Council Considers New Master Plan to Manage Growth

Council members pelted city staff members with questions Monday night as they tried to understand the implications of a proposed new growth management plan.

The series of proposals discussed Monday night culminated the council’s yearlong effort to do something to modify and streamline Ventura’s unwieldy housing allocation process. Planning officials have argued that as a mature community with little room left to expand, all growth should be judged with an emphasis on development quality, rather than phantom population numbers.

“This is a recognition that we are a mature community with a limited amount of developable land left,” said Ted Temple, chairman of the Planning Commission. “Decisions are much more critical when your resources are limited.”

Tom Figg, the city planning and redevelopment manager, said the shift in priorities began because there was a frustration that the city is not providing what the growth management process should provide--which is quality development. Figg told the council that the goals of revising the growth management plan were to:

* Better define how the city’s population is calculated.

* Clarify when housing allocations are counted.

* Increase the efficiency and clarity of the growth management process.

* Provide for higher-quality projects.

The report on changes to the plan, and their significance, took nearly one hour. By 9 p.m., the planning commissioners and the public still had not had a chance to speak.

In Ventura, where growth and development are hot-button issues on which elections have been decided, planning officials have complained that community debate has sometimes been sidetracked by arguments over whether to raise the population cap.

The city staff wants to take attention away from population numbers and focus on development quality. The current cap for the year 2000 is 105,000, climbing to 115,000 by 2010. These guidelines were set in the city’s Comprehensive Plan, which was originally adopted in 1989. But Figg points out that the population targets were never meant to be adopted as law.

Before the Comprehensive Plan was adopted, the targets had been arbitrarily established as part of a regional effort to improve air quality, Figg said. Ventura’s self-imposed limit of 105,000 is well under the recommended year 2000 air quality population limit of 111,000.

Councilman Steve Bennett blasted parts of the city staff report as editorializing. He maintained that although the population numbers may have been used to protect air quality in the late 1970s, that is not true now.

“Over the past 20 years, it has evolved as a growth-control measure and councils have used it as a growth-control measure,” Bennett said.

Figg said the revised growth management process would allow the city to gradually start moving toward a focus on quality, but would leave allocations currently in the mill to be finished under existing rules.

“We’re not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but we are going to change the bathwater,” he said before the meeting. “We will do it methodically.”

Ventura resident Bill Fulton, a professional urban planner who has watched the growth management debate closely, denounced the plan as business as usual.

“I think the council made it clear that they wanted to give out more allocations and they didn’t want to change the population cap.

“It’s like balancing the federal budget,” he said. “Politicians always agree to do it in the next president’s term. In this case, now the council has a certain number of units they can use, and they are going to use them all up by the year 2003 if they continue at this pace.”