OXNARD : Lemonwood Is Site of City Council Meeting

Like a modern-day Paul Revere, Oxnard resident Chris Schweinhard motored through Lemonwood Tuesday evening with a bullhorn bearing his neighbors important news: the City Council was coming.

As an experiment in making government more accessible, Oxnard’s City Council has decided to go on tour four times in 1995, and made its first stop Tuesday evening at Lemonwood School’s cafeteria.

It wasn’t fear of the Redcoats that led Lemonwood and Diamond Bar residents to jam the off-site City Council meeting; it was the chance to tell the council about their problems with potholes, missing street signs, litter and a proposal to build 716 homes in a nearby greenbelt area the city had once exempted from development until 2020. And though discussion of Channel Islands Estates wasn’t on the agenda, several residents rose to speak out against the project during time allotted for public comment.

“No on Channel Islands Estates . . . “ said Charles Olson, a 45-year-old Lemonwood resident. “We don’t want it . . . We want to be able to see the greenbelt.”

Schweinhard, chairman of the Lemonwood Neighborhood Council, said his neighborhood is already battling crime and school overcrowding. A new development, he said, would push the neighborhood over the edge.

“If we end up with more housing, especially high-density housing, the lifestyle that we are trying to maintain would go away,” Schweinhard said.

Residents so far have gathered 1,034 signatures on a petition and written 112 letters in attempts to kill the Channel Islands Estates project. Last year, the council allowed a developer to move forward with plans to develop the 132-acre parcel, including construction of 159 low-cost dwellings. But Councilman Andres Herrera said Channel Islands Estates is far from a done deal.

“We don’t have a project,” Herrera said. “I thought that we should look at three specific areas including the Point Mugu airstrip, the northeast and Channel Islands Estates. We will have a comprehensive review and look at these areas in a subsequent meeting.”