Conference Aims for Global Spin : Thousand Oaks: Leaders want to introduce world to the county and hope City Council will donate services.

Daring to think global, Thousand Oaks will host an international seminar on how to use the information superhighway next month, welcoming foreign dignitaries and Washington bigwigs to a daylong expo at the Civic Arts Plaza.

You thought David Copperfield and Liza Minnelli were big?

This conference aims to attract Dan Quayle and Al Gore.

But first off, organizers hope to get the Thousand Oaks City Council on board.

Council members on Tuesday will consider sponsoring the gala event by providing $4,350 worth of services. The conference’s chief backer, the World Affairs Council of Ventura County, has asked the city to donate the labor needed to produce a video record of the proceedings.

In return for the city’s contribution, the World Affairs Council promises to shove Thousand Oaks into an international spotlight. Executive Director Cindy Cooke has invited 350 foreign journalists to the conference, plus dozens of diplomats based in Los Angeles.

And though the conference has plenty of substance--including debates, panel discussions and speeches--its primary purpose will be to introduce the world to Ventura County.

Foreign reporters and bureaucrats “are very familiar with the Los Angeles Basin and Orange County, but they have no idea we’re up here,” Cooke said. “We’d like the world to know we’re around.”

Every journalist who writes about the conference will reach thousands of overseas readers, Cooke said. Among them, she hopes, will be well-heeled jet-setters and entrepreneurs.

“If we have 20 press people here, their audience is 100 million,” Cooke said. “To buy that exposure would cost a lot more” than the proposed $4,350 donation. So for Thousand Oaks, she added, sponsoring the conference “is a very cold, hard business proposition.”

Councilman Frank Schillo, for one, is willing to shake on it.

All that cheap publicity sounds like a good deal, he said. That is especially true since the Oct. 27 conference will take place less than a week after the Civic Arts Plaza’s grand opening, when the city will be trying to spread news of the facility, he said.

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“I would seriously doubt that we would be giving in-kind donations of this type one year from now,” Schillo said. But as a kick-off to the maiden season, he added, this “will show everyone that we’ve got an outstanding place here.”

In a city where politicians proudly boast of a small-town atmosphere, however, such mass marketing raises questions. Most pressing is whether Thousand Oaks can retain its vaunted quality of life despite an influx of tourists.

“Clearly, we’re at a transition now,” Councilwoman Jaime Zukowski said. “Our Civic Arts Plaza has been compared, at times, to the Washington Monument and the Eiffel Tower, so in some people’s minds it is a very worldly (attraction). What does this mean to our comparatively small town?”

To Zukowski’s question, conference organizers offer a one-word answer: dollars.

Tourism, of course, generates revenue for city coffers through the sales tax. But the conference will also seek to lure businesses and industries to Ventura County through a trade show in the Civic Arts Plaza and a tour of the region for foreign guests.

And the topics discussed--such as “How to do Business in the Global Information Age”--are designed to help both local entrepreneurs and city bureaucrats adapt to changing times, Cooke said.

Given all those goals, Zukowski said she too would support the conference. “We can’t isolate from the rest of the world,” she said. “If we can be educating visitors and exchanging information with other parts of the world, that can only be positive.”