Farmland Protection Panel Favored

Trying to protect the county’s No. 1 industry, the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday is expected to create a task force intent on preserving the area’s dwindling supply of prime farmland.

All five county supervisors said Thursday that parties traditionally at odds on issues of growth--farmers, environmentalists and government bureaucrats--now seem to generally agree on at least one point: The time is right to draw a line in the county’s fertile soil and declare vast stretches of it off-limits to developers for decades to come.

Faced with giant development projects in Oxnard and Santa Paula that would dig deep into the county’s agricultural greenbelt preserves, Supervisors John Flynn and Kathy Long propose creating a broad-based task force to make the case for saving the agriculture industry, and to take those findings to town hall meetings to gather residents’ support.

By the end of the year, the task force would present to local city councils a series of reforms that would make it much more difficult for cities to annex greenbelt lands for development.

The Ventura County Farm Bureau, in its first major land-use policy change since 1983, endorsed a similar reform last week, even proposing a large new greenbelt in citrus areas near Piru. Until then, the Farm Bureau had not supported greenbelts, officials said.

“The timing for this could not be better,” said Flynn, whose 2nd District includes prime cropland near Oxnard. “I’m getting so many calls from people asking why we’re losing so much of our agricultural land. And now we have the Hansen Trust study [on the economic importance of local farming] and the Farm Bureau’s change of policy.”

Supervisors said Thursday that new efforts to stop the constant loss of Ventura’s farmland--about 1,100 acres a year--are long overdue. Without strong action, the county’s annual $1.2-billion farm industry will perish as surely as did farming in Orange County, they said.

“Frankly, we may want to draw a line in the sand and say these are the urban limit lines,” said Long, whose Camarillo-based district also includes some of the county’s richest farming areas, the Las Posas and Santa Clara valleys.

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Creation of the farmland task force would culminate years of discussion and worry over whether Ventura County can save its 3,000 farms in the face of urban sprawl that has increased its population six times since 1950.

The county now has only about 105,000 irrigated acres, even though farmers are increasingly cultivating citrus and avocados on less-than-prime hillside parcels, because more fertile flatlands are being paved over.

In a new county study released Thursday, planners reported the degree to which local cities from 1981 to 1996 paved over farmlands within their city limits and so-called spheres of influence. A total of 6,068 farm acres were developed, with Oxnard building on 2,792 acres, Camarillo 1,781, Ventura 867, the county of Ventura 404 and Santa Paula 224.

Thousand of acres of prime farmland still remain within city boundaries, but that has not kept cities from extending beyond their limits to support attractive development projects. The county has also supported projects in greenbelt areas, including a new county jail and recently two driving ranges in the Tierra Rejada Greenbelt near Simi Valley.

Encroachment into farmlands, the Farm Bureau’s new push to save agriculture and a successful 1995 farmland preservation initiative approved by Ventura voters have all conspired to force the issue to a head.

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Indeed, Ventura Councilman Steve Bennett, a co-sponsor of the Ventura ballot initiative that blocks development of thousands of farm acres without voter approval, said interest in preserving farmland is so keen now because some fear his slow-growth coalition’s continuing efforts to put farmland and open space measures on the 1998 ballots in several other local cities.

“There’s no question that all of this activity was motivated because our effort was successful in Ventura,” Bennett said. “Many people are now interested in this because they’re concerned about a countywide [initiative].”

Farm Bureau President Mike Mobley acknowledged that farmers recently agreed to support greenbelts, fixed city boundaries and other reforms because farmland preservation was an issue that would not go away and they wanted to lead the reform, not follow it.

“Now we want to be the ones leading the charge,” Mobley said. “We don’t want to be beat over the head and told what we can and can’t do with our property.

“Our land-use policy was kind of wishy-washy,” he added. “We were kind of sitting on the fence. We were supporting agriculture but we were also supporting the farmers’ right to develop. We’re still doing that, but not in the greenbelt. . . . Now we’ve jumped off the fence and landed on the side of preservation. And we will fight farmers who take a step toward developing prime agricultural land that’s currently in a greenbelt.”

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Ventura County Greenbelts

Ventura County’s six greenbelts comprise about 83,000. Supporters say they want the farmlands to be better protected.