Marathon Session Will Precede City Council’s Monthlong Vacation : Government: Ventura panel members must face 33 agenda items. They will likely meet into the wee hours before their break can begin.

Managing a monthlong vacation is never simple.

There are plans and preparations to be made. Business issues must be reconciled or put off. Work piles up.

For members of the Ventura City Council, poised to take a four-week summer recess, it all comes due Monday. There are no fewer than 33 items of public and private business on two agendas that cover nine pages.

“Usually by the end of June you have your bigger issues taken care of and you start winding down in July,” Mayor Tom Buford said. “This year has obviously been different.”

Although the high-profile issue Monday is Centerplex, the $70-million baseball stadium-aquatic center-raceway proposal, council members will discuss a full plate of items that on any given day could prompt scrappy debate.

They will begin at 6 p.m. in closed-door talks about ongoing labor negotiations with city firefighters, then debate lawsuits and potential litigation before convening the public meeting at 7 p.m.

After a meeting of the City Redevelopment Agency and reports from the chairs of seven separate committees, the council will consider a consent agenda of 22 items.

Consent agendas typically include issues and spending decisions not considered controversial. But Monday’s docket recommends spending almost $3 million on items ranging from a new trolley service to preliminary work on a skateboard park.

Later in the meeting, the council will consider a Chamber of Commerce-backed plan to restructure the fee schedule for businesses, and whether to extend the temporary homeless assistance center founded after the January flood.

The Centerplex debate will be the last item considered, a schedule that all but ensures the council will meet until early Tuesday.

With controversial issues such as mobile home rent control, library funding and a city-run ambulance service under debate week by week, most of the meetings over the past three months have stretched into the early morning,

“That’s the way this council has been running these days,” complained Councilman Jim Monahan. “Everything seems to run long.”

“If some of the council members would quit the grandstanding and get on with the issues and vote, the meetings would be shorter,” he said.

Monahan said the council should consider doing away with the four-week summer break, which was implemented just three years ago.

“But if we bring it up Monday night, it will only add to the length of the meeting,” Monahan said. “I’d rather bring it up another time.”

Buford said the lengthy meetings of recent weeks are primarily the result of increasing interest in the city of Ventura, either by developers, investors or its citizens.

“There’s encouragement by the council members to have the city participate in various stages and not simply at the policy level,” he said.

“But it hasn’t been like this my whole term.”