A Toast to City’s 131st Birthday

If all of Ventura’s council members, past and present, could get together Monday for the city’s 131st birthday, they would probably head downtown and buy a round of drinks at the Rendezvous Room on Main Street.

As city historians tell it, Ventura city and county government began in 1866 in a saloon. Ventura’s first mayor, Walter Chafee, presided over his fellow council members in a room over Spears Saloon--the site of today’s Rendezvous Room.

Of course, these men were not the first to settle here.

The Chumash caught fish in the sea and roamed the land in “Shilsholop”--the place of mud--for thousands of years. And Father Junipero Serra founded the San Buenaventura Mission in 1782.

On March 10, 1866, after receiving a charter from the California Legislature, the city of San Buenaventura was officially born. Slowly, things began to change. “It went from being a wild and woolly town to a more staid, agricultural town,” said unofficial city historian Richard Senate.

In those days, Ventura was a bilingual city. Senate says half of Ventura’s mayors and council members in the first 10 years were Latino--and it was largely due to the lobbying efforts of saloonkeeper Angel Escandon in the state Legislature that Ventura was incorporated as a city.

Escandon went on to become Ventura’s second mayor. The leather-bound council minutes from those first meetings are still kept in the archives of the city clerk’s office at City Hall.

“I looked at the old leather-bound minutes that Barbara Kam keeps in her office,” said city publicist Richard Newsham. “They have this beautiful cursive Spanish handwriting. It’s incredible to see the continuity . . . that we have records that go back that far.”

In fiscal year 1996-97, Ventura’s general fund budget is $49 million. But in its first year, City Council members spent only $7,465.

The city’s first-year capital improvement budget consisted of $50 to build a public well and funds to pave Main Street.

Ventura was a cow town back then--so most of the city’s most stringent regulations dealt with cattle. The city government outlawed cattle driving and bullfighting on or near Main Street, and limited milking on main roads to one cow per family.

The city was so different then that it’s hard to compare--but City Clerk Barbara Kam, who presides over the minutes--would disagree.

“Basically the problems that members of the City Council were dealing with then are the same ones we’re dealing with now,” Kam said. “Things may have gotten a little more sophisticated, but they haven’t changed all that much.”

The city will not be holding any special events to celebrate its birthday, Newsham said.