Robert McNulty

Quality of life is not a luxury, says Robert McNulty, president of Washington, D.C.-based Partners for Livable Communities.

It’s a resource.

“You put it to work and you invest in it. It’s not something that, ‘Oh, Santa Barbara can do that, but we can’t.’ ”

Paying attention to things such as respect for the environment, historic preservation, good architecture, the arts and other pillars of culture makes communities--large or small, rich or poor--better places for everyone to live.

McNulty will share that view this week with Ventura city officials and others. The city invited him as part of its campaign to create a shared vision for its future.

He will speak at noon Wednesday at the Ventura County Museum of History & Art. Limited seating for the public is available; for reservations, call 658-4740.

A Northern Californian raised in the East Bay area, McNulty earned business and law degrees at UC Berkeley. In the early 1970s, he was assistant director of the design and planning program at the National Endowment for the Arts. That program gave small grants to help communities improve their economic, social and cultural situations.

“I met a lot of very interesting people who were dynamic leaders, who took small grants and changed their communities mightily,” he said. “After working for seven years with those people I decided to form an association to take these leadership examples to a broader degree of community development.”

In the two decades since, his nonprofit corporation has helped communities across the country make the most of their amenities and adopt public policies designed to encourage improving quality of life.

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Question: What message will you be bringing to Ventura this week?

Answer: I understand there is a need for some greater citizen involvement in setting the vision for the community to update the comprehensive planning process.

Also, there have been efforts to look at arts and culture and facility, park, open space and environment issues as they relate to the image, the definition, the economic opportunity and the marketing of Ventura. That’s what my organization has specialized in for the past 22 years.

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Q: When planners and others use the phrase “livable communities,” what are they talking about?

A: It depends. When AARP [the American Assn. of Retired Persons] uses “livability,” which they do, they talk about retrofitting communities for aging in place.

When energy groups use “livable,” they talk about affordable energy bills. So it can be whatever agenda you’re pushing.

We say that a livable community has certain characteristics: It looks ahead, it tries to protect and preserve and invest in its best resources, it creates a wage opportunity so people can afford to not only earn a living but stay in the community, it has fairness and equity, it’s balanced in terms of everyone should have a chance for the good life, and there should be a great degree of citizen participation not only in setting the agenda but in being asked to help implement the agenda.

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Q: Several of our cities here in Ventura County have held visioning processes and tried to get moving on them. Is this a nationwide trend?

A: Yes, the millennium approaching has created almost a Pavlovian desire for looking ahead, so there are lots of year 2000 or 2020 plans. We’ve done a fair amount of work both doing it and studying why it’s done. Generally we find that unless there is a clear public groundswell of doing it, most of it is a waste of time.

A lot of the public visioning is done at the convenience of the bureaucrats rather than of the citizens. We specialize in helping to design innovative programs that are fun, that are of limited duration, that have results tied into them so that the people’s good will is not wasted by a process that goes on so long that you forget what you’re even doing, and that create a public-private partnership committed to implement the ideas before you even begin wasting people’s time talking about what they want.

We designed the whole program in Chattanooga, Tenn., which is the national model for a citizens’ process of visioning, setting the goals, implementing them and then re-visioning every 10 years to see what they want to do next.

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Q: What other cities are doing things in a way that is not a waste of time?

A: I’d say any community that takes a broad base of its leadership (we call them the stakeholders, public and private), makes it fair (so that you include women, minorities, people with special needs), and then asks them to help design a process that would engage their constituents (whether it’s the soccer moms or the church groups or the environmentalists) and then design a program of three to six months of seriously engaging these citizens to help set the course for the future and look 20 years out, but then bring it back five years, then bring it back three years, then say “What do we do in the next 12 months to achieve that?”

If a city is willing to do that and the planning department is flexible enough and creative enough to set the hours for gathering at the convenience of the citizens, not the planning department staff, not the city council, then they’re probably going to have a far better result.

Any vision that’s done solely to update the comprehensive plan is probably doomed from the onset, because who gives a damn about the comprehensive plan?

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Q: It seems like the tricky part isn’t coming up with the vision but taking those first couple of steps to get moving toward achieving it.

A: It’s the 12-month agenda that’s the absolutely essential thing because success breeds success. And planning is a waste of time unless you do something with it.

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Q: What are some of the old assumptions or habits that stand in the way of building more livable communities?

A: Particularly in California--and I say this as a fourth-generation Californian--livability may be perceived as something that can be achieved in a Berkeley or a Santa Barbara or a La Jolla, but it’s a different set of agendas in Willits or Oxnard or Carlsbad. I think that’s fallacious.

I think that any community that has people who have civic spirit should be attractive, there should be environmental attention, it should be nurturing of young people and there should be some degree of spirit or imagination, I call it creativity or culture, that is a destination so when Aunt Jane comes into the airport, they say, “Let’s go downtown because . . .”

The real question I’m going to ask is, “What is Ventura’s ‘because’ ”? What could be so special about downtown that a visitor would want to experience it?

It might be a participatory water sculpture, like Aspen has downtown. All the kids who go to Aspen, Colo., get soaked because the water shoots up out of the ground on a acoustical system--and 500 people sit around for 10 hours a day watching the kids get soaked.

That’s damn fun! Atlanta copied it for its Olympic Park.

The one thing you have to avoid is that if everyone is building an aquarium and you’re the last one on-line, no one is going to come to yours.

So you have to create an original, valid product for your own community, not buy a replica that’s airdropped in that no one really cares about.

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Q: What can the average citizen do to help make his or her block, neighborhood, city or county more livable?

A: We’re a firm believer that livability begins at home, so it’s your block, your neighborhood and then the downtown has to be an extension of your living room.

Your first concerns are safety, security, beauty and livability of your neighborhood, and then part of the job of the planner is to say, once you feel comfortable in your community, what would you like to see downtown that would make it everyone’s community?