Newhall Ranch Plan Puts County Officials on Edge : Development: The environmental impact of a planned community east of Piru raises concerns.

Plans for a new 70,000-resident community on Ventura County’s northeast flank have prompted a flurry of concerns about river degradation, traffic snarls and the eventual sprawl of suburbia across the farmlands of the Santa Clara Valley.

Although all of the Newhall Ranch project announced last week would be in Los Angeles County, it would fill five miles of open space between Six Flags Magic Mountain and the Ventura County line along California 126.

And, say local officials, environmentalists and real estate analysts, it would eventually create enormous pressure on Ventura County to alter its strict growth policies to allow Newhall Land & Farming Co. to build on 15,000 acres it owns in this county.

“I think we need to be very concerned about this project’s impact on Ventura County,” said Maggie Kildee, county supervisor for the Santa Clara Valley communities of Piru, Fillmore and Santa Paula.

“I’m concerned about traffic and air quality and the Santa Clara River. And part of my concern is what happens on this side of the line,” Kildee said. “We’ve already had a lot of pressure to lay out a development plan on this side.”

Supervisor John K. Flynn said he is so troubled by the new Newhall Ranch proposal that he will check with county lawyers to see if there is anything that Ventura County can do to block it.

“The Santa Clara Valley should remain as it is,” he said. “If Newhall develops here, it will wipe out that valley.”

Officials note that Newhall will have removed all its Ventura County acreage from a state farmland preservation program by 1998.

Newhall executives say that they simply want to lift government restrictions from their land, but that they have no development plans for their Ventura County holdings, which stretch westward past Piru seven miles into the county.

Instead, the company is focused on its new Los Angeles County project, which alone will take perhaps 25 years to build, Newhall Vice President Jim Harter said.

“I think their fears are unfounded,” Harter said. “The world changes. I don’t know what the world will be like 25 years from now. But at the present time, we have no plans for development in Ventura County.”

Aside from long-term concerns, Ventura County officials say the new Newhall Ranch proposal--just beginning to wend its way through a three-year approval process in Los Angeles County--must answer questions about its potential effects on Ventura County.

With nearly 25,000 homes, 10 schools, six shopping centers and a business park, the new development would be the largest master-planned community in Los Angeles County history.

It would be six times the size of Fillmore, which is just 14 miles away, three times the size of Port Hueneme and larger than Camarillo.

Opponents say they expect to challenge the project on a variety of fronts, but acknowledge that its passage by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors seems inevitable.

Unlike Ventura County, Los Angeles County has no policies restricting construction in unincorporated areas that provide greenbelts between existing cities.

Also working in Newhall’s favor is its reputation as developer of the attractive, well-planned Valencia community, and its assertions that it will make Newhall Ranch a model of environmentally sensitive development along an endangered river.

Company officials have vowed not to pave any of Newhall’s part of the 100-mile-long Santa Clara River, the largest remaining wild river in Southern California and a habitat for the endangered least Bell’s vireo songbird and the unarmored three-spined stickleback fish.

Newhall also plans to remove no river vegetation and will artificially support river banks only in the several areas prone to erosion during floods, Harter said.

“What we plan basically leaves the river in its natural state,” he said.

Cat Brown of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Newhall has made a good start. But she said she wants fewer artificial supports of river banks, which destroy the habitat of frogs, turtles and birds.

Ron Bottorff, chairman of Friends of the Santa Clara River, said his group will argue that no structures be allowed in the river’s flood plain, so there will be less pressure after future floods to change the natural flow to protect buildings.

Bottorff said his group is pushing for a full environmental report on Newhall Ranch’s potential damage to the river. A less thorough environmental assessment has already found no significant impact, he said.

“We know the development will undoubtedly go through in some form,” Bottorff said. “The best we can do is reduce the impact.”

Newhall’s environmental studies will not be completed for months, but it is certain that the impact of the new project will reach into Ventura County.

* California 126, although widened to four lanes by the time Newhall Ranch construction begins in 1998, will certainly feel the project’s effect. Most of the thousands of new commuters, however, are expected to drive eastward to large industrial parks in Santa Clarita or to the Los Angeles Basin. A Metrolink right of way from the Golden State Freeway to the Ventura County line has been set aside for a future commuter train.

* More traffic will mean more air pollution. But Ventura County’s top planner says air quality will probably not be a major issue locally, since prevailing winds usually blow inland, away from the county.

* Fillmore residents will be closer to large stores and entertainment, their commute cut from 25 miles to about 16. But the new shopping centers might undermine some local stores.

