City Hopes to Keep Lid on School Crowding

With classrooms in the city’s east end bulging beyond capacity, city officials are moving forward with a plan that could allow the City Council to deny some development requests based upon their potential impact on schools.

The council will consider a report by the city attorney tonight aimed at changing the city’s planning guidelines to keep new developments from pushing schools past their capacity to handle class size increases.

Under state law, the City Council cannot deny a developer’s request to build a housing project based upon its effect on local schools. Instead, the law requires developers to pay a mitigating fee of $1.72 per square foot.

But parents, council members and school officials have been seeking a better solution.

In March, city planners were asked to evaluate whether the city’s Comprehensive Plan could be changed to give the council more leeway.

The city attorney determined that by changing language in the land-use portion of the plan, city leaders could grant themselves new authority to consider school capacity when reviewing tract maps, development agreements and zoning changes.

“It’s narrow,” City Atty. Pete Bulens said. “And you have to have some reasons.”

But the change in wording would give the council for the first time some ability to deny projects based on school impact, officials said.

“There is nothing in our ordinances or Comprehensive Plan that specifically gives them that criteria as a reason for denial,” city planner Karen Bates said. “This would give them that legal backing.”

Ventura Unified School District officials said Friday that they had not thoroughly reviewed the proposal, but liked the idea.

“The concept is a good one,” said Joseph Richards, assistant superintendent of business services. “I think it is something worth exploring.”

Under the proposal to be considered tonight, developers would have to obtain from the school district a written evaluation of their project’s potential impacts. The information would be considered as part of the project’s environmental review.

But for the new policy to work, city officials must first receive a statement from the school district identifying the magnitude of overcrowding, Bates said.

“We are willing to help them,” she said, “but they need to give us clear direction.”

Cliff Rodrigues, chairman of Ventura Unified’s Board of Education, said the district recently compiled statistics that pinpoint areas of the city where overcrowding is severe.

“We know that there are definitely certain areas that are currently impacted, and if new tracts go in, are going to be more impacted,” he said.

The proposal dovetails with an effort already underway between the city and the school district to jointly address community issues such as classroom overcrowding.

“Our goal, of course, is to come up with a long-range plan so we are not impacting parents and families,” Rodrigues said.

Buena High School opened with 200 more students than expected last fall due to a surge of new housing tracts in the city’s east end. Projects that had been on hold for years were built at the same time, resulting in the sudden enrollment spike.

The new east-end development was reflected in the latest population figures, which set the city’s current population at about 104,000 and projected it to reach 107,000 by 2000 if the city’s build out continues.

The statistics raised enough concern that the council recently postponed for a year its biennial housing allocation process, in which builders are granted the right to develop.

The council also agreed to hold off on a proposal to raise the city’s population cap to 110,000 until the school issue is addressed.

Some city leaders say the proposal to alter the Comprehensive Plan is a good first step in addressing the overcrowding issue and to better plan for the future.

“I think it is a tremendous idea,” Councilman Jim Friedman said. “It sets a platform for ongoing communication between the city and the school district. This would force us to communicate a lot better.”