Council Brainstorms on Quality-of-Life Issues

What defines a community’s quality of life? More cops on the beat or better schools? Or is it clean air and rugged rural surroundings?

Preparing for another growth spurt within the next 10 years, Moorpark city leaders spent much of Wednesday night asking similar questions while selecting the most important aspects of life in their town and hashing out how to protect them.

Underlining the meeting was the principle of managing growth. The Moorpark City Council wants to set up so-called quality-of-life standards to ensure that development in this city of nearly 28,000 does not overtake its ability to absorb new residents.

Growth could be managed by forcing developers to meet quality-of-life standards, city leaders say, which might include paying for more police officers or building new roads and schools.

But what such standards would ultimately comprise must still be worked out. Over the past year, City Council members Bernardo Perez and John Wozniak have served on a committee that has looked at ways to manage Moorpark’s growth.

The standards could take on specific parameters--demanding that developers pay for a certain number of police officers for every 1,000 new residents that their projects are expected to attract, for instance. Or the standards could be broad and vague, offering goals for keeping Moorpark’s streets safe and crime-free.

“We don’t know what these standards will look like yet; that’s why we’re having these discussions,” Perez said.

In an attempt to flesh out ideas Wednesday night, Wozniak asked how large the city would have to grow to justify building its own sheriff’s substation. The city now relies on the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department for law enforcement.

“Will there be a threshold that we reach that says that we might want to build a police station?” Wozniak asked.

In response, Sheriff’s Department officials told him the city would have to grow to about 35,000 residents to justify the cost of building a local station.

The proposed standards are meant to eventually take the place of Measure F--a strict city growth-control ordinance that expired at the end of 1995.

Measure F was passed in the late 1980s, when Moorpark was among the fastest-growing cities in California. The town had to scramble to cope with a population that quadrupled from 7,000 in less than a decade. That frenzied pace of growth--which hit 200% one year--led to the passage of the ordinance in 1987.

Moorpark’s growth rate has dropped off considerably since then. In the past five years, the annual increase in population has not exceeded 2%. But the city is considering new housing developments that could add 14,000 residents to the city--a 50% increase in population.

Despite the anticipated growth, the City Council decided against renewing the ordinance last month due to concerns about exposing the city to developer lawsuits. A similar ordinance in Oceanside was struck down by a state Supreme Court decision last spring. Like the Oceanside ordinance, Moorpark’s law regulated growth by relying on numerical caps on city-issued building permits.

The proposed new standards are meant as a legally defensible replacement for Measure F, and council members hope they will also represent goals for what Moorpark can become.

The City Council discussed 34 possible standards, modeled after similar quality-of-life standards in Chula Vista of San Diego County. The panel plans to winnow that number to between 10 and 20.

Along with discussing standards related to police service, traffic and air quality, the council considered standards for providing parks, recreation, schools and youth services.