Ventura Council Puts Poli Street Measure on Ballot

Ventura voters will decide this November whether Poli Street, which bisects the Ventura High School campus, should be closed during school hours.

In a unanimous vote just after 1 a.m. Tuesday, the Ventura City Council agreed to put the initiative on this year’s ballot. The action rewarded the measure’s dogged supporters, who fell 243 short of the 8,589 petition signatures needed to qualify the issue for a special election.

“I think it’s going to settle it one way or the other,” said a relieved Verna Thompson, who worked for months gathering signatures. “This should not go on forever.”

The initiative demands that the city open Poli Street, a road that runs parallel to Main Street and slices right through the north end of the Ventura High campus. The measure also calls for removing the newly installed gates at Palomar Avenue and Sunset Drive, two through roads farther up the hillside from Poli Street.

The City Council voted last August to shut off Poli to through traffic during school hours, after 150 people crowded the council chambers to argue the issue for hours. Since traffic increased on nearby roads, the council also closed Palomar and Sunset later in the fall, galvanizing some residents of those streets to join the initiative effort.

Parents, students and school officials say blocking off Poli protects students from random violence as they cross campus and reduces the cacophony of rushing autos and honking horns that drifts into the classrooms bordering the road.

But neighboring hillside residents insist that the closure creates unbearable gridlock on nearby streets. Also, they argue, closing the streets makes it harder for emergency vehicles to reach residents in a crisis.

A majority of the council said they favor closing Poli Street as a temporary solution to the problem, but agreed to put the measure on the ballot in the hope of settling the issue.

Even Joseph Spirito, superintendent of the Ventura Unified School District, said he would not oppose putting the issue to the electorate.

“If you move this onto the ’94 ballot,” Spirito told the council, “we will support that and do everything we can to move this to a closure.”

Activists gathered enough signatures to place the initiative on the 1995 ballot, which will be an official city election and a petition needs signatures from only 10% of all registered voters. But this fall’s election is not a city election, so a ballot measure requires signatures from 15% of the city’s registered voters to qualify.

With the Poli Street initiative falling just short of that 15%, only the council could move the issue onto the ballot in November.