Judge Rejects Suit Against SOAR Backers

Wading into Moorpark’s contentious battle over open-space initiatives, a judge threw out a city lawsuit Friday that accused slow-growth advocates of using “false or misleading” language in a fall ballot argument.

The suit accused backers of the slow-growth Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources initiative of incorrectly referring to council members who backed a city-sponsored alternative measure as “pro-growth.”

The action also took objection to the defendants’ claim that the city-sponsored growth-limiting initiative had the backing of “out-of-town real estate speculators.”

Assistant City Manager John Nowak said the city obeyed the judge’s order to file the ballot arguments as submitted.

“We were disappointed,” Nowak said. “But we respect the judge’s decision and the basis on which he made that decision.”

Attorney Richard Francis, who represented the five people who wrote the ballot argument, called the suit “an outrageous use of government power to squelch citizens’ views.”

Roseann Mikos, a member of the SOAR advisory committee named in the suit, also applauded the decision. Mikos and others have called the city-backed measure a “sham” alternative to the SOAR initiative, which did not make the ballot in Moorpark because of technical errors.

“All we were doing was exercising our right of free speech, to tell the truth,” she said. “The winners are the people of Moorpark.”

The judge’s decision comes on the heels of a special meeting at which the Moorpark City Council voted 2 to 1 to remove a special tax initiative from the November ballot. If passed, the initiative would have collected $40 per home in the city if passage of either the city-sponsored growth measure or the SOAR initiative resulted in lawsuits.

The removal is telling, SOAR backers say, because the tax initiative ostensibly applied to both the SOAR measure and the city-sponsored one.

Removing it, they said, shows that it was specially designed to target the SOAR initiative.

“This is a pattern of duplicity,” said Francis, a leader of the SOAR movement. “It was clearly designed to confuse and frighten voters.”

City Councilman John Wozniak, who cast the sole dissenting vote in the special Thursday meeting, said he also had thought the tax measure was supposed to apply to both measures.

“I thought it was designed for both,” he said. “You’ve still got an initiative that could be challenged.”

Council members Debbie Rogers Teasley and Bernardo Perez, who voted to remove the tax measure, could not be reached for comment.