SOAR Turns In 70,000 Signatures

Capping weeks of signature-gathering at suburban strip malls, preservationists on Monday submitted petitions aimed at slowing urban growth in Ventura County.

Members of Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources, or SOAR, pushed wheelbarrows full of petition papers to the Ventura County Government Center.

Wearing straw hats and waving signs that depicted an orchard-covered valley, they declared their proposed ballot initiatives the best way to preserve the county’s farming industry.

“I want to be able to see the farmland when I drive between the towns,” said Alice Wennerholm, an 88-year-old Oxnard woman who had helped gather signatures outside a grocery store for the petition drive. “And I want to know what city I’m in when I drive through the valley.”

The group submitted slow-growth petitions for the county and four cities: Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Moorpark and Santa Paula. SOAR is also negotiating with officials in Camarillo and Oxnard to adopt growth restrictions.

By filing the petitions Monday, slow-growth activists met a June 1 deadline set by county officials to qualify the measures for the November ballot. The initiatives seek to freeze each city’s and the county’s growth boundaries at certain limits. Voters would have to approve any expansion of those limits.

County election officials described the signature-gathering campaign as unprecedented in scope. The elections office will spend the next three weeks verifying some 70,000 signatures to determine whether the measures qualify in each locale.

“It’s a big task,” said Bruce Bradley, county elections chief. “It’s going to be a long summer for us.”

Farmland preservation has become Ventura County’s hottest political issue in 1998.

The SOAR measures would restrict expansion and development beyond current limits for 20 to 30 years, depending on the locale.

That, combined with giving zoning power to voters, would help preserve the county’s $1.2-billion agriculture industry and semirural feel, slow-growth activists contend. SOAR supporters have based their campaign on a landmark slow-growth law passed by Ventura voters in 1995.

But opponents, including numerous county farmers, developers and politicians, call SOAR’s proposals extreme and unfair. Not only would they rob farmers of the right to develop their property, but the proposals also could result in skyrocketing housing costs and a serious slowdown in job growth, opponents contend.

“Economic disaster is more like it,” grumbled one man as he watched 30 SOAR proponents celebrate outside the government center.

The Agriculture Policy Working Group, a countywide body of farmers, politicians, urban planners and developers, has proposed its own growth-control measures. That group would also halt growth at city limits, but for a shorter period--10 years. Like SOAR, the group would let voters, not politicians, decide on expansion proposals.

“It’s a better alternative” than the SOAR initiatives, said Scott Deardorff, an Oxnard strawberry and vegetable farmer. “It’s just as stringent, but gives cities a window to figure out long-range planning.”

The SOAR group had set a goal of exceeding by 40% the number of signatures necessary to qualify for the ballot in each community.

Because many signatures are found to be invalid, petitioners must typically exceed the qualifying number by about 20%, election experts say. SOAR said it far surpassed that goal for the countywide measure, with 45,000 signatures--more than double the number necessary to qualify.

That figure would put it close to the 50,000 signatures gathered a few years ago by supporters of a countywide measure that shielded the Sheriff’s Department and district attorney’s office from budget cuts.

This year’s signature-gathering success, SOAR supporters said, demonstrates the local electorate’s desire to block the urban sprawl that covers the San Fernando Valley.

“This is a mandate,” said Thousand Oaks City Councilwoman Linda Parks, a chief SOAR organizer.

In the individual cities, the results exceeded or came close to topping the goal of a 40% buffer, SOAR backers said. They gave the following tallies:

Simi Valley petitioners gathered 9,400 signatures, compared with 5,900 needed to qualify. Thousand Oaks volunteers gathered 10,200 signatures, compared with the required 7,000. Moorpark’s volunteers gathered 2,900 signatures, compared with 1,500 needed for the ballot, SOAR reported.

In Santa Paula, where opposition to SOAR has been fierce among farmers, volunteers launched their signature campaign only Thursday--and came away with 1,800 signatures, compared with 1,300 needed to get on the ballot.

“We were in front of Vons, Kmart and carwashes, and we only had four days,” said Laura Flores Espinosa, head of SOAR’s Santa Paula drive.

In Camarillo, the group fell short of its buffer goal, collecting 4,000 signatures, compared with the necessary 3,300.

The group did not file its Camarillo petition, because the Camarillo City Council has already expressed support for the restrictions. Without issuing a deadline, City Council members said they will vote the restrictions into law after the necessary signatures are gathered and approved.

Meanwhile, Oxnard City Council members have already voted to place the issue on the ballot.

Over the next three weeks, election officials will do a random sampling of each petition to ensure that bogus signatures do not turn up at a high rate. If they do, officials will embark on the arduous task of checking each signature.

In November, SOAR could face competing ballot measures in Moorpark and Oxnard. In those cities, elected officials have suggested putting what slow-growth activists say are less restrictive measures on the ballot.

Plus, SOAR officials expect the building industry to mount a multimillion-dollar campaign against new growth restrictions. SOAR officials say they will spend $150,000 on political mailers.

Meanwhile, SOAR backers are also taking aim at how elected officials are dealing with a planned initiative in Santa Paula.

Richard Francis, a co-leader of the SOAR campaign, charged Monday that Mayor Don Johnson has violated the government code because the weekly newspaper he owns in the city publishes municipal legal notices. The code prohibits city officers from profiting from decisions made by a body on which they sit.

Francis said he became aware of the possible violation after Johnson declined to accept a legal notice SOAR was required to publish before circulating its petition, citing a conflict of interest. Johnson said he was concerned the SOAR notices might cost more than $250, which would have made him ineligible to vote on the issue for the next 12 months.

“I didn’t want to run that risk so I declined the ad,” he said.

Staff writer Miguel Bustillo and correspondent Nick Green contributed to this story.