Ventura Staff Wants Population Cap Left Alone

After spending more than a year debating whether to raise Ventura’s population cap for the year 2000, city staff members will recommend Monday that the City Council abandon those efforts and leave the cap where it is--at 105,000 residents.

Instead, city staff members will urge the council to overhaul the way the city manages development. As befits a mature community with little space to grow, they argue, all growth should be judged with an emphasis on development quality, rather than population numbers.

“We’re questioning the underlying theory behind growth management, its relevance to Ventura, and how to make the system more workable,” said Tom Figg, the city’s planning and redevelopment manager.

“There is a frustration that we are not accomplishing what we hoped growth management should provide, which is quality development.”

*

In Ventura, where growth and development are hot button issues, planning officials have complained that the community debate has sometimes been snagged by endless arguments over whether to raise the population cap.

Resident Bill Fulton, a professional urban planner who has watched the growth management process closely, argues that population considerations are still getting in the way.

“They are not changing anything Monday night,” he said. “They are creating a mechanism under which they can give out more housing allocations without raising the population cap. They are punting until after the election.”

The current cap on growth by 2000 was set in the city’s Comprehensive Plan adopted in 1989. But Figg points out in his report that will be in council members’ hands before Monday’s meeting that population targets in Ventura were never adopted as actual law.

And even before adoption of the Comprehensive Plan, they had been arbitrarily set as part of a regional effort to improve air quality, Figg said. Ventura’s year 2000 self-imposed plan of 105,000 is well under the recommended year 2000 air quality population limit of 111,000.

“A good deal of attention has been focused on RGMP [the Residential Growth Management Plan] and, more particularly, the perception of rampant growth,” Figg wrote in the report to the council.

“Contrary to popular belief, Ventura’s growth rate since the advent of RGMP has remained consistently below the state and county average and considerably less than neighboring cities.”

State Department of Finance figures show that Ventura’s population from 1979 to 1996 has grown at an annual average rate of 1.77%. The state’s annual average was 1.78%; the county’s, 1.9%; Oxnard’s, 2.15%; and Camarillo’s, 2.84%.

*

Revisions to the growth management plan would focus on clearly defining criteria for housing projects, increasing public participation and improving cooperation between the Planning Commission and the City Council on growth management related issues.

Planning Commissioner Sandy Smith sees the proposed revisions as a first step toward recognizing that Ventura is a mature community.

“It’s not the kind of thing where we need to set a 20-year plan for population growth. It’s not going to be long until the five pieces we have left are developed. We don’t have unlimited land to develop into,” Smith said.

“The need for the types of processes we had in the past isn’t as great. But we do need to be very, very careful of the projects we have.”

Fulton says he thinks the city should have gone further.

“This is progress of a sort,” he said Friday. “But I hoped they would get away from population completely and go to housing. The population number is a moving target, because the state estimate changes every year.”

He said he would have worked to find a way to translate the population number into a number of housing units.

Smith acknowledges Fulton’s point, but says to eliminate population numbers completely would be political suicide--especially in an election year.

“There would be an irrational fear of rampant development,” he said.”I think that the community as a whole would be scared.”

Council members reached Friday could not comment on the plan because they did not have the report yet.