Richard Francis and Steve Bennett

Richard Francis and Steve Bennett are leaders of Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR), a campaign for ballot measures to preserve farmland in the county.

The initiative, based in part on the city of Ventura’s 1995 greenbelt protection law, would establish urban limit lines beyond which any proposed development would need voter approval.

Francis, an Oxnard attorney and former Ventura mayor, and Bennett, a high school history teacher and counselor and former Ventura city councilman, discussed the origins and strategies of SOAR with DOUG ADRIANSON, editor of the Times Ventura County Edition editorial page.

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QUESTION: The SOAR measure passed by the city of Ventura has survived challenges all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The versions you’re proposing now are a bit different. Do you have any qualms about tinkering with something that’s already been legally tested?

RICHARD FRANCIS: The countywide initiative, which addresses the incorporated area, will be almost identical. We have 10 different cities and to address each city in an identical way didn’t make a lot of sense. So our plan is to adopt the current general plan designations for agriculture, open space and probably rural, although that’s still in debate. We would adopt those, reaffirm them and keep them in place for the next 20 years, maybe 30 years, maybe forever.

Our vision is a ring around each city. I like acronyms that convey information, so we’re calling them City Urban Restriction Boundaries, CURBs, and so we’re laying a CURB around each city within which the city can do whatever it wants.

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Q: What do you think of the whole process of the Agriculture Policy Working Group, with its scenarios and town meetings? What you think its real motive was and did SOAR get a fair shake from it?

FRANCIS: I don’t know that we can intuit what the motivations were. Obviously the issues were bubbling and that’s one reason why we got active, maybe the same cause led those supervisors to get active. There’s a suspicion out there that they were in response to our activities. I don’t know.

Have we gotten a fair shake? I don’t think that we have in a truly democratic way. They’ve literally picked up our literature and moved us outside, into hallways and such.

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Q: They didn’t invite you to be on the committee, either.

FRANCIS: Exactly. I don’t take personal umbrage at those things. It’s a political process. I recognize that what we’re doing, at least with some of the elected officials, is not popular, and I expect to be excluded. On the other hand, just by having those seven forums, we got a great shake.

STEVE BENNETT: We can’t buy this kind of publicity and that’s what we’re short of. There are a lot of different people in the ag study group, with different motivations for being there. I think at least some people were interested in trying to come up with something rather than sitting back and just having SOAR go forward. Maybe not the supervisors, maybe somebody else. And realistically, if one of the supervisors had said, “Well, we’d like to ask one of the SOAR representatives to be on here,” I think they would have just said, “No, that’s it, we won’t.”

And that unwillingness to sit down and sort of say, “Hey, urban sprawl is a huge problem and we can create this partnership with the citizens, with the politicians and everybody to control that,” that has been the one thing that they won’t consider. I think that speaks volumes right there.

FRANCIS: We have had a remarkably warm reception with other communities. Partly by virtue of these Agriculture Policy Working Group meetings, we have learned of some things that were of concern to some of those constituents and we have incorporated some of those concerns in making the initiative more palatable for the broader base. When we get the concept out, so that people understand that we’re not locking down every city’s general plan, it is not Scenario A, people start to look at us a little differently. We are not the radicals out there freezing the county for all time.

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Q: What comments and perceptions did you run into during this process that surprised you? Did you learn anything about your own image from these sessions?

BENNETT: One thing is just how many people we didn’t know have stood up and spoken passionately for SOAR. They literally embrace you, those people who have been looking for an alternative solution to sitting back and, as they perceive it, doing nothing.

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Q: What are some of the points that you believe the public still doesn’t understand about SOAR?

BENNETT: That it doesn’t take away property rights. They keep making that argument. . . .

FRANCIS: That’s the important point to recognize: We don’t change anybody’s designation. If their property rights were taken--and the Supreme Court has spoken about that already, clearly they’re not, but if they were--we didn’t do it! It was done 20 years ago when the county first adopted the agricultural designations and the general plan. What we’re saying is that these are good designations that worked well. We’re seeing that eroded and that’s our concern.

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Q: So the people with concerns are those who have designated property they have assumed they could get changed whenever they wanted to?

BENNETT: You’ve probably heard this analogy before: I could make a fortune if I could put a McDonald’s in my front yard. But it would be a terrible thing for my neighbors. I don’t have the right to demand that my property be rezoned to allow it. My property rights aren’t taken away because I don’t get to put a McDonald’s right there. That’s a property restriction I knew about when I bought residential property.

Same thing with these ag people. They don’t have a right to demand to be rezoned when they bought land that not only was zoned ag but the general plan says, “We intend this to stay ag.”

I’ll tell you another misconception out there is how much of the land is owned by speculators and how much of the land is owned by that small family farmer everybody talks about. An awful lot of this land in Ventura County has already been purchased by people for speculative value, and that’s the risk they took.

