Flynn to Ask County to Put SOAR on Ballot

With a technical glitch threatening to derail all the signatures gathered in the SOAR initiative drive, Supervisor John Flynn plans to ask the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday to place the group’s countywide measure on the November ballot.

Leaders of the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources campaign said they were mulling their options Thursday after Ventura attorney Robert Chatenever sought to scuttle their initiatives for the county and four cities on grounds that the group circulated petitions violating the elections code.

But it apparently did not take long for SOAR’s favorite option to become a possibility: having elected officials instead place their measures on the ballot, thereby skirting a legal showdown.

“It seems it’s gotten into some kind of legal jam, and I think it ought to be on the ballot,” Flynn said. “I think people should have that choice.”

SOAR wants to pass measures preventing Oxnard, Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Santa Paula and Moorpark from expanding beyond designated borders without approval from voters. The group is also hoping to pass a countywide initiative preventing development of farmland and open space outside city boundaries unless voters sign off on it first.

The grass-roots organization submitted more than 70,000 signatures June 1 to qualify initiatives for the county, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and Santa Paula for the fall ballot. The Oxnard City Council has already agreed to place the measure on its city ballot, and the Camarillo City Council has agreed to make SOAR into law if the group can gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

Supervisor Frank Schillo, who endorsed the SOAR initiatives earlier this year, said he has no problem placing the group’s countywide measure on the ballot--on condition that the board first support his desire to poll county residents on a complementary proposal he has devised.

Schillo pointed out that he supported SOAR with a caveat: The county needed to form an open space preservation district that would purchase “development rights” from affected landowners, thereby removing concerns that SOAR trampled on property rights.

“I feel since I made a commitment to do that when endorsing SOAR, I have to follow through with that commitment,” Schillo said. “Otherwise, I would seriously consider putting SOAR on the ballot, yes.

“We’ve had so many overturns of the public’s votes, I think the public is frustrated with government,” he added. “And I am, too. I think too many people signed this to leave it to a technicality.”

But Supervisor Judy Mikels, an outspoken SOAR opponent, said she would never vote to place it on the fall ballot, adding that the county is engaged in a similar effort as part of the Agriculture Policy Working Group. “It may go on the ballot,” Mikels conceded, “but I’m not going to vote for it.

“First of all, I think this legal issue needs to be resolved. Secondly, I don’t see why we would put this on the ballot when we’re spending thousands of dollars on our own initiative as part of the working group.”

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Flynn countered that SOAR in no way contradicted the intent of the working group, which is made up of farmers, business leaders, environmentalists, government officials and representatives of the building industry. “I think this [SOAR initiative] is the mood of the county, and we need to hear what voters think about this issue,” Flynn said. “It’s too important not to be on the ballot.”

Supervisor Susan Lacey said she was undecided. Supervisor Kathy Long, who represents the farm-rich Santa Clara Valley, did not return phone calls Thursday.

“I will have an opinion Tuesday,” Lacey said. “I have not had time to reflect on what the legal problems are with the initiative.”

If the SOAR initiatives are not placed on the ballot by county elected officials, group members say, they are prepared to fight it out in court against Chatenever. And if they lose, they are prepared to go out a second time and gather enough signatures to force a special election after November.

“This is sort of like a chess game, and it’s their move,” said Richard Francis, an attorney and former Ventura mayor who is one of the leaders of the SOAR movement. “They [Chatenever] have made a threatening letter. We’ll see where they go from there. If a lawsuit gets filed, we’ll have to decide our next move.”

Chatenever, who said he is representing a group of local voters concerned about the petitions, declined to discuss the matter Thursday, as he had the day before. But in letters this week to the county, Moorpark, Simi Valley, Santa Paula and Thousand Oaks, he outlined his demands that the signatures be ruled invalid--and he threatened to have a judge intervene if the agencies did not do so by today.

Chatenever is seeking to have the signatures thrown out because the petitions on which they were gathered contain a flaw that violates the state elections code: Instead of asking voters to write their place of residence, the SOAR forms asked voters for their “Residence Address (as registered).”

That is a major defect, Chatenever wrote, because it prevents election officials from making sure the people who signed still live where they were registered to vote. But Francis argued Thursday that the format violation was a small oversight that should have no impact on the validity of the signatures.

As evidence, he noted that according to county elections chief Bruce Bradley, the SOAR petitions contained about the same percentage of voters who were not registered at their listed address as other petitions.

“The number of signatures that are thrown out traditionally because people have moved is identical to the number thrown out in the SOAR initiatives,” Francis said. “That says this little parenthetical clause made no difference.

“We used a format that had been used before,” he added. “It seemed reasonable to use. My focus was on the substance of the initiative.”

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Although they acknowledged that the petitions technically violate state law, county officials have refused to give in to Chatenever’s demands that the signatures be thrown out. They contend the violation was of minor consequence, and heeding the opinion of the secretary of state’s legal counsel, they have decided that the validity of the signatures should be decided in the courts. Officials from the cities have followed suit.

“I know of no other case that’s taken place like this, on this issue, where there were this many signatures gathered,” said Assistant County Counsel Robert Orellana. “Court challenges are very difficult in these cases. We’re waiting to see what [Chatenever] does.”

Meanwhile, county elections officials, who are charged with determining whether SOAR gathered enough signatures to place its measures on the ballot, have declared that the Simi Valley, Moorpark and Thousand Oaks measures had enough valid signatures. And on Thursday, elections officials determined that the Santa Paula measure fell just short of the number it needed to qualify in a random sampling, requiring a count of each signature.

Officials also continue to count signatures for the countywide initiative, and should be finished by early next week at the latest, Bradley said.