Volunteers to Finish Ventura River Cleanup : Floods: Scores of people will descend on an unincorporated area in two weeks to cart off debris from ravaged campsites.

Two months after contractors were paid more than $177,000 to clean out the city’s portion of the Ventura River bottom, a group of Ventura volunteers is pulling together to finish the job along a stretch of unincorporated county land.

Just beyond the city limits north of Simpson Street, the Ventura River bed is still strewn with flood-ravaged campsites, abandoned shopping carts and huge piles of garbage.

At an organizational meeting Thursday, Councilman Jim Monahan and businessman Frank Ybarra collected names from those who want to help and prepared for a target date of June 24.

Scores of volunteers will descend on the river bottom in two weeks, carting off leftovers from the dozens of shanties formerly occupied by residents of the Ventura River bottom before the January floods, organizers said.

“It’s a terrible mess,” Monahan said. “I’m worried about the young people who go there to play like I did when I was a kid. Right now it’s a wasteland. Nobody should be down there until it’s cleaned up.”

Most of the plywood, tarps and debris abandoned in the river bottom is north of Simpson Street--the city limits. Bicycle parts, old tires and potentially toxic waste products like old car batteries and used propane tanks riddle the thick brush along the riverbed.

Earlier this spring, the City Council approved an emergency contract with a local land-clearing firm to remove tons of debris left over from the heavy winter rains.

Although California Land Clearing, which was awarded the city cleanup contract, was able to do the work for less than $58,000, the council agreed to pay more than $177,000 to clean out the city’s portion of the river bottom.

City Manager Donna Landeros later admitted publicly that the engineer’s office had badly overestimated the amount of rubble to be removed, and that the city spent too much for its share of the cleanup.

California Land Clearing crews stopped the cleanup effort at the city border, and tons of rubble still remain on county property north of Simpson Street.

“We’re trying to do this at no cost to the taxpayers,” said Monahan, the only council member to oppose the contract. “We should have worked with the county at the time we did this so-called emergency cleanup.

“I don’t see how the emergency stopped at Simpson,” he said. “For the same amount of money we spent, we could have cleaned up this whole thing past Kinko’s.”

County Supervisors John Flynn and Frank Schillo have offered to support Monahan’s volunteer cleanup plan. Schillo said a lack of resources has prevented the county from cleaning up its portion of the river bottom.

“The county did help clean up lower in the river, but it’s a matter of expenses basically,” Schillo said Thursday. “There wasn’t the citizen interest earlier this spring.”

Frank Ybarra, who owns a tire shop in east Ventura, is coordinating the cleanup plan. He said he expects more than 100 volunteers to turn out June 24, but that it may take several weekends to complete the job.

“The area we have to get into, we can’t use trucks down there,” Ybarra said. “It’s more of a wilderness-type terrain, so a lot of it has to be maneuvered by hand.”

Ybarra said a number of local businesses have offered equipment, food and drinks to the volunteers expected to show up in two weeks.

“This is a realistic goal,” he said. “These goals are in place in a lot of communities where they have neighborhood cleanups.”

Eric Vang of Clark Engineering, a Ventura Avenue land-clearing company, said he already has commitments from half a dozen of his workers to volunteer come June 24.

“This is where I live. This is my environment,” he said at the meeting Thursday. “That’s where it all starts--at home.”

Vang said that in addition to labor, Clark Engineering would donate the use of backhoes, Bobcats and other heavy equipment.

“Those guys [at California Land Clearing] were paid thousands of dollars and it’s still a mess,” Vang said. “So we’ll take care of it.”

Ventura Police Sgt. Carl Handy, who also plans to volunteer on the river bottom cleanup, said routine patrols have shown that none of the 100 or more homeless people who lived in the area have since returned.

“We’ve encountered a lot of people moving stuff, but there’s nobody moving back in,” he said. “We’ve had to threaten some people with arrest [to keep campers out of the area], and we did arrest one guy for trespassing last week.”