Discord on Growth in Oxnard Increasing : Government: Some applaud City Council’s pro-business stance. Others say members are easily swayed by influential staff.

The grumbling can be heard along the sycamore-lined streets of Oxnard’s most historic neighborhood, where the City Council allowed a developer to proceed with plans for apartments despite rancorous protests from residents.

City activists say the same discontent is evident across town in east Oxnard, where residents are rallying against a plan to build 716 houses in a greenbelt previously exempted from development until 2020.

The discord is also apparent in a petition drive launched by a group of former Oxnard officials to reinstate the city’s Planning Commission--dismantled in January by the City Council for slowing down growth.

But most of all, it is increasingly obvious in the dismay of Oxnard’s top elected official, Mayor Manuel Lopez--often on the losing end of battles with first-term council members Dean Maulhardt, Tom Holden, Andres Herrera and Bedford Pinkard over the city’s direction.

Lopez, the only council member who voted to retain the Planning Commission, says his fellow council members are blindly rushing to revamp city government. In his view, they are too easily influenced by an increasingly powerful city staff that has begun to assume policy-making duties in Oxnard.

“They are honest and intelligent, but they are dealing with professionals, and they are novices at this point,” said Lopez, a 17-year council veteran. “Here, we have the staff setting the policy, and I don’t think that’s right.”

The discontentment is hardly universal. Many in Oxnard are pleased with the City Council and its pro-growth stands. And Holden, who has been pushing a plan to restructure Oxnard’s bureaucracy, says Lopez and others opposed to Oxnard’s new direction are mainly old-timers who cannot accept change.

“I agree whole heartedly that these changes would never have taken place under a veteran council,” Holden said. “But people were tired of veteran councils and council members thinking of other terms. People wanted change.”

Added Don Facciano, the Oxnard Chamber of Commerce’s executive director: “We applaud the city of Oxnard for allowing business to flourish and reducing the burden of government on development.”

Such disputes among council members are not a new phenomenon in Oxnard, but the growing mood of community dissent contrasts with the reputation of a city infamous for its political apathy.

According to some residents, the current Oxnard City Council members are looking to conduct as much city government as they can behind closed doors and to limit public participation wherever possible.

“I’m real disappointed with them,” said Randy Elliott, chairman of the city’s Carriage Square Neighborhood Council. “For the most part their decisions are made before they listen to the public.”

Much of the criticism has been directed toward the city’s new land use advisory committee--the five-member panel created by the City Council to take the place of the Planning Commission.

Some residents say the advisers are merely a rubber stamp for developers--and the committee’s creation an attempt to limit public input on what is built in Oxnard.

“The (council members) want to bring in business so bad that they are going to jeopardize the serenity of our neighborhoods,” said 66-year-old Ralph Vester, an Oxnard resident since 1948. “I’m not against business, but it needs to be done right.”

However, supporters of the Planning Commission say the land use advisory committee hardly bears the mark of progress.

“Change in the wrong direction is worse than nothing,” said former Oxnard Mayor Jane Tolmach, who is organizing the petition drive to revive the Planning Commission. “When you start excluding the public from government in the city, that’s old-time politics. That’s nothing new at all.”

According to some neighborhood leaders, criticism of the Oxnard City Council began to increase after 1993, when council members considered plans for a major card club casino.

About 2,000 residents sent letters to the city opposing big-time gambling in Oxnard--outnumbering supporters’ correspondence 20 to 1. And Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury announced he was investigating the possible laundering of campaign contributions to council members by casino advocates.

Bradbury’s investigation ultimately led to guilty pleas by two card club promoters to misdemeanor money laundering charges. They were convicted of indirectly making a total of about $1,000 in small contributions to former Councilwoman Dorothy Maron’s 1990 council race, former Councilman Michael Plisky’s 1992 mayoral race, former Mayor Nao Takasugi’s 1992 Assembly race, and Holden’s 1993 council race.

By then, the card club issue was long dead. After Bradbury’s warning, the council eventually voted 5 to 0 to kill the casino proposal, acknowledging that the D.A.’s probe played a part in the decision.

But critics say it should never have taken a threat of a criminal investigation or the public outcry that preceded the vote to convince the City Council that a major gambling casino was not the best of ideas.

“They took it down to where the community had to get up in arms over it,” said Paul Chatman, former chairman of the Tierra Vista Neighborhood Council in southeast Oxnard. “If they had their pulse on the community, they would have cut it out much earlier. That was sad. That’s why people lose faith in government.”

Also about 1993, Oxnard council members began promoting the city’s neighborhood council program, which had been in place since 1973, asking residents to become more active in their communities.

Residents responded, and Oxnard’s neighborhood councils experienced a resurgence. Thirty of Oxnard’s 39 neighborhoods have formed councils, including five in the past three months, according to city records.

But creation of the councils, ironically, has produced some of the community discontent now focused on the City Council. Many members of the groups say they are frustrated. On one hand, Oxnard leaders have flaunted them like poster children for the city’s renaissance. On the other, they contend, the City Council has only paid lip service to their concerns.

