3 Plans for Revamping Growth Approved

After four hours of questions, debate and bickering, the City Council unanimously approved three proposals designed to revamp the city’s growth management plan.

The council divided the city staff’s recommendations into three parts Monday before taking a final vote about 11:25 p.m.

First, council members voted to revoke 390 housing allocations on the Triangle property--one of the last undeveloped ocean-view sites in Ventura--and put them back into the pot of downtown allocations. Councilman Steve Bennett abstained on that vote because he owns property nearby.

Then, putting an end to a yearlong debate, they voted not to raise the year 2000 population cap of 105,000 in the Comprehensive Plan--the city’s blueprint for development.

Finally, they voted to approve recommendations by the Planning Commission on how to streamline and clarify the cumbersome residential growth management process so that it focuses on development quality, rather than population numbers.

Most important of those recommendations, planning commissioners say, is a plan to begin redoing the Comprehensive Plan in the next two years. The plan was drafted in 1989 and already lags behind the times, they say.

A new plan would take into account that Ventura is now a mature community with little room to expand and that because of the ballot measure Save Our Agricultural Resources (SOAR), the city’s 2,300 acres of agricultural land is no longer open to development.

The Planning Commission’s recommendations will be brought back before the council at a later date. Planning Commissioner Sandy Smith said Monday night’s steps will effectively make growth--typically a hot-button issue in Ventura--a nonissue in the November election.

“In this campaign, I think growth is not an issue,” Smith said before the meeting. “Our growth is at about the state average. It is market-driven. And we just don’t have that much more room to grow.”

But that did not stop tempers from flaring.

Housing applications already submitted will still be processed under the old system.

Tom Figg, planning and redevelopment manager, says the revised residential growth plan will be a first measured step toward a broader growth management overhaul starting in 1999.

In the future, he said, the city will begin evaluating development proposals by the quality of their design, and whether they place an undue financial burden on existing city services.

The proposals leave the present system relatively unchanged, and professional urban planner Bill Fulton has argued repeatedly in letters to the editor, speeches to the Planning Commission and letters to the City Council that this is not enough.

“They have acknowledged their sins, but they have not repented,” he said Monday before the meeting. In an April 21 letter to the City Council, Fulton called for the city to find a way to get rid of population numbers completely in the growth management process and instead find a way to translate them into housing units.

Still, planning commissioners and council members alike hailed some parts of the new plan.

For example, there are 1,100 units in Ventura with building permits that have not been built yet, thereby skewing the city’s population numbers.

But a new policy would prevent developers from holding on to their permits indefinitely. Under the new rules, developers who receive allocations but do not use them within a given amount of time will lose them.