Turkeys Coming Home to Roost

So what is all this ruckus about a new, 70,000 population community being appended to that “neo-slurb” Santa Clarita by L.A. County bureaucrats and politicians? For Ventura County residents, it’s just a case of the chickens (or more seasonally-appropriate, the turkeys) coming home to roost.

It’s beyond irony and disingenuousness that in excess of $80,000 of taxpayer funds should be going to county departments and consultants to challenge the likely approval of the Newhall Land & Farming Company’s next-stage for the suburbanization of the farmland of the Santa Clarita River Valley. Ventura County and many of the cities here routinely ignore their own “Guidelines for Orderly Development,” take the money, and give the wink and nod to developers, especially if they are public agencies. Witness the Reagan library, County Jail, Oxnard High School, and the notorious Ahmanson Ranch new town.

The Ventura County Transportation Commission has routinely funded the major transportation infrastructure that will allow Newhall Ranch/Santa Clarita residents to conveniently commute into Ventura County--i.e. Highway 126. The subterfuge about traffic safety (which could have been addressed more cost effectively with a permanent concrete barrier down the middle of the road) cannot cover up the nearly completed four-lane highway to the Ventura coast. Maniac and drunken drivers still annihilate themselves and others on this freeway to the rich, developable Newhall Ranch lands adjacent and east of Fillmore.

That Fillmore Mayor Roger Campbell can’t offer any criticism strongly suggests Newhall’s cheap payoff of $1,150 will pay dividends for this project and later ones nearer that community. Farm Bureau Director Rex Laird also knows that beneath the thin farm soil veneer of his constituents, lurk developers of the ilk found earlier in Orange County and in Chino.

Consultant Fulton glibly suggests that Ahmanson Ranch was rational, but Newhall Ranch’s future development can be stemmed with farmland and development preservation bonds. But at what extraordinary costs to the ultimate taxpayers--current Ventura County residents? He obviously hasn’t checked Ventura County voters’ opinions about taxes and bonds over the last several elections.

Watershed preservation interests should look no further than Ventura County examples to see where Newhall Ranch’s vaguely treated sewage water will go--directly in the riverbed, which may already be a source of contamination to drinking water as far away as Oxnard.

Commitment and consistency with Ventura County’s Guidelines for Orderly Development would have been a more ethical and moral basis for challenging L.A. County’s go-ahead for further Newhall Ranch development. But Ventura County and the cities forfeited the high ground a long time ago.

NEIL A. MOYER

Ventura