ELECTIONS : Activists May Take Their Drive for Greenbelt Protection Countywide

Encouraged by their election victory in Ventura, slow-growth activists immediately began talking Wednesday of pushing a countywide greenbelt-protection measure that is nearly identical to the one approved by city voters in Tuesday’s election.

“We need some time to marshal resources, but I want to take this idea countywide,” said Ventura Councilman Steve Bennett, one of the principal organizers behind the city’s new farmland-preservation law. “That’s the next logical step.”

Ventura’s new ordinance forbids the City Council from allowing urban development on thousands of acres of farmland in and around the city until the year 2030--unless the development gets permission from a majority of city voters.

As threatened during their expensive campaign, farmers predicted Wednesday that a lawsuit will be filed challenging the ordinance on the grounds that it violates their property rights. A core group of initiative opponents will meet this week and next to sort out the options.

“Of course, there will be a legal challenge,” said Robert C. Pinkerton, a citrus and avocado grower who helped finance and organize the campaign against Measure I. “It is too early to tell how one goes about that.”

Although Ventura voters adopted Measure I by a margin of 4 percentage points, they confounded both supporters and foes by rejecting a companion greenbelt-preservation initiative, Measure J, by about the same margin.

Some political organizers theorize that Measure I passed because its ballot description was easier for voters to comprehend. Others speculated that voters may have figured out that Measure I had a better chance of standing up to legal challenges.

Regardless of the reason, supporters were delighted with the voters’ selection. Unlike Measure J, supporters believe that Measure I cannot be defeated in court because it is based on a 5-year-old Napa County law that has been upheld by the California Supreme Court.

Richard L. Francis, an attorney and former Ventura mayor, said he wanted to capitalize on Napa County’s success when he used that law as a precise template for Ventura’s. He calls his drafting efforts pure plagiarism.

“I had my secretary type it into my word processor,” Francis said. “Every place it said ‘Napa,’ I wrote ‘Ventura,’ and every place it said ‘grapes,’ I put in ‘fruits and vegetables.’ ”

Francis teamed up with Bennett to push the two ballot initiatives, under the banner Save Our Agricultural Resources (SOAR). He is also interested in taking the issue countywide, if environmentalists and other activists can assemble a political network needed to mount a countywide campaign.

“There are some folks in Simi Valley, and folks in Thousand Oaks and in Camarillo would be interested,” Francis said. “We will proceed if they have the energy or can find some young folks with the energy.”

For now, Francis is helping an Oxnard-based group, Save the Oxnard Plain (STOP), to draft a greenbelt-protection initiative designed to stem urban expansion into farmland surrounding that fast-growing city.

The leader of STOP, George Johnson Jr., said he is more eager than ever given the success of Measure I in Ventura. “If it had not passed in Ventura, we would have decided we wouldn’t have had much luck in Oxnard.”

Measure I gathered 10,261 “yes” votes in Ventura and 9,440 against. A breakdown of precincts shows that the measure’s strongest support came from voters in downtown, mid-town, the Ventura Avenue area, the Ventura Keys and Montalvo. Precincts around Ventura College and hillside areas were split on the issue, and those in east Ventura leaned toward defeating it.

The political debate over Ventura’s growth has dominated city politics for decades. And this fall’s political fight over Ventura’s greenbelt-protection ordinances overshadowed the City Council election--although voters elected three council candidates who opposed the farmland-protection measures.

Farmers and pro-growth business leaders outspent Measure I’s supporters by 6 to 1, raising roughly $165,000 compared with $27,000, according to the latest campaign finance statements.

Farmers took their campaign door-to-door, delivering lemons to signify what they thought of the ballot measures. They hired professional telephone callers to persuade voters and had professional political consultants design a flurry of mailers that were stuffed in voters’ mailboxes.

Some flyers claimed that the initiatives would lead to increased crime, increased taxes, and force the city to lay off police officers and firefighters. They claimed that the proposed ordinances would set up a huge bureaucracy and cost the city millions of dollars to defend itself against a barrage of lawsuits.

Some claims drew disclaimers from some leaders of the farmer’s group. Bob Tobias, chairman of Farmers, Families and Friends Against Irresponsible Regulations, said he regretted that the mailers had made claims with little or no factual basis.

Ventura City Atty. Peter D. Bulens, who has analyzed Measure I, said he did not expect that the new law would create any type of large bureaucracy at the city.

If the city is snowed under with applications from farmers to develop their property, he said it could cut into the normal duties of the city’s Planning Department and other staff. “Beyond that, I don’t see a huge bureaucracy,” he said.

As for legal challenges, Bulens said he cannot predict what type of inventive ways opponents may use in attacking the law in court. But he said he compared Measure I to the Napa County law and believes that the state Supreme Court’s ruling seems to cut off the usual legal avenues.

“It would be a daunting legal task to challenge it, given the actions of the California Supreme Court,” he said.

And depending on what type of challenges come forward, he said he and his four attorneys on staff might be able to resolve any lawsuits without hiring outside legal help.

“There is a potential that we could handle this in-house,” he said.

The Ventura County Farm Bureau, which lent $20,000 to the opponents’ campaign, is not likely to initiate any lawsuit, said the bureau’s executive director, Rex Laird.

“We are not suing anybody, and we are not contemplating suing anybody in the near future, at least as an organization. But there might be some individuals who might very well sue. That’s a little bit out of our league financially.”

Proponents of Measure I have also discussed the possibility that they could conceivably end up having to go to court to defend the measure if future councils try to circumvent the voters. That is because of two provisions that give council members some flexibility in determining if they really have to submit all development proposals to voters.

First, the measure states that the council may allow development of farmland if it has lain fallow for two years and either bad soil, poor drainage or other physical reasons make the land no longer suitable for farming.

Second, the measure also says the council can allow development if a majority of members conclude that the landowner would have no other economically viable use of the land--a right guaranteed by the U. S. Constitution.

Pinkerton, the avocado and citrus grower who is a farm bureau director, said he believes that Measure I’s success shows that farmers need to better explain to their urban neighbors about the difficulty of locking up farmland for decades without provisions to help farming remain profitable.

“It is sure an indication that we in agriculture need better communications with the public,” he said. “We need to open up a good dialogue with the people. We would like to have a voice in any up-and-coming ballot measures.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Preserving Farmland

Ventura voters approved one of two greenbelt-protection measures on Tuesday’s ballot. It was the measure most favored by slow-growth activists because it was more carefully drafted to withstand legal challenge.

Measure 1: Modeled after a Napa County law upheld by the California Supreme Court, this measure sets the shaded areas off limits to development until the year 2030. A landowner could develop a parcel in this area only with permission from a majority of city voters or through narrow loopholes invoked by the City Council. The council could allow development only if it determines either that farming is no longer possible on the property because of physical reasons or that the measure’s restrictions violate the landowner’s property rights under the U.S. Constitution.Source: Election papers, Ventura City Attorney, Ventura City Planning Division; Researched by KEN WEISS / Los Angeles Times

*

FUTURE GROWTH

Task force discusses county growth policies. B5

ELECTION TOTALS: B4