New Projects Again Aimed at Renovating Downtown

The four-block stretch of meandering A Street that symbolizes Oxnard’s efforts to revitalize its downtown will be straightened in February, bringing more than a quarter-century of redevelopment full circle.

The $225,000 “enhancement project” will all but obliterate the remnants of Oxnard’s downtown pedestrian mall. Built in 1969 as one of the city’s first attempts to keep shoppers from fleeing the old commercial core, the streetscape of decorative planters, fountains and pergolas instead ushered in an era of urban blight that continues to this day. Now it will come out--for the sake of revitalization.

“It should have been done a long time ago,” Councilman Tom Holden said. “This is a solution to a problem that was created many years ago that should have been addressed.”

The A Street project and a simultaneous $281,000 make-over of Plaza Park are the most high-profile of a string of programs starting in the new year.

Others are more mundane, but nonetheless represent a new approach to the city’s retail core.

Out are redevelopment projects imposed on businesses, with little regard for their needs, officials said. In are circumspect programs meant to work in concert with private investment, such as grants and loans to improve facades and recruit and retain tenants. Total cost of all programs: more than $1.7 million.

“You cannot tell merchants, ‘This is what we’re going to do and it’s going to be good for you.’ What we need is a partnership,” Holden said.

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But many merchants are blase about another round of redevelopment programs. An air of resignation pervades the business sector, especially among those who paid a combined $500,000 in 1987 to reopen A Street to vehicle traffic while leaving the remains of the pedestrian mall intact. That project proved irrelevant to a street of shuttered storefronts and empty lots.

“There’s this general feeling [of] how many times are we going to redo A Street?” said Peter Apanel, Oxnard’s first-ever downtown manager, who was recently hired from a similar position in Pasadena. Merchants “are more upset that this will be the third incarnation in 20 years.”

Business owners are quick to snipe--at the city, at the millions spent on various redevelopment projects, and at the sprouting suburban shopping malls that sapped downtown’s customers and vitality decades ago.

“Show me” is the attitude of the dean of downtown shops, Chuck Johnson, owner of the venerable Johnson’s Television and Video, established in 1937 and the retail core’s oldest continuing business.

“If the truth was known, I bet you half the businesses in downtown are wondering why they’re in business,” he said, referring to the stagnant business climate in downtown Oxnard. “This is [redevelopment’s] last shot.”

But some merchants blame a lack of leadership within their own ranks as being partly responsible for the moribund downtown. A proposed business assessment district collapsed in the 1980s after facing opposition from some proprietors. Apanel says one of his goals is to establish the district, which would provide money to promote the retail core.

A downtown business association also collapsed amid acrimony during the 1980s. The group reassembled as the Oxnard Downtowners in 1994, but has acted on few suggestions to improve the business climate proposed in a $36,000 study that same year.

“It’s not fair to blame the city entirely,” said Betty Kennedy, the 45-member group’s president. “As far as implementing these things, they have not been done and we only have ourselves to blame.”

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But against the backdrop of bitterness and blame, squandered money and wasted effort, are flickering signs--however faint--that downtown’s long-sought resuscitation may be under way.

Apanel’s hiring, the change in government focus and slowly rising private investment indicate to some that 1996 may set the stage for better times.

Many see Apanel’s two-year contract as the missing link between downtown property owners and the city--the human face of a faceless bureaucracy.

“There was never a close connection between the business community and redevelopment, and that’s absolutely essential in any community,” said Steve Kinney, president of the Greater Oxnard Economic Development Corp. “His arrival here is key and his experience over the next six months is going to be pivotal to the future of downtown.”

Apanel, the founder of Pasadena’s irreverent Doo Dah Parade, has never worked within the strictures of City Hall. It is from an A Street storefront rather than behind a City Hall desk that the soft-spoken, jeans-clad Apanel will try to cultivate grass-roots support.

People rather than projects are the main contributors of a community’s vitality, said Apanel, who saw Pasadena’s Old Town shed its blight to become vibrant once more.

“A storefront-by-storefront approach ultimately produces a better result,” he said. “The hard part is, you just can’t order up a neighborhood.”

The city has remade its role slowly in the two years since a new council majority came to power, Holden said. The results of a change in policy are beginning to be seen, he said.

The long-established redevelopment agency quietly became the Community Development Commission in November. Redevelopment is a term that made sense when the city purchased and demolished buildings in the 1960s until it owned some 30% of land within the central business district, becoming the area’s largest landowner, officials say.

But a redevelopment agency is merely a financial tool, using a portion of the property taxes collected within the district to fund new projects. The commission’s responsibilities are wider in scope, said Dena Garcia Fuentes, project manager.

Marketing and business outreach and coordination are replacing the traditional emphasis on infrastructure or large rehabilitation schemes. But the basic idea remains the same: to stimulate private investment.

“The whole basis is to provide a catalyst and an impetus for development,” Garcia Fuentes said. “It’s slower than we would like, but that’s what we’re starting to see.”

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Two long-delayed downtown housing developments are expected to open in 1996, providing a much-needed population base. And a developer signed an agreement with the city in December in a bid to attract a tenant for a multimillion-dollar downtown theater and entertainment complex that would be built on land owned by the development commission.

Then there’s Heritage Square, where a dozen historic homes were converted into offices at a cost of about $9 million--the biggest redevelopment success story to date, said Alejandro Herrera, associate city planner and downtown program team leader.

The project, which is fully occupied, commands the county’s second highest office-rental rate, said Dick Keller, property manager. A second phase has begun.

Robert Rains invested about $500,000 to purchase two homes he finished converting into offices on Seventh Street last month. In 1996, he envisions building a $2-million replica of the circa-1899 Oxnard Hotel on an adjacent site.

The building would house a gourmet coffee shop and upscale restaurant, two attractions that downtown lacks. Oxnard’s redevelopment agency, which sold Rains the land, had a fiscal finger in the initial project and will participate in the second, he said.

“Because of the redevelopment agency, it certainly made it easy and certainly made it more appealing than having to go out and scramble for a loan,” Rains said. “Maybe I’m naive, but I think the hotel can have a greater impact on the continuation of development downtown than people can even imagine.”

Oxnard has the fundamentals in place for downtown to reemerge, said Keller, the property manager. He owns property near Santa Monica’s successful Third Street Promenade, and said that city’s revitalization efforts failed on a much larger scale than Oxnard’s before they took off.

“Any community that’s taken a serious shot at revitalization of its historic buildings has succeeded at it,” he said. Oxnard’s “isn’t finished yet, so it hasn’t failed.”

Apanel, too, has seen dilapidated downtowns rebound, and refuses to participate in pessimism.

“When people say it can’t be done, I say ‘sorry,’ because it’s happening all over the country.”