Oxnard Council Hits the Road for 1st Off-Site Meeting of ’95 : Government: Members to meet in Lemonwood in an effort to make sessions more accessible. Residents are eager for officials’ firsthand look at their area.

Oxnard City Council members will take their show on the road today, with the Lemonwood School cafeteria their first stop.

President Clinton, Ross Perot and other politicos have made “taking government to the people” trendy with their splashy town hall meetings across the country, but Oxnard officials said they’re sincere--they truly want to make their council meetings more resident-friendly.

“Sometimes the City Council chambers don’t lend themselves to involvement with local residents,” Oxnard City Councilman Tom Holden said. “The goal is to make the council meetings more accessible.”

Today’s 5:30 p.m. meeting in the southeast Oxnard neighborhood of Lemonwood is one of four off-site meetings scheduled for 1995. The council hasn’t firmed up other dates or locations.

Lemonwood resident Chris Schweinhard said the visit will give council members a chance to witness firsthand his neighborhood’s problems with potholes, missing street signs and trash in the alleys.

“I’m just tickled pink they’re coming,” said Schweinhard, chairman of the Lemonwood Neighborhood Council. “A picture is worth a thousand words. They are going to see the condition of the neighborhood versus us going to City Council chambers and complaining about it.”

The City Council isn’t the first body to try the grass-roots approach. Oxnard’s elementary school board held its first off-site meeting at Frank Intermediate School on March 8, drawing more than 200 parents.

“The turnout at Frank was tremendous,” said school board President Dorothie Sterling. “In our boardroom, there are about 50 chairs, and usually 10 or 12 are filled. I was not strongly in favor of going out to schools, but I have changed my opinion.”

According to Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez, attendance at City Council meetings generally ranges from about 10 to hundreds, depending on whether there’s a controversial ordinance or redevelopment issue on the agenda. Today’s lineup includes discussion on funding Ventura County’s Base Realignment and Closure Task Force and the city’s efforts to build a low-income housing development with real estate speculator Donald T. Kojima.

But Schweinhard predicted a large turnout among residents opposed to another development--a plan to build 716 homes in the nearby Oxnard greenbelt area that the city had once exempted from development until 2020.

In a 4-1 vote last year, the council allowed Affordable Homebuilders Inc. of Ventura to move forward with plans to develop the 132-acre site, including construction of 159 low-cost dwellings.

So far, residents have written 108 letters to the City Council and collected 1,026 signatures on a petition in attempts to kill Channel Islands Estates, which still lacks final council approval.

Residents said it didn’t matter that the issue doesn’t appear on today’s agenda.

“We’re going to bring it up if they don’t,” said Ed Rouch, chairman of the Diamond Bar Neighborhood Council. “We want to let people know that we don’t want farmland covered up with houses and concrete. We don’t want to end up looking like Orange County or L. A.”

Lopez said City Council members would have gone mobile earlier if they had worked out a way to televise their meetings from other locations. Most of Oxnard’s schools now have cable hookups, making it easy to broadcast the meetings on Jones Intercable.

Lopez said he hopes that the travel experiment will become standard policy.

“When we have issues that are of paramount importance to a particular community, it is important we discuss them there,” he said. “The more people who get involved with the process, the better government you have.”