Tactic Against Sprawl Takes Root in Ventura

It started with a Napa County law fashioned in 1990 by farmers and activists to stop urban sprawl from eating away vineyards that give the region its special charm and its classic wines.

The approach was simple: require that all major decisions on the development of farmland be put to a vote of the people. Finally upheld this year by the California Supreme Court, the law is now being reviewed statewide as an ingenious new way to control growth.

Just this week, voters in the city of Ventura approved a ballot initiative similar to the Napa ordinance. It declares that farmland in and around Ventura cannot be rezoned for development for 35 years--without permission from a majority of voters in a city election.

Slow-growth advocates are delighted by Tuesday’s vote in Ventura; developers are aghast. And while farmers provided key support to Napa County’s farmland protections, they financed an expensive and bitter fight against the Ventura measure. Though they agree on little else, both sides expect the Supreme Court-sanctioned approach to spread.

“We find that once an idea pops up somewhere, other local jurisdictions hear about [it] and they start popping up all over the state,” said Amy Glad, executive vice president of the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California. “We will definitely appeal to city councils and the electorate to stop this.”

In fact, activists in Ventura were so encouraged by their victory that they have begun drafting a similar ballot measure for the city of Oxnard. And they plan to push the same concept across Ventura County.

“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.”

The state Supreme Court upheld the Napa County law in March, concluding five years of legal wrangling in state courts. The opponents chose not to attack the substance of that law, but the public’s right to use the initiative process to amend a local jurisdiction’s comprehensive plan, the official document providing the blueprint for future development.

“[We] cannot say that the measure, as it comes to us today, thwarts the basic purpose of the planning law,” the court’s five-member majority wrote. “On the contrary, it appears to be a reasonable attempt to effectuate those purposes by delineating a long-range policy intended to guide the county’s development, curb haphazard growth and promote desired land uses.”

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Bill Fulton, an urban planning expert and author of “Guide to California Planning,” said the ruling capped a 20-year trend in state law of allowing local land-use planning to be decided at the ballot box. “The Napa case,” he said, “was one of the final pieces.”

Stanislaus County in the San Joaquin Valley tried to pass a farmland protection ordinance modeled after the Napa County law in 1992, but the measure failed.

And this week in Palo Alto, voters also rejected a similar initiative that targeted what its supporters view as excessive commercial development. The measure would have prevented rezoning land designated as residential in the city’s comprehensive plan for non-residential uses without voter approval.

Citizen activists have a rich history of borrowing each other’s ballot initiatives and converting them for their communities, said Madelyn Glickfeld, co-author of “Regional Growth . . . Local Reaction.”

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Glickfeld tracked an upsurge in local ballot initiatives to restrict urban growth during the booming 1980s. Such measures have fallen off in recent years with the recession.

“These initiatives are very much tied to economic cycles and people’s economic security and how they feel about growth around them,” she said.

She understands the allure the Napa County law must hold for slow-growth activists, because it has been sanctified by the state Supreme Court.

“It’s an attractive prepackaged piece,” she said. “But I’m not sure there is the tremendous growth pressure right now to lead to the proliferation of anti-growth initiatives.”

Those who monitor the pace of urban development in California say the battle in Ventura foreshadows growing conflicts ahead as the state’s urban areas bump up against its rich agricultural heartland.

The debate over urban growth in Ventura has dominated city politics since the early 1970s, when slow-growth candidates first managed to wrest control of the City Council from the pro-growth Chamber of Commerce.

The council has lurched back and forth since then, influenced by a fickle electorate that swings between pushing progress and preserving Ventura’s small-town quality of life.

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A recent growth spurt unleashed by a pro-business City Council turned Ventura into one of California’s fasting-growing cities and pushed its population to more than 100,000. That was one of the catalysts that motivated activists to place twin greenbelt-protection measures on the Nov. 7 ballot.

The voters ended up adopting only one of the ballot initiatives, called Measure I. But the political fight lumped the two measures together and overshadowed the fall elections for City Council.

Farmers from across Ventura County vigorously opposed the farmland-protection measures, saying they infringed on their property rights. They complained that the measures would unfairly lock up their land for decades without provisions to help farming remain profitable.

Joined by developers and builders, the farmers outspent the slow-growth activists by 6 to 1 during the testy campaign, raising about $165,000 to initiative supporters’ $27,000.

Farmers took their campaign door to door, delivering lemons to signify what they thought of the ballot measures. They employed phone banks and hired professional consultants in Ventura and Orange counties to design a flurry of mailers that were stuffed into voters’ mailboxes.

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The flyers 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. As a result, they contended, the initiatives would lead to increased crime and higher taxes, and would force the city to lay off police officers and firefighters.

The superheated rhetoric was too much for some local farmers who publicly expressed regrets a few days before the election about wildly dramatic claims that had little or no basis in fact.

Slow-growth activists mounted a spirited defense of the proposed measures, walking precincts and telephoning voters. They tapped another political hot button, saying the measures were needed to prevent Ventura from becoming another endless maze of stucco homes, strip malls and traffic lights.

“We don’t want to become another San Fernando Valley,” Councilman Bennett said during the campaign. “Council members receive significant financial contributions and cannot resist the steady pressure from developers. This is a citizen safeguard.”

On Tuesday, Measure I won by 4 percentage points. But the voters expressed mixed sentiments about growth controls, rejecting the companion measure by a similar margin and voting in three City Council candidates who had been backed by the pro-growth Chamber of Commerce.

Nevertheless, slow-growth activists are ecstatic that the voters chose Measure I, which unlike its companion initiative was drafted using the Supreme Court-ratified Napa County law as its template.

Richard Francis, an attorney and former Ventura mayor, called his work pure plagiarism. He said he wanted to capitalize on Napa County’s success in beating the legal challenge from landowners and the Building Industry Assn. of Northern California.

“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 also copied two loopholes in the Napa County law that give elected officials a bit of flexibility.

Under Ventura’s Measure I, the City Council can permit development of farmland--without voter approval--if the land has lain fallow for two years and bad soil, poor drainage or other physical factors make it unsuitable for farming.

The council also can allow development if it concludes that otherwise the landowner would have no economically viable use of the land--a property right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Both of these legal avenues are considered extremely narrow, but were built into the law to make it legally defensible.

As was threatened during the campaign, farmers expect that the ordinance will soon be hit with lawsuits. And the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California plans to scrutinize the legal wording for weaknesses.

“Of course there will be a legal challenge,” said Robert C. Pinkerton, a major citrus and avocado grower in Ventura County. “It is too early to tell how one goes about that.”

But Francis and his legal advisers remain confident that Ventura’s new greenbelt protection law will stand up in court. He has been assisted by Susan Goodkin, an attorney who wrote a legal brief in support of the Napa County law when it was before the state Supreme Court.

At a political debate with farmers this fall, Goodkin advised the opponents not to waste their money on legal challenges. “Talk to a good land-use lawyer and think long and hard about it,” she told the pro-growth crowd. “There are a lot better ways to waste your money.”