Another City Agrees to Put SOAR on Fall Ballot

Thousand Oaks on Tuesday night became the latest city to put a growth-control measure on the November ballot despite concern over whether the initiative would have much practical effect in this slow-growth area.

By a unanimous vote, the Thousand Oaks City Council agreed to let residents vote on a local Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources measure, championed by Councilwoman Linda Parks.

Half a dozen residents spoke in favor of the measure, which the council passed after no debate.

Resident Debbie Gregory said the SOAR measure would preserve “a legacy of greenbelts and divisions between cities” for children. “They will know hills and dells in their lives.”

Before Tuesday’s meeting, Parks said approving SOAR for the ballot was “the right thing to do.”

“There has been a groundswell of opinion from the residents of Thousand Oaks that we want to have something on the ballot to protect our city from expanding into the open space all around us,” she said. “Whether you endorse SOAR or not, it is the will of the people to put it on the ballot.”

Given that Thousand Oaks is already ringed by 14,000 acres of permanent open space and has no intention of hopping its boundaries, City Councilwoman Judy Lazar said she was not sure the SOAR measure would make much difference in Thousand Oaks. But she said the matter is best left to voters.

“The public seems to find SOAR an attractive sound bite,” she said Tuesday afternoon. “When in reality, it’s what we have advanced and guaranteed over the past 20 years. . . . If the public feels more reassured [with SOAR in place], we should do this.”

Activists have gathered more than enough signatures to put SOAR measures on the ballot for the whole of Ventura County and six of its major cities, but the Libertarian Party has legally challenged the validity of the petitions.

Having cities such as Thousand Oaks put the measure on the ballot as a city-sponsored measure, rather than a citizen-sponsored one, skirts that legal challenge.

The direct-to-ballot strategy appears to be working.

By Tuesday, county supervisors and city councils in Simi Valley and Santa Paula had placed SOAR measures on the ballot. The Moorpark council is scheduled to discuss the matter tonight.

The Oxnard City Council, which agreed to placing SOAR on the ballot in April, may make its measure even more restrictive Saturday at a special meeting that will double as a budget study session.

The city and county measures are designed to complement each other.

The city measures would prevent a city from expanding beyond a designated border, unless voters say otherwise.

Similarly, the countywide initiative would forbid the rezoning of agricultural land for development without a public vote.

County leaders decided last week to place the countywide SOAR initiative on the fall ballot independent of the 45,300 signatures collected to accomplish the same goal.

But on Tuesday, they still had to address the issue of whether to certify the signatures.

That is because once a group turns in petitions to place something on the ballot, it cannot legally take the petitions back. If there are enough signatures for an initiative to qualify for the ballot, politicians by law have only three choices: put it on the ballot, adopt it as law directly or study it for 30 days.

On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to pursue the study, hoping in the meantime the lawsuit regarding the validity of the signatures can be resolved--and the county not end up with two versions of the same initiative on the ballot.

“We would all be better off if a judge makes the decision,” Supervisor Frank Schillo said.

If a judge decides to throw out the signatures, as attorneys for the Ventura County Libertarian Party are requesting, then only the countywide SOAR initiative placed on the ballot by county leaders would go before voters.

But if the signatures are upheld in court, the county would be in the odd position of having two identical measures on the fall ballot.

If that occurs, county leaders would resolve the situation by taking their SOAR initiative off the ballot and simply letting the one that qualified due to signatures move forward.

SOAR leader Richard Francis told the Board of Supervisors that he will ask the judge at the hearing scheduled for Thursday to simply grant the Libertarian Party’s request and throw out the county signatures. He said he may also ask for the city signatures to be thrown out, depending on what the various city councils do this week.

“We have no interest in seeing two identical measures on the same ballot,” Francis said.

Meanwhile, the Camarillo SOAR group has collected 3,700 signatures--200 more than needed--to qualify a local initiative on the November ballot.

But since the petition is expected to be challenged in court, the Camarillo council will decide July 22 whether to sponsor a SOAR ballot measure or simply adopt the growth-control initiative as an ordinance.

In Santa Paula, the City Council Monday night voted to place two separate growth-control initiatives on the fall ballot.

One is backed by SOAR even though it would allow the development of more than 500 acres of farmland in the greenbelt between Fillmore and Santa Paula. The initiative, however, would reduce the size of the city’s proposed expansion plans, Councilwoman Laura Flores Espinosa said.

A second version, backed by Councilman John Melton, proposes retaining the current city boundaries and abandoning any future growth at all.

Councilman Jim Garfield cast the lone vote against placing the two measures on the ballot.

Although Espinosa was pleased the initiatives will go before voters, she was critical of the reasoning her fellow council members used to justify their favorable votes.

“Their only reasoning to put it on the ballot is to save potential litigation costs or the threat of a special election being called [later],” she said. “It’s positive for the citizens of Santa Paula to have a voice.”

Times staff writer Miguel Bustillo and correspondents Nick Green and Pamela J. Johnson contributed to this story.