* Local officials fear that the new community could increase the potential for urban pollution to drain into the Santa Clara River, although developers say they will use the latest technology to make sure that that does not occur.

* A new sewer plant could overflow during storms and pollute the ground-water basins that supply Fillmore residents and Santa Clara Valley ranchers. But Newhall executives say the new plant, run by Los Angeles County, would include excess capacity to prevent overflow.

* The new city will need thousands of acre-feet of water a year, but none of it will come from the Santa Clara River subterranean basins on which the Fillmore area depends, Harter said.

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As the closest local city to the new community, Fillmore would probably feel its touch most heavily. And some city residents say they are looking forward to the groundbreaking.

City Councilman Roger Campbell said the shops along Fillmore’s classic small-town main street should not be undermined. “Our town’s economy is more based on the agriculture in the area and on the commitment of our people to shop locally than on what shopping malls go where,” he said.

Shopkeeper Michelle Patterson said she thinks that her customers will keep on coming. “We have a personal relationship with our customers, and I think that’s true of any business in Fillmore.”

And City Manager Roy Payne said Newhall Ranch may help Fillmore emerge as a tourist destination. “To my mind, this just brings tourists five miles closer to us,” he said.

Fillmore is basing its future allure partly on rides aboard full-sized steam and diesel locomotives expected to eventually offer regular dinner excursions, not just special charter events.

And Campbell thinks that development of Newhall’s Metrolink right of way could someday combine with 32 miles of track on the Fillmore line to help link Santa Clarita with Ventura--and make life easier for Ventura County commuters.

“We are already pretty much a bedroom community,” Campbell said. “That would make it so people wouldn’t have to use their cars.”

Indeed, Campbell and several other Santa Clara Valley residents said they do not see the Newhall Ranch project, or a potential low-density, high-quality Newhall development in Ventura County, as a large threat to their rural lifestyle.

“They’re a very fine company,” said Alan Teague, president of Teague-McKevett Co. of Santa Paula, which owns about 500 acres of farmland in the Santa Clara Valley. “I have no fear of what they’re doing.”

Teague said he thinks that some development of the valley is inevitable and necessary.

“The two industries that built this valley are agriculture and oil,” Teague said. “One of them is about gone and the other is being threatened. . . . We are going to have to replace that. We need some increased economic base.”

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It is the local long-range intentions of Newhall, as a major Ventura County landowner, that concern some Ventura County officials and environmentalists more than its Los Angeles County proposal.

“As they move westward, this becomes their area of opportunity and ultimately that will affect some of our orchard and flatlands farming,” said Neil Moyer, president of Environmental Coalition of Ventura County. “Certainly that’s their intention.”

Newhall officials have never submitted a plan for development to Ventura County, and they insist that they do not have one to submit. But over the last few years, they have asked county planners about the potential for development locally, planners said.

“The last time I spoke with them, I would characterize it as a fishing expedition,” county planning Director Keith Turner said. “They wanted to know were there any opportunities for some sort of urban development in the long term. Our answer was ‘No.’ ”

Some landowners seem to think that county policies that force the clustering of development in and around cities are simply a holding plan until a good project comes along, Turner said.

“But it is our position that county plans for open space, and the river and mountain areas and the agricultural and citrus belts, will remain,” he said.

The county’s strict Guidelines for Orderly Development have been in place for more than two decades. But supervisors sometimes break them, as they did in approving the 3,050-home Ahmanson Ranch project in 1992 and the Sherwood Country Club development in 1988.

In both cases, supervisors said large and costly trade-offs from developers--community improvements and parkland--made the violation of policy worthwhile.

“It is clear that Newhall wants to develop,” Kildee said. “If Newhall wants to build and will put X number of acres in an agricultural trust for perpetuity, I might talk to them. But I want them to be talking about 85% (in a trust), not 2%.”

The way some in Ventura County see it, Newhall will try to develop its Ventura County acreage as the final phase of a 37,000-acre, two-county building plan.

The first phase was 10,000-acre Valencia, where development began in 1965.

The second phase is the proposed 12,000-acre Newhall Ranch. And once the roads, sewers, water and rail lines are in place up to the Ventura County line, they will try to make a move here.

“That seems to be their plan,” said veteran Westlake real estate analyst Ernest V. Siracusa Jr. “But it will take them 20 years before this area is sufficiently built out so they’ll try to move into the next area. They know darned well they couldn’t get anything approved now.

“A county line is just a political boundary,” he added. “But on one side of that line is a vast difference in philosophy on development issues. In Ventura County, they will have a mountain of political policy to climb.”