Entrepreneur Shows Marine Center Sketches to Council

Flanked by a corps of designers and architects, a Montecito-based entrepreneur gave the Ventura City Council its first taste Monday of what a proposed marine center might look like.

Al Fiori, a former design professor who created the state of California’s pavilion for Expo ‘86, wants to see a $20-million educational and entertainment center, including an aquarium, at Ventura Harbor. He envisions a public-private effort to finance the center.

On Monday, he brought a representative of a landscape architecture firm, who showed sketches for design of the grounds and the parking lot, and an architect with a concept for the building.

Douglas Cardinal, the architect commissioned to design the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of the American Indian, exhibited a model showing a cluster of modern wave-like buildings perched on a platform, lapped by the ocean waters.

“This is one of the most promising and exciting opportunities since the university,” City Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures said, referring to a failed proposal to construct a Cal State University campus in Ventura. “This meets a lot of needs.”

Fiori approached the council this summer with a plan for a state-of-the-art facility encompassing an expanded Channel Islands National Park visitor center, an outdoor shipbuilding facility, indoor and outdoor aquariums, fish hatcheries, an Imax-Cinemax large-screen theater and a research center for Jean-Michel Cousteau, the son of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.

The council gave him $10,000 to pursue his vision, much of which he spent on detailed renditions of the prospective project. But Fiori fell short of his promise to target potential funding sources for the center, instead sketching a broad vision of private businesses and nonprofit groups working with local officials.

At an evening study session, some council members proposed an economic study to determine just how marketable the proposed center would be. Since Fiori presented his idea to the council this summer, the city learned that Oxnard, Santa Barbara, San Pedro and Long Beach are also planning their own versions of a marine center.

The Oxnard facility, now the subject of a feasibility study, would be at the Channel Islands Harbor, just a few miles down Harbor Boulevard from the proposed Ventura site.

The Ventura study would examine the viability of the center and the potential for raising funds locally to pay for it.