thousand Oaks.

“We have a real interest in the marine center, though to what extent at this point, we’re not sure,” said Leo McCarthy, vice president of Cousteau’s production company. The three council members on the city’s economics committee said the marine center could be a landmark development for Ventura.

“Ventura’s always been on a real launching pad to something greater,” said Councilman Gregory L. Carson, one of the council’s most enthusiastic tourism boosters. “This means we’re finally being discovered.”

Fiori asked the city to give him $10,000 as soon as possible, so he could draw up a blueprint outlining how much the center would cost, what would be its scope, and what kind of services it would feature.

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“The figures for these kinds of studies usually come in ahead of $100,000,” Fiori said, as council members Carson, Gary Tuttle and Rosa Lee Measures nodded in agreement. “But the reason we’re coming in at this number is that I really believe this is going to be a fantastic center.”

Fiori refuses to pin a price tag or a time line on the project, only saying it will definitely cost more than $5 million and could take at least five years to construct.

Carson at first tried to negotiate with Fiori on the tab for the blueprint study. “I don’t know if the city needs to foot the whole bill,” he said. “If we’re going to have a partnership, today’s the day to start.”

But the enthusiasm of his fellow council members quickly won him over.

“Personally, I’m a little humbled,” Tuttle said. “Here we sit in Ventura, and they come to us with a project like this . . . I’m not going to fight over $10,000.”

Lauren DeChant, Fiori’s partner at Rising Hawk, described a number of possibilities for the project, including an underwater photography center and a fishbowl laboratory that would allow tourists to observe scientists working on marine research. The center might also include interactive videos and computers that could be operated by visitors.

“We came up with basically a bag of ideas,” she said. “The meeting today was our real vote of confidence, so now we can move on to the next step.”