FRANCIS: People talk about buying “development rights.” If it’s designated ag, what development rights are there to buy? Unless somebody wants to buy my right to put up an apartment house on my residential lot.

BENNETT: Or buy my McDonald’s rights.

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Q: The SOAR campaign is sort of a vote of no confidence in elected officials. Yet both of you are politicians. What office does each of you expect to seek next, and when?

FRANCIS: Ah, you want to take it, Steve? I have no ambitions at this point. I have 7-year-old twins; I left public office when they were 1 year old, finished out my term. I’ve found that I can do more from the public side than from the elected side.

I don’t like the idea that this is a politician-bashing vehicle. That’s not what got me involved in it.

I believe that the local elected official is confronted with constant pressure. I was. And I recognized it then but it was still hard to fight.

You know, “It’s just that one parcel, and they’ve got a really good reason for wanting to develop it, and it’s right next to the city, and it is only the one parcel. . . . “

And you do that one at a time. And you end up with what I think the long term will hold. I just want to stop it. Remove that pressure from elected officials, and I think for the most part they’ll do a good job.

BENNETT: When I think of the amount of work this takes and how hard it was to get this off the ground. . . . If either of us took a third of this time and put it into our own political careers, we’d be much further down the road.

Anyway, I would consider some other political office down the road. I don’t know what that will be or when; there’s a whole lot of things in my career I would consider. But I think that’s to the good. There are enough people with our perspective who are willing to run.

The more important issue, I think, is the idea that this is built on distrust of public officials. What we really need is for the politicians to say, “This is such a serious problem, we’re going to form a partnership with the citizens to try to solve it.” And the partnership is very similar to the partnership we have with Proposition 13. Back then, the citizens basically said, “Hey, raising our taxes is such a serious issue, you have to convince us that it’s a good idea.”

I wish everybody could have listened to [Simi Valley Mayor] Greg Stratton talk. He said, “We already have that partnership on the Simi Hills.” They have a hillside ordinance that can’t be changed without a vote. He said, “So this just kind of rounds the package out for us.”

The county would be better off if that defensiveness would drop. Distrust of the politicians may be too strong, more like frustration with the system.

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Q: There’s definitely a frustration with the system and it extends to the initiative process as well. Prop 13 has unfolded in ways that weren’t foreseen. Maybe the power is in the hands it belongs in now, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t had unfortunate consequences. Will the wisdom of the voters to decide on these parcels be any less prone to manipulation than their ability to pick supervisors who will follow their will?

BENNETT: I just think the electorate gets it right more often than anybody else. I don’t very often see this becoming a parcel-by-parcel vote. I see it more likely that a city would say, “We’ve lived within our CURB for the last 25 years.”

The debate Santa Paula is going through would be classic. “It’s time for us to grow, and this is why . . . .” They lay the whole thing out. They come up with a really good plan, and then shoot that to the voters. That’s what I think should end up happening.

FRANCIS: This subject makes me want to go back and talk about the fact there are two initiatives, how different they are. Getting that understanding out there has been somewhat difficult.

This is not a blanket initiative that covers the entire county. There is the unincorporated area and there are the incorporated areas. To the extent a parcel is close to an incorporated area, then the issue is, “Should the CURB line be extended to encompass them?” That would be a local vote of that community. It wouldn’t require going countywide for an election for one 40-acre parcel.

If that parcel is somewhere in the middle of the unincorporated area, what the hell are they developing for anyway? It just doesn’t make any sense.

So the symbiosis of the two initiatives really addresses that issue. If it’s an appropriate parcel for development, and it is near where urban services are, then it’s that urban center that decides whether it’s going to be developed and become part of their community. It’s a relatively simple concept.

BENNETT: It worked in Northern California, in Napa, because farmers actually led this battle. When you talk to their farmers they say, “You don’t have farmers down there, you have farmer-developers down there. We have farmer-farmers up here. And so our farmers really wanted this because they felt like the biggest threat to their profitability was development. Your farmers down there like seeing that encroaching development, because they like watching those property values go up.”

FRANCIS: That’s another misconception, that we are opposed by all farmers. We don’t have a tight political subgroup yet, but we have had a number of calls from farmers who want to support us. We have some people out east of Fillmore, in south Oxnard, in the center in Camarillo. These are individuals who really believe in what they’re doing. They don’t want to see that lifestyle compromised. What is opposing us is the institutional organization of farmers that just doesn’t include everybody.

BENNETT: Another [criticism] is that SOAR is not perfect. The fundamental question is, “Is it better than what we have now?”

There’s no question it’s better than what we have now and it’s also better than anything anybody else is putting out there on the table. And so somehow this implication that because SOAR isn’t perfect we shouldn’t do it, implies that we should stay with what we have.