The Carriage Square neighborhood in northwest Oxnard decided to form a neighborhood council last year to fight graffiti taggers and gang members who were slowly encroaching on their community.

Elliott, who was elected neighborhood chairman, said he expected the City Council to listen to the group’s opinions.

But last month--when the City Council considered a proposal to turn the former site of St. John’s Hospital into a massive apartment building despite opposition from the surrounding neighborhoods--he said he realized the council did not care about his views.

Council members voted last month to postpone their decision on the hospital project, but Elliott is cynical. They will surely approve it later, he said.

“I don’t know why they want neighborhood councils, because it seems to me that they basically form their little boys club and do not listen to the concerns of the residents,” Elliott said.

Not all neighborhood leaders have given up hope of influencing the City Council, however.

Less than two months ago, most residents of Oxnard’s F Street neighborhood knew Steve Buratti as the offbeat man who dressed up as Santa Claus at Christmastime and founded the city’s Candy Cane Lane display.

Now Buratti is chairman of the Wilson Neighborhood Council, which includes the historic F Street area. He has become a vocal advocate for the preservation of his community, once home to banker Achille Levy and other Oxnard pioneers.

After the City Council and the land use advisers considered four development projects around his neighborhood last month--all in the same night--he and other residents responded angrily.

They threatened to seek revenge at the polls if the plans--which involved what they considered to be high-density housing--were approved.

Council members voted to let the projects move forward, but they later tabled their decision, and although many residents in the neighborhood are fed up with the City Council, Buratti said he is now optimistic.

“Two weeks ago, it seemed like we were flapping our gums for the sake of flapping our gums, and they were just doing whatever they wanted because they were the City Council,” Buratti said. “Now the City Council seems to be listening.”

Holden said that the current City Council inherited the burden of 20 years of shabby development in Oxnard, and has been put in a difficult position by its predecessors, who failed to build enough low-cost housing for the city’s many struggling families.

“We have a community that has made it very clear it needs affordable housing,” Holden said. “Then you have neighborhoods that are concerned, rightly so, that affordable housing is going to be built near them.”

To ensure that development in Oxnard meets their standard of quality without creating undue hardship for large builders as well as small entrepreneurs, council members are revamping the process of evaluating projects, Holden said.

He pointed to the city’s new pre-application procedure--where developers have to present preliminary plans to the City Council at the start of the planning process as well as the end--as an example of the new scrutiny.

Yet one of the City Council’s efforts to improve the way development is reviewed in Oxnard--the dismantling of the Planning Commission in favor of the land use advisers--has been interpreted by many residents as an attempt to ease restrictions on builders and reduce public input.

Advisers approved plans for Shopping at the Rose II last month despite objections by neighboring cities, which expressed concern about the development’s impact on the already-congested Ventura Freeway-Rose Avenue connector.

Before the vote, adviser Sonny Okada said the panel should not dwell on the increased traffic generated by the development, commenting that it was formed to “make it easier for developers to come to the city of Oxnard.”

Opponents of the land use advisers said their worries were confirmed.

“I think (Okada) was being very honest, but he wasn’t following the party line,” Lopez said. “The proponents of the changes are arguing that they are for the little people, the ones that need to fix their homes and so on, but that is clearly not the case.”

But it is the presence of a city staff member on the policy-making panel that has caused the most concern among residents.

Some land-use rulings previously made by the Planning Commission will now be decided by a single person--Oxnard Community Development Director Richard Maggio, serving as hearing officer on the land use advisory committee. That, critics say, will lead to thorny ethical dilemmas.

As a clear example of conflict, they point to the recent land use advisory committee meeting on the proposed apartment complex near F Street, where Maggio listened to one of his subordinates present a report that Maggio had written. Maggio then voted to approve the report’s recommendation.

The group of former Oxnard leaders planning a petition drive to reinstate the Planning Commission needs to gather the signatures of at least 10% of Oxnard’s registered voters in the next six months to place the issue on the November, 1996, ballot.

Another of the issues that has stirred community discontent--preliminary plans for a large housing development within an east Oxnard greenbelt--has also produced charges that the City Council does not listen to the concerns of residents.

Many east Oxnard residents say that when they bought their homes, they were under the impression that they had moved to the boundary of growth in the city.

So when the City Council allowed a developer last year to move forward with preliminary plans for 716 houses in the greenbelt area, residents reacted angrily, banding together to oppose the project, which they say would lower property values and tarnish the semi-rural feel of their community.

Almost 800 east Oxnard residents have signed a petition stating their opposition to the project, titled Channel Islands Estates. But they worry that the City Council will approve the development anyway because it would include 159 low-cost houses.

“I hate the idea of seeing those fields covered with houses,” said Ed Rouch, chairman of the Diamond Bar Neighborhood Council in southeast Oxnard. “We’re going to put up a fight. Whether they listen is another story.”