Ventura Council to Weigh Plan for Homes on Ex-Refinery Site : Development: Decision bypasses environmentalists concerns over land at north end of Avenue.

Deciding that every issue deserves a review, the Ventura City Council has agreed to consider a request to build homes on the site of a shuttered oil refinery, despite some environmentalists’ concerns that the property should first be surveyed for contaminants.

The proposal potentially opens to residential development the entire northern Ventura Avenue area, a region dominated for years by the oil industry and possibly scarred by the waste left there.

The question of whether USA Petroleum can change the zoning on its Ventura Avenue land will next go to the Ventura County Board of Supervisors, which is due to hear the issue within a month.

The 96-acre property--home of the Petrochem factory, which closed in 1984--lies in the county. But because it is just outside the city and could one day be annexed, the city and the county long ago agreed to share oversight of all property on the north end of the Avenue.

City planners are also recommending that if Petrochem’s request is reviewed, all industrial properties along the unincorporated stretch of the Avenue should be considered, to see if they too should be rezoned for residential use. County officials said they also were discussing redrafting the area’s general plan.

Ventura council members said Monday they favored any proposal to remove the hulking, rusting machines now jutting out from the fields lining the unincorporated Avenue.

“If going forward with this is a way to facilitate better planning, then that’s great,” Councilman Steve Bennett said.

A representative of USA Petroleum concurred, saying the company would be happy even to replace the refinery with other industrial buildings.

“You have to do something with the property--that plant is an eyesore,” said Eddie Ramseyer, a Ventura-based consultant for Petrochem. “If it be property remains industrial, so be it. We would divide up property, and have it developed as an industrial property.”

Roy Kirby, a local resident who owns a small engineering business in Ventura, urged the council to give serious consideration to building such an industrial complex.

“I am really nervous and concerned about the idea of rezoning industrial property,” he said. “There is not a lot of land available for a guy like me. All around me, I see property I’d like to buy being rezoned away from manufacturing.”

Ventura resident Pat Baggerly warned the council that any development plan for the site would have to take into account possible chemical hazards remaining on the property and the fact that the land is probably in a flood zone.

The plant began operation in the 1950s, when Shell Oil Co. owned the property and manufactured urea fertilizer. USA Petroleum bought the land in 1972 and started refining crude oil there two years later.

At its height, the facility refined 20,000 barrels of oil a day and could store 850,000 barrels in above ground tanks and seven to 10 underground tanks. Hazardous wastes produced at the plant--such as sulfide sludge and mono-ethanolamine--had to be hauled off-site for disposal.

USA Petroleum proposed a $100-million expansion in the early 1980s. Neighbors, however, succeeded in blocking the move, protesting that the plant represented an environmental hazard to the surrounding community. Because Petrochem’s profitability depended on the expansion, the company closed the site’s doors in 1984.

The company tried for years to sell the land, but buyers stayed at bay. Soil samples collected at the site failed to turn up evidence of hazardous waste, county officials say. But still, some residents of the area say they remain suspicious.

The defunct refinery lies in county Supervisor Susan Lacey’s district, and she said she is eager to look into changing the zoning of the property.

“I don’t know what’s going to come out on the other side,” she said of the review process for the property. She noted that USA Petroleum may have to spend money to clean up waste on the land before one house can be built.

“But anything that gets rid of that horrible looking thing and improves the Avenue,” she said, “I am in favor of.”