OXNARD : Land-Use Officer May Gain Power

The Oxnard City Council today will consider assigning more autonomous powers to a city staff member serving on the Oxnard land-use advisory committee, which replaced the city’s Planning Commission.

The committee is composed of four residents and a hearing officer--a city bureaucrat with planning expertise. Council members disbanded the Planning Commission in January, arguing that its members were amateurs who were slowing down progress.

Yet when the City Council appointed the members of the committee two weeks later, it chose three former planning commissioners and a local mathematician with no land-use experience.

Richard Maggio, Oxnard’s community development director, was appointed as the fifth member by City Manager Tom Frutchey. Maggio serves as the hearing officer.

Rejecting residents’ contentions that such unchecked power may result in corruption, council members voted last month to give the hearing officer authority to make some planning decisions--such as the approval of environmental reports--by himself.

The City Council will consider granting the hearing officer the ability to approve all parcel maps, zoning variances, planned development permits and special use permits that are exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act and are therefore deemed minor.

Council members will also consider a “quality rewards” program, where development projects that are considered to have exceptional architecture and design will receive priority over more mundane plans, instead of a first-come, first-served system.

The City Council will consider amending the design section of Oxnard’s General Plan to improve the quality of development in the city, as well as a proposal to hire architectural consultants to help city staff.

The land-use advisory committee is under attack by a coalition of former Oxnard politicians that has begun a petition drive to reinstate the Planning Commission.