Ventura to Consider Increasing Growth Limit

Debate over Ventura’s most divisive issue--growth--is sure to be intense Monday night when the City Council considers ratcheting up the population growth limits spelled out in the city’s Comprehensive Plan.

City officials say the proposed revision will merely bring the Comprehensive Plan in line with reality--it will not throw open the doors to unchecked population growth.

“Whatever limits the city might set, the reality is [that] things are market driven,” said Everett Millais, Ventura’s director of community services.

And Millais stresses that development in his seaside town is not running out of control.

“By the end of November we issued 52 residential building permits. It is not like Ventura is experiencing explosive growth,” he said. “The numbers are still very restrictive and will remain so.”

As proposed, the Comprehensive Plan would be amended so that Ventura’s population would be capped at 110,000 in the year 2000, rather than the present cap of 105,874. But the longer-term growth limit, for the year 2010, would remain constant at 115,874.

According to city officials, the plan’s current population figures are flawed for two reasons. First, the city has approved development of residential housing in some areas of the city that has not yet been built and occupied. Future residents of those already-approved housing units are not reflected in the population data provided by the State Department of Finance each year. But those future residents need to be factored in to city plans.

In addition, the city used an average number of 2.5 people per household from the 1990 census figures to calculate estimated population. But the 1996 population data use an average number of 2.6 people per household. Since households are larger now than 10 years ago, earlier calculations are artificially low.

The purpose of the Comprehensive Plan, which every California city is required by law to have, is to allow a city to provide adequate infrastructure--roads, schools and other public services--to its citizens. A flaw in the document’s population numbers means police and fire services, the city’s infrastructure and the money budgeted for them will be insufficient.

“This simply means we are being more accurate,” said Karen Bates, a senior planner for the city. “We are supposed to be in conformity with reality. If we are not, we could be liable if someone were irate about some new development.”

Changing the population cap in the Comprehensive Plan, in fact, has little effect on the city’s pace of development. Instead, the pace of building is tightly monitored under the city’s Residential Growth Management Program--which will also be discussed on Monday.

The program carefully regulates all new development in Ventura. But in recent months, city officials have complained that the present process is unwieldy and slow, especially for larger development projects. In a city with a limited number of areas for growth, Ventura is swamped with applications for only a few available spots, officials say.

Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures calls the current procedures “cumbersome and ineffective.”

The council hopes to streamline the current application process for building in Ventura to make it more efficient.

For example, the current system gives developers allocations to build long before construction actually begins. This means a builder can hold onto his allocations indefinitely, potentially stalling other housing projects that are ready to move forward sooner.

But the council is also awaiting results of a Long Range School Facilities Plan, which is due out later this month.

Measures said she is not prepared to move on how to better regulate development until she sees the report.

“Until the council can be confident we can mitigate those issues--traffic and schools--there will be no additional development,” she said.

For this reason the council is expected to delay reforms of the cumbersome process until the City Council and the Ventura Unified School Board hold a joint meeting on Jan. 13, 1997.

* EDUCATION

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