Council Plans Initiative on Open Space

The Thousand Oaks City Council has agreed to devise an initiative for the November ballot that would make it difficult to rezone open space for development.

Council members decided Tuesday to meet with other agencies that manage open space within the city--the Conejo Open Space Conservation Agency and the county--to craft language for a proposed ballot measure that would further protect the city’s valued open space.

A competing citizens’ initiative, however, is already in the works. Planning Commissioner Linda Parks has begun to collect signatures in support of an ordinance that would require a two-thirds vote of citizens before homes or businesses could be placed on any land zoned for parks, golf courses or open space.

Warning that open space can now be rezoned with a simple 3-2 vote of the council, Parks said her initiative would keep pristine acreage free from the whims of politicians.

She described the council’s intention to establish a rival ordinance of its own as politics as usual.

“You get competitive initiatives and the public ends up with the wrong information,” Parks said after Tuesday night’s vote. She said her proposed ordinance would be more ironclad against development.

“They’ll have a weaker ballot measure,” she said. “Theirs will have loopholes that developers will be able to get through.”

Council members disagree with Parks’ assessment.

“The five of us may have some philosophical and political differences, but there’s no doubt in my mind about our overall commitment to open space,” Mayor Andrew Fox said.

City Atty. Mark Sellers called Parks’ initiative “expensive and not needed.”

Last week, Parks notified Thousand Oaks of her intent to circulate petitions for her ballot measure. She needs to collect 9,600 signatures--or 15% of the city’s 64,000 registered voters--by September for her initiative to be placed on the November ballot.

Thousand Oaks currently has about 12,900 acres of natural open space within its borders and 1,500 acres of golf courses and parklands. The mere discussion of a proposed sports complex that would have been built on parkland owned by the school district generated huge opposition. The Sport X project--a vast, privately owned sports enterprise that would have been built at Conejo Creek Park--never got off the ground after Conejo Valley Unified School District said its 10 acres on the proposed site were not for sale.

But the very idea of such a project rallied the community toward stricter safeguards against overdevelopment.

“We’ve had proposals to develop parkland, to put affordable housing on park sites, and we’ll continue to get these proposals,” Councilwoman Elois Zeanah said. “We need to let residents have the final say.” Zeanah said she supports Parks’ initiative, but ultimately voted with the council to look at one of its own.

Managing growth has become a hot political issue throughout Ventura County. In November, Ventura residents approved a measure that prohibited development on that city’s greenbelt areas unless otherwise approved by a majority of the voters.

And on Tuesday, Simi Valley residents voted in favor of Measure Q, an extension of its 10-year, slow-growth plan, which will continue managing residential development until 2004.