Oxnard to Weigh More Funds for Cleanup of Blighted Area : Redevelopment: Council will consider spending $440,000 in latest effort to revive troubled Southwinds neighborhood.

Over the last decade, Oxnard leaders have funneled more than $1 million into the city’s Southwinds neighborhood, a blighted haven for gangs, drugs and prostitution, with the hope of cleaning it up for good.

To date, nothing has worked, and some community leaders say Oxnard’s efforts to improve life in Southwinds have been misguided.

But on Tuesday, the Oxnard City Council will consider spending another $440,000 to try to mend the lawless area, site of four killings and numerous shootings in the past two years alone.

The redevelopment money would be spent to repair cracked curbs, streets and sidewalks, to landscape around graffiti-scarred walls and to shutter alleys that have become dens of crime. Southwinds has been a redevelopment zone since 1985.

“There’s a lot of problems there,” Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez said of the neighborhood. “There are very high-density apartments and a lot of transient people.”

In the most recent violence in the neighborhood, Manuel Martinez Contreras was shot in the face last week while unloading his car in the alley behind Cuesta del Mar Drive, once regarded as Ventura County’s most dangerous street.

Contreras and his wife, Frances Mandriguez Ayala, who was also shot, were innocent victims caught in the middle of gang gunfire, police said. Contreras, a 33-year-old farm worker, died earlier this week, and a 14-year-old boy suspected of the shooting is in custody.

The two-block stretch of crowded apartment complexes was formerly named Aleric Street, but Oxnard officials changed the name to Cuesta del Mar in 1988 after an intense police campaign to clean up the area. Its grisly reputation did not change, however.

Using redevelopment funds, Oxnard police opened a community storefront station in Southwinds in 1993, and overall crime in the neighborhood has decreased by 45% since then, police said.

But residents say they still live in fear, unable to leave their homes at night, afraid of being beaten and robbed.

Maureen Finley, a former chairwoman of the Southwinds neighborhood council, said that redevelopment money has not done anything to better her community.

“This city has accomplished nothing for 9 1/2 years,” Finley said. “It’s blight creating blight.”

Since the area became a redevelopment zone, Oxnard workers have rehabilitated Southwinds Park, begun work on a neighborhood recreational center, painted over graffiti and spruced up old houses and apartment buildings.

Oxnard officials are now looking to spend $200,000 to help the neighborhood’s poor residents buy homes, $60,000 to fix streets and sidewalks and $30,000 to improve the appearance of Southwinds’ southern end, a gateway to Oxnard.

Working with the Baldwin Co.--a developer pushing to build 5,000 homes at nearby Ormond Beach--city officials also want to study ways of leveraging Southwinds’ redevelopment money.

That money would be used to renovate the entire commercial area along Hueneme Road between Courtland Street and Perkins Road, a strip of old bars and liquor stores.

Oxnard officials also are looking to spend about $6,850 to erect a fence next to Courtland Street to prevent cars from driving into adjacent vacant lots and illegally dumping refrigerators, mattresses and other unwanted items.

Oxnard is working hard, doing all it can to make Southwinds more livable, Lopez said.

“The storefront, the neighborhood council, the (Police Activities League) programs, we hope it will work,” Lopez said. “We can’t have 24-hour patrols.”