City Council Agrees to Ease Burden on Staff : Ventura: It’s the officials’ most concrete achievement in a daylong workshop that fails to establish any spending goals for coming year.

Locking themselves into the top floor of a retirement home Saturday, the often-squabbling Ventura City Council held a goals-setting session that ultimately failed to set any spending goals for the coming year.

Some council members, however, pronounced themselves satisfied because they did agree to work on what they say is one of their biggest problems--hassling overworked city staff members.

In the most concrete achievement of the day, council members pledged to run their pet projects by each other and the city manager first, rather than ordering staff members to throw aside all other work and concentrate on developing their proposals.

“We established both a commitment and a process for further council improvement,” Councilman Steve Bennett said.

The council picked the highest floor of the Ventura Townehouse convalescent center to conduct its marathon, seven-hour goals-setting session. And there, surrounded by a view of the entire city, the seven-member board hashed through political and personal conflicts--and agreed to hold more study sessions.

The next time they meet in one of these sessions, council members said, they hope to set some priorities for spending city money on big-ticket projects such as a baseball stadium or a marine center.

But one council member said such a meeting would not be soon enough for him.

“I’m still very frustrated,” said Councilman Gary Tuttle as the session wrapped up in mid-afternoon. “It took us five hours to get a policy statement that could have been done in five minutes.”

Tuttle said he had hoped to learn more about which projects his colleagues wanted to support.

“I wouldn’t criticize any council for study, study, study,” he said. “But somewhere along the line, I think the citizens of this community want to know what we’re doing.”

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The council now faces a multitude of demands for the city’s limited resources. Saturday’s session wrapped up with council members dividing the demands into an A list of major projects and a B list of ongoing projects. The two lists were largely summaries of the rambling assortment the council tossed out in a preliminary session Friday evening.

The A list consisted of seven items:

* A combination minor league baseball stadium and sports complex near the city’s auto mall, which comes with a price tag of at least $15 million. The developer says he can get at least partial private funding.

* A marine center at Ventura Harbor, which could cost Ventura up to $5 million, with another $15 million coming from other private and public sources.

* A $9-million parking structure to serve the customers from a theater and shopping complex proposed for downtown.

* A regional park for the city’s eastside.

* A swimming pool where leagues could hold meets.

* An expansion of the Buenaventura Mall, where developers are asking the city to trade millions in sales tax revenue for public improvements in the surrounding area.

* A convention center at the Ventura County Fairgrounds, which could cost the city up to $9 million.

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The council’s B list held nine items, including funding for Ventura’s beleaguered libraries, completion of a bike trail winding about the city’s edges, downtown revitalization, and a commitment to working more productively together as a council.

Friday’s two-hour session--held at the Pierpont Inn--and Saturday’s seven-hour meeting cost the city about $3,500, Ventura City Manager Donna Landeros said.

Both sessions were moderated by management consultant Peter J. Brown, who scribbled down policy goals on large paper sheets, using big colored markers, while simultaneously laboring to keep discussions from descending into extended bickering.

The meeting quickly settled into hours of discussion on how the council could get along better.

Mayor Tom Buford, for instance, urged his colleagues not to resent that Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures spends more time at City Hall than they do. The other six council members hold full-time jobs, but Measures does not.

“I can get jealous,” he conceded. “But I don’t think it’s wrong for some council members to spend more time at the job. Once in a while that happens, and that’s OK.”

The meeting, however, was also marked by pointed, personal jabs and occasional refusals by council members to agree that their colleagues’ concerns were valid.

As the session wrapped up about 3 p.m., Carson asked the council to add one more item to its list of future objectives.

“How about working on relationships with each other?” he said.

But the suggestion was met with silence and blank looks. And finally, after a moment, a few uncertain laughs.