Ventura : Plans for Office Complex Dropped

A company that once proposed building a Victorian-style office complex on city-owned property in downtown Ventura has dropped its plans because it cannot even strike a preliminary agreement with the city, company and city officials said Wednesday.

The environmental consulting firm of Holguin, Fahan & Associates had proposed in March to build a 10,000-square-foot office, laboratory and warehouse development on a 25,900-square-foot vacant lot at Figueroa Street and Thompson Boulevard. The lot belongs to the city and is part of its redevelopment district, which means the city can give a developer low-interest loans and other incentives on a project.

City officials and officials of the Ventura-based company said they have spent the past few months trying to agree on preliminary terms. But the two parties were so far apart they could not even open formal talks, officials said.

On Wednesday, the council’s economics committee decided not to pursue the negotiations when representatives of the consulting company did not show up for a meeting to discuss the project.

Andrew Holguin, the company’s owner, said he did not want to pay Ventura a $10,000 deposit to open talks on the development. City officials said they planned to use some or all of that money toward costs associated with the negotiations. If negotiations fell through, the city would return, with interest, the portion it did not spend, city officials said.

Holguin was also frustrated because the city could not loan him as much money as he would have liked for the development.

“It just became too costly for me to deal with the city,” he said.

For their part, city officials said they were disappointed.

“We really wanted the project,” said Pat Richardson, a city planner assigned to the redevelopment effort. “We believe that what we were asking for was not unreasonable. Not unreasonable at all.”